What happened in the school shooting at Stoneman High School gets even odder: It now seems a senior officer on scene ordered all the deputies to ‘set up a perimeter’ while the killer wandered around in the building for six minutes killing people. This goes contrary to the procedure instantiated after the Columbine massacre in 1999, that the first officer present ‘on scene’ was to engage the assailant and ‘neutralize’ him, even without backup.
Did that first deputy I discussed yesterday fail in his duty? I don’t mean to lay blame where there is none, but it seems he should he have just gone in and ‘neutralized’ the target. Perhaps he was ordered not to, Perhaps not. Like the Vegas shooting, there are layers and layers, all filtered through the media, so who really knows, except, perhaps, him?
People are waking up to the fact that the police cannot really protect you. By the time they arrive, the damage is generally done. Switzerland has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, and not because they’re all Swiss, but rather that every able-bodied male must take a turn in the military, and keep his weapon at home. This is what used to be called a ‘militia’, and, in our current climate, it might not be a bad idea to get back to that quaint notion. Florida is now arming its teachers. What a world. But one must face reality.
And speaking of reality, Vladmir Putin in a speech yesterday extolled the glories of the Russian military, claiming they now have a nuclear missile with ‘infinite range’, which means that it can hit any target on Earth (so not quite infinite), impossible to intercept, travelling at Mach 10 which is about 7,410 miles per hour, which means it can traverse Moscow to Washington, DC (4,861 miles) in just over half an hour.
As Putin put it in his speech: “No one listened to us. Listen to us now“. Hmm.
What does he want to say, I wonder?
And on the front of spiritual warfare, Cardinal Sarah has more or less warned of a possible schism in the Church, if such is not already happening in a practical way. As the Cardinal put it:
Some high-ranking prelates, above all those coming from opulent nations, are working to cause modifications to Christian morality with regard to the absolute respect for life from conception until natural death, the question of the divorced and civilly remarried, and other problematic family situations. These ‘guardians of the faith’ however ought not to lose sight of the fact that the problem posed by the fragmentation of the ends of marriage is a problem of natural morality.
Stay firm and founded in the truth, dear reader. As I wrote a few days ago, Christ will make all things well in His own good time. In the interim, there is much to pray for in this Lententide, for which we should offer some thanks to God.