Something has changed following Parkland. The overwhelming narrative has been to assign moral agency to inanimate objects: the guns. Everybody else, and the morality of their action or inaction, is somehow irrelevant.

Of the astounding failures by law enforcement leading up to and during the Florida massacre, perhaps the most egregious was that Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson hid outside the school while the shooter gunned down students.

Had he gone inside immediately instead of four minutes after the shooting began, he probably could have saved lives. Yet faced with this troubling information, one Parkland student David Hogg defended the inaction. And while he’s only one student, the predictably disappointing cable news media have made his point of view the defining meme for the moment.