In a discussion this week with a friend about the events in Uvalde, he stopped at one point and said simply, “this is hell.”
He wasn’t just referring to the mass killing by a madman of 19 young children and 2 teachers, an atrocity that left as many as 17 more individuals in various hospitals. He was also talking about the complete failure of law enforcement officials to stop the killer as he continued shooting children yards away from them for as much as an hour.
He kept shooting even as a teacher and several children were repeatedly calling 911, begging them to send the police in to stop him. These victims assumed - as most of us likely do - that the police are there to “serve and protect,” as the motto of many police departments proclaim. They assumed that the police would rush in with guns blazing to stop this madman from killing their friends and students just as soon as they arrived on the scene, as they have seen actors playing cops do so many times in movies and on their televisions.