MAUREEN CALLAHAN: The Cowardly Parkland Representative and Why America Has No Courage Now

Whether you think he’s a coward or not, the Scot Peterson acquittal has made one thing clear: America has completely given up protecting our children from school shooters.

Just look at the police and armed guards, who are no longer expected to risk their own lives to save young innocents because it is inherent in their job description.

What should our country look like to the world?

In Peterson’s case, we have a 6’4″, 250-pound former sheriff’s deputy, with more than three decades in law enforcement, who stood by and did nothing when a lone gunman gunned down Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

Fourteen students and three adults were killed. Seventeen others were injured. Video shows Peterson hiding for 40 minutes, long after the shooter was apprehended.

On Thursday, a jury found him not guilty of all charges, including seven counts of child neglect.

“I have my life back,” Peterson said after the verdict.

Tone deaf doesn’t begin to cover that statement. Tell that to the destroyed parents who sat in court for two weeks.

But Peterson went on and on about how hard this was — for him.

“An emotional roller coaster,” he called it, filled with “endless nights.”

At one point during Peterson’s impromptu celebratory press conference — his lawyer was oddly tearful and showboaty — his supporters erupted in cheers. A victim’s father, who tried to talk to the media down the hall, was drowned out.

Such a lack of decorum and humility makes it all the more plausible that Peterson also possessed a critical lack of professionalism.

Incredibly, just three months after the shooting, Peterson insisted on showing NBC’s Today that he hadn’t acted was not out of cowardice or fear.

“It wasn’t because some said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go in that building, oh, I don’t want to run into anyone there,'” he said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

Real? What else could it have been? If your job is to use the loaded gun strapped to your body for an event like this – why else would you be on a high school campus with the title “school security guard” – what was stopping you?

This is the key question.

At trial, Peterson said he did not enter the school building because he could not say exactly where the gunshots came from.

Although, in a recorded 911 call, Peterson was also heard telling police not to approach and to “stay at least 500 feet away.”

And do you remember Uvalde? A police force responded to an active shooter at Robb Elementary in Texas last year, then were caught on video strolling hallways, using hand sanitizer, patting each other on the back, check their phones while small children were slaughtered, while others hid under dead bodies, while desperate parents literally – in vain – fought the police to get in.

Those officers had automatic rifles, body armor and shields. They were much better protected than those little kids. Yet they did nothing.

Eleven-year-old Miah Cerrillo, who covered herself in the blood of a dead classmate to play dead, said it took police three hours to respond. It was actually 77 minutes.

Nineteen fourth graders and two teachers were killed.

Cerrillo later cried in an interview with CNN. ‘Why not [the police] come on in?’ she asked. “Why didn’t they save us?”

An entire nation asked the same thing.

What are the implications, more than a year later, for these nearly 400 members of Texas law enforcement? Almost nothing.

The school’s chief of police, Pete Arredondo, was fired. Still, he had the guts to appeal his dishonorable discharge and won. His cowardice was, in fact, expunged from the record so that he would have no trouble finding another job.

God forbid that his life should be further inconvenienced.

A handful of other officers were fired or resigned. And the Texas Department of Public Safety has closed its investigation, hiding much of it from the public.

A Justice Department investigation is underway — for all the good that will do.

Arredondo, like Peterson, maintained that it was not cowardice that prevented him from approaching the shooter. He told investigators his strategy was to keep the shooter in the classroom.

“I know this is terrible,” Arredondo said earlier this year, “and I know it is [what] our training tells us to do so, but – we restrained him. There will probably be some dead in there, but we don’t need more from here.’

But that’s the exact opposite of what emergency responders are trained to do.

Under active shooter protocols, they are told to “endanger themselves and show unusual acts of bravery to save the innocent.”

We can’t even do that anymore.

What has become of courage, of sacrifice, of higher callings?

We have evolved from a nation of uncommon bravery – those brave firefighters who climbed the World Trade Center towers to certain death – to crouched in corners as little children suffer and die.

Sandy Hook should have prepared us for this. Even the deaths of 20 six- and seven-year-olds by shooting weren’t enough to force Congress, bought and paid for by the gun lobby, to act.

“First graders,” then-President Barack Obama said at a press conference four years after the 2016 attack, still visibly upset. “Every time I think of those kids, I get angry… We all need to demand that Congress be brave enough to stand up… We need the vast majority of responsible gun owners, who every time this happens with we mourn and feel your views are not properly expressed, to demand something better with us.’

The NRA, pulled like never before, countered: “The only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Look how that turned out.

Four hundred men with rifles could not stop Uvalde’s assassin.

If we’re going to give up gun control and the safety of our children, can we at least hold cowards to account?

How weak we have become. There is more media outrage about pronouns and beer recommendations than about school shootings and assault weapons.

The Peterson case is a metaphor for a very sick America right now: one big shrug.

The FBI put in place active shooting protocols after Sandy Hook, but large sections of US law enforcement seem to view these as light suggestions rather than emergency measures, contingencies to constantly train on rather than be taken by surprise.

The trial of Scot Peterson was a first in American criminal justice.

Unless we have a faithful reckoning, it won’t be the last.

Cowardice, legislative and practical, is apolitical. So is trust in those who are sworn to protect and defend.

As Broward County Attorney Harold Pryor said after Peterson’s verdict, “It’s not political to expect someone to do their job.”