After Texas school shooting, many questions loom – Yahoo! News.

This is definitely tragic. And anything occuring in this magnitude is sad and should not happen – in all places – a school.  I feel for the family and the community – as the family has lost a loved family member and the community as a whole has experienced a horrible incident.

But what people are trying to grapple with is:  Why would the boy not drop the gun after the police told him repeatedly to drop the gun?  If he would have just dropped the gun, he would not have died.  Why didn’t the police just shoot him in the shoulder, or the leg, or the arm to disarm him?  Why kill him?  These are legitimate questions and questions that should be answered respectfully.  Whatever the answers are, there are three sides that are affected by this incident:  The immediate family, the school and community and the police force.  The first two are obvious, but the third is not so obvious.

The cops who shot Gonzalez are probably suffering also.  I was thinking,  “What if I was in those cops’ shoes?”.  After the incident, and finding out that the kid only had a pellet gun, I would have been traumatized; thought that I had done something wrong – I’m supposed to protect – especially children. I think many people are forgetting about the cops who choose to protect and serve the community as they are most of the time caught between “doing the right thing” and “what if”???