{"id":90201,"date":"2026-04-21T07:37:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=90201"},"modified":"2026-04-21T07:37:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:37:34","slug":"the-eternal-half-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=90201","title":{"rendered":"The Eternal Half Hour"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building. \u00a0 There&#8217;d been reports of bombs &#8211; half-true &#8211; and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in. \u00a0By the time SWAT got into the school&#8217;s library, the victims and shooters had been dead for hours. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Police training changed after that, as Federal law enforcement studies showed that the most successful deterrence to spree killers was to\u00a0<em>try to kill them<\/em>. \u00a0 It threw off the careful planning that almost all of them put into their attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, the pol<a href=\"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69607\">ice at Parkland dawdled<\/a> for long enough for the murderer to have enough time not only to kill 17, but to leave the premises. \u00a0Uvalde was even worse &#8211; 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; by which time Vance Boelter was halfway to North Minneapolis on the bizarre chase that led to his eventual arrest. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Police used a drone and saw Melissa Hortman wounded inside the home at 4:09am. It wasn&#39;t until 4:40am that police went inside to get her. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/CUn13wegXg\">https:\/\/t.co\/CUn13wegXg<\/a><\/p>&mdash; daviss \ud83d\udcf8 (@daviss) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/daviss\/status\/2046339110265049505?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 20, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Some are hollering &#8220;cowardice&#8221;. \u00a0As my first carry permit instructor Joel Rosenberg said about civilian self-defense shooting, &#8220;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&#8221;., and I suspect that&#8217;s true for police as well; room-clearing against someone who&#8217;s expecting you is frightfully dangerous, body armor ain&#8217;t perfect and even when it\u00a0<em>does\u00a0<\/em>stop a bullet it leaves you pretty banged up. \u00a0 I&#8217;ll wait for a more thorough investigation (and I may be waiting a while) before I judge anyone&#8217;s character. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But for those crying &#8220;cowardice&#8221; &#8211; this seems like a fine time to point out that people in our society consider our own lives \u00a0to be of incalculable worth, needing to be preserved no matter what and defended&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;by cops, who are expected to put their lives on the line for what a cop makes &#8211; an average of about $68K in the US today. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So &#8211; what is it that makes your life of infinite value, but a cop&#8217;s worth risking for $68,000?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the central thesis of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=69607\">Geoff Snyder&#8217;s classic &#8220;A Nation of Cowards<\/a>&#8221; &#8211; a seminal article on the moral imperative to\u00a0<em>see to one&#8217;s own defense first\u00a0<\/em>before blithely expecting society to do it for you. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It is, of course, a personal choice &#8211; but like most personal choices, there&#8217;s a moral component to it as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Columbine, it took four hours for the SWAT team to enter the building. \u00a0 There&#8217;d been reports of bombs &#8211; half-true &#8211; and protocol was to make sure the bomb squad had had its say before sending the SWAT team in. \u00a0By the time SWAT got into the school&#8217;s library, the victims and shooters [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90202,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90201\/revisions\/90202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}