MAUREEN CALLAHAN: The coward Parkland deputy and why America is now devoid of valor

Whether or not you think him a coward, the not guilty verdict in Scot Peterson’s case has made one thing clear: America has fully given up on protecting our children from school shooters.

Just look to police and armed security guards, no longer expected, as inherent in their very job description, to put their own lives at risk in order to save young innocents.

What must our nation look like to the world?

In Peterson’s case, we have a 6’4”, 250-pound former sheriff’s deputy, with over three decades in law enforcement, who stood by and did nothing as a lone gunman shot up Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

Fourteen students and three adults were killed. Seventeen more 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 got 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.

Here we have a 6’4”, 250-pound former sheriff’s deputy, with over three decades in law enforcement, who stood by and did nothing as a lone gunman shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. What must our nation look like to the world?

But Peterson went on and on about how difficult this has been — 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 strangely weepy and showboaty — his supporters broke out in cheers. The father of one victim, attempting to speak to the media down the hall, was drowned out.

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

Incredibly, just three months after the shooting, Peterson insisted to NBC’s Today show that his failure to act wasn’t out of cowardice or fear.

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

Really? What else could it have been, then? When your very job is to use the loaded gun strapped to your body for an event such as this — why else are you on a high school campus with the title ‘school security officer’ — what stopped you?

This is the key question.

At trial, Peterson said he didn’t enter the school building because he couldn’t tell exactly where the gunshots were coming from.

Though in a recorded 911 call, Peterson was also heard telling law enforcement not to approach and to ‘stay at least 500ft away’.

And remember Uvalde? An army of police responded to an active shooter at Texas’s Robb Elementary last year, then were recorded on video strolling up and down hallways, using hand sanitizer, patting each other on the back, checking their phones as small children were slaughtered, as others hid under dead bodies, as desperate parents literally fought cops – unsuccessfully – to get inside.

Those officers had automatic rifles, bulletproof vests and shields. They were vastly more protected than those little children. Yet they did nothing.

And remember Uvalde? An army of police responded to an active shooter at Texas’s Robb Elementary last year, then were recorded strolling up and down hallways, using hand sanitizer, patting each other on the back, checking their phones as small children were slaughtered.

Eleven-year-old Miah Cerrillo, who covered herself in a dead classmate’s blood to play dead, said it felt like three hours before the police responded. It was actually 77 minutes.

Nineteen fourth-graders and two teachers died.

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

An entire nation asked the same thing.

Over one year later, what are the consequences facing these nearly 400 members of Texas law enforcement? Almost nothing.

The school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was fired. Yet he had the temerity to appeal his dishonorable discharge and won. His cowardice, in effect, stricken from the record, so he wouldn’t have trouble landing another job.

God forbid his life should be further inconvenienced.

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

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

Arredondo, like Peterson, maintained it wasn’t cowardice that kept him from moving in on the shooter. He told investigators that his strategy was to ‘contain’ the gunman in the classroom.

‘I know this is horrible,’ Arredondo said earlier this year, ‘and I know it’s [what] our training tells us to do, but — we have him contained. There’s probably going to be some deceased in there, but we don’t need any more from out here.’

Yet that is the exact opposite of what first responders are trained to do.

Eleven-year-old Miah Cerrillo, who covered herself in a dead classmate’s blood to play dead, later cried in an interview with CNN. ‘Why didn’t they save us?’ she asked. An entire nation asked the same thing. (Pictured: Uvalde cop checks his phone).

They are told, per active shooter protocols, ‘to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.’

We can’t even do that anymore.

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

We’ve gone from a nation of uncommon valor — those brave firefighters who climbed the World Trade Center towers to their certain deaths — to crouching in corners while little children suffer and die.

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

‘First graders,’ said then-President Barack Obama four years after the attack at a 2016 press conference, still visibly upset. ‘Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad… All of us need to demand that Congress be brave enough to stand up… We need the wide majority of responsible gun owners, who grieve with us every time this happens and feel like your views are not being properly represented, to join with us to demand something better.’

The NRA, on the ropes as never before, came up with a rejoinder: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’

Look how that’s turned out.

Four hundred guys with guns couldn’t — wouldn’t — stop the Uvalde killer.

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

How weak we have become. There’s more outrage in the media over pronouns and beer endorsements than school shooters and assault weapons.

The Peterson case is a metaphor for a very sick America circa now: One big shrug.

We’ve gone from a nation of uncommon valor — those brave firefighters who climbed the World Trade Center towers to their certain deaths — to crouching in corners while little children suffer and die. (Pictured: Gunman stalks hallway in Uvalde).

The FBI put active shooter protocols in place after Sandy Hook, but large swaths of American law enforcement seem to take these as light suggestions rather than emergency actions, eventualities to train for constantly rather than be taken by surprise.

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

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

Cowardice, legislatively and practically, is apolitical. So is trust in those sworn to protect and defend.

As Broward County state prosecutor Harold Pryor said after the Peterson verdict: ‘It’s not political to expect someone to do their job.’