A nation had seen, on their wide flat-screen TVs and on their hand-held phones, images of the carnage. Every school in America was in terrified shutdown. The nearly 98,000 public schools in America, along with tens of thousands of private and parochial schools, tens of thousands of day care centers, thousands of universities, colleges, and community colleges, all were in lockdown. The universal sound of that day would be the wailing of sirens. Every local police officer, whether on duty or off, had raced to the schools in their town. For almost all, there was a school with their own children or those of friends and neighbors. County sheriffs raced to protect schools as well, until called to go to nearby interstates where an even greater mass murder was unfolding. State police raced to the interstates. Their years of looking for drunk drivers, or, in quiet moments, pulling over those going eleven miles over the speed limit, or their being first on the scene of a deadly crash, none of that had prepared them for chasing gunmen armed with AK-47s, joyful in their killing and with no intent of being taken alive.
