Uvalde: Police Restrained Parents from Rushing in to Save Their Children at Robb Elementary

I’m very firmly on the side of law and order, that doesn’t mean I’m always unfailingly and unthinkingly on the side of every police officer. It seems to me that I’m more on the side of law and order than many police officers of today are.

You can be firmly for a thing yet be critical of it. This “all or nothing” crap is what Greg Gutfeld calls “the prison of two extremes” and it’s nothing but fantasy and the mark of a lesser intelligence.

For instance you can be 100% for Donald Trump yet realize and describe in detail the many mistakes he made, mistakes more as a person than as a President. That doesn’t automatically make you an “anti-Trumper”. I’ve gotten in some knockdown, drag-out fights in here over just that. Because as soon as I say anything that could be construed as negative about Donald Trump one micro-brain in here especially starts lambasting me with all the condemnation that an actual, real life no-shit anti-Trumper deserves.

That kind of thing is de facto proof that a person isn’t really willing to think about real problems and discuss them. They might have a lot to say but what they have to say isn’t worth reading because … It’s proof they’re not real bright. They’re not conversing with you, they’re talking at you saying the things they think will make everyone admire them. That’s virtue signalling in the purest form. They aren’t smart enough to realize that you’re not the target they’ve been hoping to encounter so they could unload and tell someone what’s what.

The same principle applies to cops. You can be for law and order and not endorse law enforcement agents as infallible heros.

Just because someone put on a badge and strapped on a gun doesn’t make him automatically a hero. He got hired to do a job and like any other job in the world some people are more suited to it than others. Some are more vigilant and diligent about it than others. Some people work hard and some people slack off and almost everyone falls somewhere between those two extremes.

It’s a job with a lot of baggage. That onus is hard to live up to. No one knows what they will do at the moment of truth until they’re facing it. YOU don’t know what you will do unless you’ve faced your own mortality and overcome the sheer, raw fear to go on to do what you must. That’s not a situation for everyone and there is no screening or testing that will reliably indicate that a police officer will do anything but crap himself and run. Until he actually encounters that situation and does the right thing. Facing your own death is something that you must do to know how you will handle it.

Period. Full stop. This is not arbitrary or open to discussion. I’ve seen people do what needs to be done and I’ve seen them crap themselves and run away. Before they faced their own demise you couldn’t tell the difference between them, afterwards they carry an attitude that stays with them the rest of their lives.

Many years ago I was in a midwestern city, in a bar in a fairly tough part of town. A cab driver came in carrying a beer. You’re not allowed to bring your own drinks in off the street in pretty much any bar in America. He was asked nicely to leave, then he was told firmly to leave, then the bouncers threw him out on the sidewalk.

He was gone about two minutes and then he came back in with a handgun and started shooting. He wasn’t trying to hit anyone because if he was, the bar was crowded enough that he couldn’t help but hit someone. So he fired into the ceiling and into the bottles behind the bar all the while yelling something incoherent.

I dove behind the bar and I had lots of company. There’s a difference between cover and concealment and the bar was the nearest cover. Remember I said it was in a pretty tough part of town? Yeah, it was tough enough that there was an armed, uniformed police officer in that bar after a certain time of day.

That cop was right next to me, sidearm drawn and shaking like a leaf. I said …

“If you’re not going to use that thing, give it to me.”

Which of course he would not do but hey, it was worth the effort anyway.

I had already been through my “trial by fire” and I would have killed that cab driver. That cop had, as it turned out, never been in a situation where he’d drawn his service weapon. The way things ended up the cab driver’s handgun ran dry and several people in the bar tackled him. No one died that day, though the cabbie looked pretty rough by the time the ambulance came to pick him up.

So honestly, I won’t claim that the saying “all’s well that ends well” isn’t applicable. Because no one got shot, not the innocents and not the bad guy with a gun. No one getting shot is always a positive outcome.

No one got shot but that was sheer Divine Providence. That cabbie could have killed someone with his last round and stopping him with lethal counterforce would have been the right thing to do.

All that said, I learned my lesson about the courage and spine of a man with a badge and a gun that day too. I never, ever again assumed that a cop would face down a bad man and deal with him. Because you never know until you have to deal with that sort of thing.

Here’s the thing I do know. If you’ve encountered a lethal situation, crapped yourself and run like a dog, you shouldn’t be drawing pay as a law enforcement officer for even one more single day after that. Because you’ve proven everything anyone needs to know about your suitability for that job.

It may be true that the job of police is to draw chalk outlines around corpses and try to figure out who did the deed. That’s not the relevant factor here.

It’s the job of any civilized adult human being to protect children from death and disaster at the hands of a crazed lunatic with a gun. If they have the means to do so. It’s not anyone’s job to commit suicide in vain.

If you’re not enough of a civilized adult human being to even try to stop an active shooter when you’re standing there with a very potent, very capable weapon in your hands, you’re not enough of a civilized human being to be a cop either.

Some might say “Well it’s the fault of the officer in charge for not allowing those cops to go kill that nutjob.”

Not true. The officer in charge may have done that but that’s an excuse not a reason. If there are children dying by gunfire mere yards from where you’re standing with your own weapon, orders be damned. So you get fired. So you have to choose and start over with another career. For the rest of your life you’ll know that several children lived because you did the right thing in spite of orders. You’ll never know how many but a rule-of-thumb guess would be one for every cartridge the bad guy had left unfired before you put him down.

If you’re not enough of a civilized adult human being to do what’s right and ignore what you’re told to the contrary you do not deserve to wield the authority of The State. Because you don’t know the difference between right and wrong or if you do you don’t have the guts to do what’s right. Same thing either way. You’re not a hero, you’re a normal human being and that job requires the exceptional from you. You’ve proven you don’t have what it takes to do the job well.