Firefighters can and do frequently put themselves at far more risk than any police officer ever will. Police don't even rank up near the top of the list in terms of most dangerous jobs to hold.

If the police cannot do their jobs to save children from being killed by a school shooter then they should not be police officers. They should not be militarized and given advanced equipment, they should not pretend that they ever need it and their budget shouldn't be the majority of a town's spending. And if they don't like it, then maybe the police and the police union can do better campaigning on actual ways to stop school shooters instead of using it as an excuse to further increase their own budget.

> The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

Over the lives of children, though? Putting your life in danger to save a random guy's life is heroic, but not expected. You're both adults, your safety isn't guaranteed, and it's not guaranteed that you'll be able to save him. But it's quite different when, instead of a random guy, it's a group of children.

I think that's the striking difference with Uvalde. It's really, really hard for me to imagine firefighters not rushing into a burning elementary school to get the kids to safety. Societally, we expect them to, and they know we expect them to.

Society also expects the same from police (laying down your life to save a child), but I'm not sure these police fully understood this societal expectation at the time of the incident, or else they would have acted differently.

>Society also expects the same from police (laying down your life to save a child), but I'm not sure these police fully understood this societal expectation at the time of the incident, or else they would have acted differently.

And yet...

>“People are going to ask why we’re taking so long,” a man who investigators believe to be Chief Arredondo could be heard saying, according to a transcript of officers’ body camera footage.

>By that point, officers in and around the school had been growing increasingly impatient, and in some cases had been loudly voicing their concerns. “If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there,” one officer could be heard saying, according to the documents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/us/uvalde-shooting-police...

Socially, there's an expectation that all other considerations are disregarded when children are involved. But you really can't save anyone if you're dead anyway. People want to think that heroes will die trying, but those heroes also want to go home to their own children. There's really no black-and-white line here, it's a big grey area.

> The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

This is fundamentally wrong. If it were ok, let's just disband them all and save a lot of money since their responsibility doesn't benefit anyone other than themselves. I reject the concept of a society where this is somehow ok.

It's 100% the truth. First responders are neither instructed to nor required to sacrifice their lives at work. They're required to take upon some amounts of risk as a matter of circumstance, but that line stops far before death.

The idea that first responders can solve anything is a very comforting idea that resonates with many people. That doesn't make it true.

>They're not going to jump in front of a bullet to protect anyone else, though. The primary responsibility of any first responder -- police, fire, or EMS -- is to preserve their own lives.

And this is where, circumstantially, you and I seem to have a fundamentally different viewpoint. We'll just keep going in circles.