Pour encourager les autres

A Uvalde school district police officer married to a teacher killed in the Uvalde school shooting last month was detained and had his gun taken away from him as he attempted to reach her, according to a top official. Speaking to the Texas Senate, the state’s Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw said Ruben Ruiz had known his wife, Eva Mireles, had been injured by the gunman but that he was forcibly moved away from the classroom in which she was trapped. “We got an officer whose wife called him and said she’d been shot and she’s dying,” McCraw said. “He tried to move forward into the hallway. He was detained, and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.” The director did not specify which agency was responsible for detaining Ruiz. Mireles, a fourth-grade teacher, was one of two teachers killed by the shooter, along with 19 students. McCraw also said on Tuesday that the classroom door had not been locked, as the embattled Uvalde school district police chief had previously maintained, and that officers could have neutralized the gunman in three minutes had they chosen to breach the door.

Multiple police officers armed with rifles and at least one ballistic shield stood and waited in a school hallway for nearly an hour while a gunman carried out a massacre of 19 elementary students and two teachers, according to a Monday news report that marks the latest embarrassing revelation about the failure of law enforcement to thwart the attack.

The officers with heavier firepower and tactical equipment were there within 19 minutes of the gunman arriving on campus — earlier than previously known, according to documents reviewed by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV.

Voltaire remarks in Candide that in England they think it well to shoot an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. This is delivered as a satirical comment on the execution of Admiral Byng, who was shot as punishment for failure to carry out his duties with sufficient enthusiasm.

There are however instances where a similar observation could with all justice be made in a much more literal way.