I’m never going to be the one to pile on someone who freezes up at the thought of charging toward mortal danger. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It happens to the best of people; trained cops and soldiers freeze solid when the immediate threat becomes real. Even soldiers who’ve been there, over and over, will freeze up – think of the Gunner Sergeant from Percy Sledges memoir The Old Breed<\/em>, who fought through battle after battle against the Japanese, only to freeze up in his final battle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody can predict how they’d do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, there are still consequences. They may even be just consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, we know a couple things about spree killings: left unchecked, they rack up horrific death tolls. And the best way to end them is to respond with immediate lethal force .<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something that cops have been taught, now, for a few decades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ll let God decide whether Scot Peterson – the cop who busied himself searching the buildings on the Parkland campus that didn’t <\/em>have gunfire coming from inside during the Stoneman-Douglas High School massacre – is truly culpable for freezing up, not “under fire” but under the threat of it. He was 56, nearing retirement, probably not too unlike Danny Glover’s character in the (fictional) Lethal Weapon <\/em>series, and just “too old for this s**t”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n