The recent report issued by Department of Justice details “cascading failures” during the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where, in total, some 380 responding law enforcement officers failed to act as a lone gunman murdered 21 souls. The report savages the bungled decision-making of then–School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo within its broader critique.

The inaction at Uvalde breeds a kind of hopeless bafflement. After all, the phenomenon of rapid mass murder, or “active shooters,” has plagued the culture for a generation. The massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado established the essential template for the long history of incidents that followed. The intervening decades since Columbine witnessed a flurry of effort at remediation. Yet, for all the effort, edgy tactics, reports, panels, hearings, and protocols, the phenomenon has not gotten any better. As a matter of fact, the numbers declare that it has gotten worse. The response at Robb Elementary School was in every essential sense the same as the response at Columbine High School — nearly a quarter century later. The efforts seem to yield no payoff. Is it possible that so little has been learned in over two decades? How can that be?

A range of systemic dysfunctions — cultural, political, moral, and tactical — drive the phenomenon of the “active shooter.” All cry for sober exploration, but an exhaustive analysis of the full range of dysfunctions would fill a volume. The report by the Department of Justice asserts that dysfunctional decision-making figured prominently in Uvalde. But it offers no explanation as to why decision-making failed so miserably. The failure wants explanation.

Nothing mucks up decision-making like inconsistent messaging. To take a simple example, consider the (often) bubbly exhortations offered by experts in finance to buy this or that stock. The upside appears obvious, if all goes well. But then, the experts never really tell you to buy the stock about which they swoon. Quite the contrary, they embed the recommendation with all sorts of qualifications — up to and including that you may lose everything that you invest. They are advising you what a good buy it is, but they are not telling you to buy. They imbed an implicit “don’t” behind an explicit “do.” Buy — but anticipate financial ruin (so … don’t buy?). (READ MORE: For Progressives, There Are No Good Guys With Guns)

Imagine guidance of this sort governing the most extreme kinds of encounters possible between human beings, requiring high-stakes decision-making flanked by chaos and urgency: rapid mass murder events. Nominally, the standard protocol for law enforcement officers is some form of “go get the killer as quickly as you can.” We agree with that tactic — without qualification. But, invariably, what follows the mandate is a heap of dense qualifications — implicit “don’ts.”

Policy, procedure, and training at one and the same time require officers to:

• Go get the killer — but: “it’s very dangerous and you might get killed.”
• Go get the killer — but “be wary of friendly fire.”
• Go get the killer — but “these incidents can evolve into a hostage crisis or barricaded event” — one of the rationalizations for delay cited by law enforcement at Uvalde — which demands the opposite of the tactic initially urged.
• Go get the killer — but “be aware that some of these killers are highly trained operators waiting for the opportunity to kill a cop.”
• Go get the killer — but “he may blend seamlessly into the crowd of victimized civilians. Be aware that he might kill you or someone else by masquerading in that guise.”
• Go get the killer — but “be careful about mistaking an innocent for the shooter — you can never live with it if you do.”

So go get him — but “don’t.”

The predictable result of the inconsistent messaging is hesitancy and inaction.

The dozens of officers (many of them fathers and mothers of young children themselves) who responded to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and waited outside an established perimeter while children were being murdered may have been cowards, but with their range of years and experience in law enforcement, it seems inconceivable that they would not have responded to their share of volatile and violent incidents prior to May 24, 2022.

Equally inconceivable is the notion that they did not care about the students who they took an oath to protect. The idea that cowardice in itself explains the inaction that haunted the mass shooting at the school is unconvincing. It would mean that dozens of individuals all rushing to the same location, presumably to help (why else go?), very oddly chose careers in a profession in which death is an occupational hazard — not generally an inviting choice for cowards.

The idea of dozens of cowardly police officers responding to the same incident is no less baffling than the inaction itself. A deeper pathology is surely at work. That pathology can be partly understood as a mental loop nourished by contradictory injunctions and the mealy indecisiveness inherent to bureaucracies. Is there no deeper explanatory power in at least countenancing the possibility that the officers believed that by entering and pursuing the killer, they might themselves have killed innocents in the chaos (if reports are accurate, this was indeed a real concern of some on the scene)? Misconstrued a hostage taker (or “barricaded” scenario, as the report establishes) for an active killer? Been ill-equipped to handle a “trained” killer? The analysis does not seek to excuse but to explain.

Cowardice is a comforting explanation in that it resolves itself into mere personal failing and, as such, requires no meaningful reexamination of the orthodoxies grounding our approach to rapid mass murder. It explains away without explaining. Officers who responded to Robb Elementary School were trained to respond to active shooters; they knew the policies of their agencies on active shooters. Does it ring true to suppose, then, that training and policy played no role in how they responded — and in how they failed? Is it not possible that the qualifications embedded in training and policy, implicitly counseling inaction, played a role in the broad inaction that riddled the response in Uvalde?

Lt. Daniel Modell (ret.) served 20 years in the New York City Police Department. He was the coordinator of the Tactical Training Unit and training coordinator for the Firearms and Tactics Section. Modell is author of The Warrior’s Manifesto: Ideals for Those Who Protect and Defend and “The Psychology of the Active Killer.”

Sgt. Russell Jung (ret.) served some 23 years in the New York City Police Department. Prior to his career in law enforcement, he served in the United States Army. He served as supervising instructor of the Tactical Training Unit and in the Firearms and Tactics Section. Jung is the author of “State Bureaucracy: Entropic Organization in the Age of 4th Generation Warfare.”