"Rifle first!  Blue, go, go, go!"

The officer in blue t-shirt pushes through the doors, rifle in position, and rushes right.

Two uniformed officers follow him; one scans right, the other scans left, both in ready position, sidearms in front of them.  They don't appear to be wearing any protective armor; they don't even wear baseball hats.  They look quickly, then run down opposite hallways.  For a second, you can see their faces: alert, disciplined, young.  Adrenaline and training firing off in unison inside their heads.

And this is where I start to cry.  Why do I cry then, I ask myself, when I did not cry the day before when I heard the news?  Why not when I heard the news of so many other mass shootings, even the mass shootings in places like Chicago that for some reason don't rate that title in the media?  Why now?

We've all seen a lot of cop shows, right?  They are a TV staple.  We get to see bad guys commit crimes, and then we see the good guys catch them.  It's exciting.  It's a modern morality tale. Sometimes the bad guys beat the rap, sure, but that's just another variation of the genre, in deference to modern sensibilities like irony and nihilism, by people who have not experienced the terror of crime themselves.

Now, tragically, the media, with our acquiescence, have made the school shooting into another kind of morality tale.  The breaking news headlines scream "Terror in the Heartland" or some such name, with sirens and lights lighting up the TV.  We see video of frightened families in parking lots searching for their children.  We see a picture of the shooter, front and center.  In a day or two, we see makeshift memorials.  Teddy bears.  Candles.  Mewling politicians.

We talk about gun violence and hear cries of "do something," yet all we hear is the same-old, same-old.  The Second Amendment is at fault, social media are at fault, or mental illness.  Or all of the above.  Politicians and police chiefs ponder what went wrong; how did we miss this?  How did society fail?  They apologize.  However, we almost never see the comeuppance for the criminal; the saga ends with a lessons-learned moment, and then the story shifts to the party politics involved.

But today, we got to see an Act 3, and that's important.  Within hours of the crime, we saw this police force, highly trained, react to the killing spree.  Not only did they show the body cam footage of the takedown of the suspect, but they also displayed online the pictures of the two officers who did finally end the spree and the suspect's life.  What they are saying is this: we are the police, and we will protect you.  We do not apologize.  We laud our heroes.

And as the sad crumpled body of the suspect testifies, it's not a glorious ending for the criminal.  She is not a warrior; she was defeated by warriors.  With time and repetition, this message might end the current Romance of the School Shooter.

This is why I cry, I suppose, when I see the faces of the two officers.  These officers are there for me, and for you, just as we had always wanted to believe.  We believed that the police exist to serve and protect us, not The Narrative.  Today, they did that, without hesitation or apology.  And we were allowed to see it play out.

To see that in this one city, the citizens are precious, especially the innocent children, is a gift.  These police, young as they are, know that evil exists, and they prepare to meet it.  They train to defeat it, at every turn.  This is the lesson learned today, that the law is magnificent, and the men and woman who defend it are heroes.  They put their lives on the line for these principles, and we are unendingly grateful that we could see that.

Image via Pxhere.