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I

t was all unfolding downtown, as it does in any high-profile crime scene. Lights flashing, sirens blaring, people rolling down their windows to ask –

everybody is curious

– what the heck was going on.

And social media – Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram – was on fire. As it is these days in those situations.

Police lined 20th Street in downtown Birmingham this morning, responding to a call about a man with a gun in a parking deck on Fourth Avenue North. He had run into trouble on the job, we were told, and holed himself up in his truck with a shotgun. Police had heard one shot, and employees in the Wells Fargo building watched from above as the SWAT team closed in.

Onlookers tweeted pictures from that vantage point, and those of us in the media retweeted them to eager audiences.

And that's when it happened. A photo came along, clearly showing SWAT's approach to the truck in the deck above Gus' Hot Dogs. I retweeted it with the following comment, the first thing to pop into my head:

"Gus' Hot Dogs better be OK."

Because, you know, I really like Gus' Hot Dogs. And the next thought in my head was ...

D'oh.

It took four minutes before a guy named Ernest Garver gave me pretty much what I deserved.

"What if it were your family member in that situation, you (effing) moron," he replied.

And he was right. God he was right.

Perhaps it's not a big thing in the grand scheme of things, an insensitive comment fired from the hip in a high-octane situation. But it is a reflex that, on better days, would be kept in check.

I've had to watch out for that kind of thing my whole life if I'm being honest. Reporters and cops are notorious for it, using bravado and humor to diffuse situations. I've heard dirty jokes at the buffet they used to serve before executions at Holman Prison in Atmore. I've seen cops use the toes of their boots to absently play footsy with brain matter on the street. I've had subjects of stories threaten suicide if I published the nature of their wrongs, and I've heard the best editor I ever knew tell me to tell them to do it on our print cycle if they were really going to do it at all.

I suppose it's a defense mechanism. Humor – or the attempt at it – served as the over-armor to keep the real horror out.

But this social media world is a different world. It is not a world of print cycles and private moments, where even off-color comments in the streets can be excused and rationalized.

It is a world in which every thought and every image and every emotion flies across the virtual world at a speed you can't slow down. It does not land without consequence.

You are what you tweet.

And I don't want to be that guy.

Because every message is a signature that tells the story of you. Every message is a paragraph in the biography of you.

And every time you make light of a life, or forget that shootings have real victims and crime has real beating-heart consequences, you lose a little bit of yourself.

You lose a little humanity. And Lord knows we need all of that we can find.

So yeah. I was an effin' moron. And I don't want to be that guy.