Nah, c’mon. There’s no way.

As badly as the local PD seems to have performed, I refuse to believe that they risked their lives to save their own children but let the shooter go about his business with others.

Although there sure are a lot of people who watched this clip who think the officer being interviewed admitted to precisely that.

Here’s a Texas DPS Lieutenant telling a local station that some officers breached the school to get their own children BEFORE the shooter was taken down. pic.twitter.com/BrvS4sCqp6

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 26, 2022

The Occam’s Razor explanation is that the officer simply misheard the reporter. She says, “We’ve heard that some law enforcement officers actually went into school to get their kids out. Can you talk about that?” Maybe he thought she said “get the kids out,” not “their.”

But I hear his response the same way Mediaite does: “Right. So what we do know, Vanessa, right now, that there was some police officers, families trying to get their children out of school because it was a active shooter situation right now.” He says “their” too.

By “their,” could he have meant the community’s children, not those officers’ specific children? You know how politicians like to refer to “our” kids.

I can’t believe he means it the way it sounds. At the very least, if cops with children who attended the school were inside the building, they would have rescued their child’s entire class, not their child alone. But even in that best-case scenario, it’s unthinkable that a police officer hearing gunshots being fired nearby would decline to follow that sound and confront the shooter before he could kill more kids.

No one faults a parent for prioritizing their own child’s life. But when you take the pledge to protect and serve, you take it to the entire community. Imagine if it turns out that cops were inside the building and prioritized saving their own kids while their neighbors’ were being slaughtered. How would Uvalde function going forward?

Meanwhile, against all odds, this horror is somehow getting worse:

Joe Garcia, the husband of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers shot and killed in Uvalde, TX on Tuesday, has reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack. Joe and Irma were high school sweethearts and married 24 years. They leave behind four children. pic.twitter.com/Rlk0M2B8nR

— Ernie Zuniga (@Ernie_Zuniga) May 26, 2022

EXTREMELY heartbreaking and come with deep sorrow to say that my Tia Irma’s husband Joe Garcia has passed away due to grief, i truly am at a loss for words for how we are all feeling, PLEASE PRAY FOR OUR FAMILY, God have mercy on us, this isn’t easy pic.twitter.com/GlUSOutRVV

— john martinez ❤️‍🔥 (@fuhknjo) May 26, 2022

With all the chatter over the past 48 hours about red-flag laws, it’s worth asking: Did the shooter in this case display any red flags?

Mass killers often do. Scroll through Aaron Blake’s rogues gallery dating back to Columbine to see how many signs were missed by friends and family before 10 different shooting sprees. CBS has been looking into the Uvalde killer’s background and says there was nothing that would have raised concern about him among law enforcement:

Authorities say the alleged Uvalde school gunman didn't have any "red flags" and was able to purchase a gun legally in mid-May.

"When you have these red flags it can be an opportunity…for law enforcement to intervene and that did not happen in this case," @CBS_Herridge says. pic.twitter.com/Lj4VEsuFpb

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 25, 2022

It depends on how you define a “red flag,” though. Much of the reporting about him so far has emphasized that he was a loner, didn’t talk much, had a turbulent relationship with his mother, and so on. There’s nothing so terribly unusual in any of that that it would warrant depriving him of a constitutional right, however temporarily.

But this is unusual:

They used to play video games such as “Fortnite” and “Call of Duty.” But then Ramos changed. Valdez said that Ramos once pulled up to a park where they often played basketball and had cuts all over his face. He first said a cat had scratched his face.

“Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said. “I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?’”

Ramos said he did it for fun, Valdez recalled.

Allegedly he was known to drive around with a friend and shoot at random people with a BB gun. He had run-ins with police too when they’d be called to his home to mediate blow-ups between him and his mother. Another acquaintance told the Daily Beast, “At the park, there’d be videos of him trying to fight people with boxing gloves. He’d take them around with him.”

Just today there’s a report that he told another friend that he wanted to be famous like the subject of the documentary “Don’t F*** With Cats,” which is about a killer who started off torturing animals before murdering someone.

The tricky part of all that is that each of those behaviors in isolation — even the cutting — is troubling but not something we’d normally assume would lead to mass murder. If everyone who fit a similar description was reported by a friend or family member, there’d be thousands of teens under red-flag orders.

Although … that’s the point, right? The red-flag law is a “better safe than sorry” law. If you’re volatile and you take an interest in guns, as the Uvalde shooter ultimately did, you don’t get to act on that interest even though it’s likely that you’ll never threaten another person. That’s the regime America and the courts will somehow have to get comfortable with if red-flag laws are destined to catch on. When in doubt about whether a dark eccentric gets to enjoy their Second Amendment rights, the answer is no.