Responding officers can make the best or worst of a bad situation, but once police are called, it’s already too late. To say that officers in Uvalde disregarded more than 20 years of doctrine about active shooters is an indictment not only of the police but also of how the United States has over the same period failed to take effective steps to prevent massacres in places like schools—in fact, such massacres have become far more frequent. Over the past two weeks or so alone, the nation has seen multiple-fatality shootings in cities including Buffalo, New York; Uvalde; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Stanwood, Michigan. The police are asked to solve problems that every other part of society has been unwilling or unable to handle, and the barbarity, inefficacy, and clumsiness of police responses are products of that collapse.

Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern policing, argued that the goal of a police force was not catching criminals after the fact but preventing crime, and it’s hard to see how police might have been able to prevent the Uvalde massacre. So-called red-flag laws, which allow courts to temporarily seize guns from people if they might be a danger to themselves or others, may indeed be a commonsense measure, but there’s precious little evidence that they are useful in stopping mass shootings. (They seem to work better for preventing suicides.)

Armed guards at schools, better preparation, fortifying schools—all of these have been proposed as good solutions, but few of them seem to work all that well in practice. Schools in Texas had already been “hardened,” but that didn’t prevent the horror in Uvalde. The school district had drilled for a mass-shooting event. No armed officer was stationed at the school when the gunman struck. (In Buffalo, a retired police officer serving as a security guard engaged and fired at the shooter, and authorities say he saved lives by buying time; despite this apparent heroism, 10 people died.)