You would have to shoot me to prevent me from entering an elementary school that one of my children was in during a mass shooting. And were you able to incapacitate me, then I would sooner or later be in jail for murder. Maybe of the shooter, maybe of whoever stopped me from entering.
See, it’s simple math. Even the smallest chance of stopping someone who is murdering children is worth it. It’s worth dying for and it’s worth killing for.
There are things in life worth dying for. There are things in life worth killing for. Hell, I even believe that there are things in life worth cold-blooded murder.
I’m willing to admit that might not be a healthy perspective. God is working on me in a lot of areas, but he has left that part of me alone so far.
In a situation like the shooting at Uvalde, every second counts, every minute. I have no sympathy for anyone who carried a weapon and a badge and felt that securing a perimeter and pointing the weapon at the citizens whose children they were supposed to protect was the right call.
I mean, can you imagine telling the boys who stormed Omaha beach that 75 years later, American men would be too cowardly to confront someone killing children. Their neighbors’ children. Their friends’ children.
Or how about the soldiers and marines who trained for years to enter a room, knowing that if they were the first person in the door they might get shot, and if they got shot they had to keep moving for the sake of the men behind them? Those same soldiers and marines then deployed to Afghanistan and did everything they could to save women and children, knowing that intelligence warned of an attack.
I can not understand how you could live with yourself if you had the opportunity and the means to save even a single child’s life and you didn’t act.
I remember being in Afghanistan when ISIS bombed a maternity ward at a hospital in Kabul. I remember both the sorrow and the anger I felt then in a country that wasn’t my own.
I thought being an American was supposed to mean something. Maybe not all good things, but at the very least a willingness to lay down our lives to confront evil. Maybe I was naïve.
But I have another thought. I think it’s simple: For 20 years, we sent some of our best around the world to fight evil. I remember a Staff Sergeant once telling me that when someone screws up, when someone is lazy, it’s not the crappy people that die in war. It’s always the best people. America lost a lot of our best and brightest in Iraq and Afghanistan, and plenty more of them came back missing limbs and with scars in their own memories.
Perhaps the man who would’ve stopped the Uvalde shooter died from an IED, a rocket attack, a suicide bomber. Or maybe, lacking purpose, he killed himself having no idea where he was meant to be.
