The Eternal Half Hour
By Mitch Berg
At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building. There’d been reports of bombs – half-true – and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in. By the time SWAT got into the school’s library, the victims and shooters had been dead for hours.
Police training changed after that, as Federal law enforcement studies showed that the most successful deterrence to spree killers was to try to kill them. It threw off the careful planning that almost all of them put into their attacks.
Nevertheless, the police at Parkland dawdled for long enough for the murderer to have enough time not only to kill 17, but to leave the premises. Uvalde was even worse – cops not only stalled for an hour, but threatened to arrest parents to wanted to take matters into their own hands while it still mattered; it took a team of Border Patrol to end the standoff.
And now comes news that the Brooklyn Park police knew what was going in the Hortman residence for half an hour before they went in – by which time Vance Boelter was halfway to North Minneapolis on the bizarre chase that led to his eventual arrest.
Some are hollering “cowardice”. As my first carry permit instructor Joel Rosenberg said about civilian self-defense shooting, “a life or death decision you make in a split second in the dark is going to get analyzed to a fine sheen by lawyers sitting in a warm, well-lit, secure room for as long as they need”., and I suspect that’s true for police as well; room-clearing against someone who’s expecting you is frightfully dangerous, body armor ain’t perfect and even when it does stop a bullet it leaves you pretty banged up. I’ll wait for a more thorough investigation (and I may be waiting a while) before I judge anyone’s character.
But for those crying “cowardice” – this seems like a fine time to point out that people in our society consider our own lives to be of incalculable worth, needing to be preserved no matter what and defended…
…by cops, who are expected to put their lives on the line for what a cop makes – an average of about $68K in the US today.
So – what is it that makes your life of infinite value, but a cop’s worth risking for $68,000?
That’s the central thesis of Geoff Snyder’s classic “A Nation of Cowards” – a seminal article on the moral imperative to see to one’s own defense first before blithely expecting society to do it for you.
It is, of course, a personal choice – but like most personal choices, there’s a moral component to it as well.
