The moment the first shot is fired, officers arriving at the scene of an active shooter are hunters, trained to track, locate, and ultimately stop the shooter.

There is no time to wait for backup or SWAT to arrive, said active shooter expert Chris Grollnek, a former Texas police officer, SWAT member, and veteran of the U.S. Marines. As more officers arrive, they should go in, too. "Let it rain police," Grollnek said.

The officers are well trained. They have lethal weapons, ballistic vests, and the odds on their side, Grollnek said. "The kids in school have Crayons," he said.

"If you're not capable of doing it, you shouldn't be a policeman," Grollnek said.

National Review spoke to Grollnek in the wake of Tuesday's massacre at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman entered the school unobstructed, and killed 21 people – 19 children and two teachers – before he was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team. The shooter was in the school for over an hour, leading to criticism that law enforcement didn't do enough fast enough.

News reports indicate that parents and frustrated onlookers outside the school pleaded with officers to act — "Go in there! Go in there!" — while others considered rushing in on their own. One parent told CNN that he offered to take an officer's gun and vest so he could go in to take on the shooter himself, "and they told me no," he said.

Members of a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team, who eventually killed the shooter, arrived on the scene around noon but were prevented from entering the building by local police for roughly an hour, the New York Times reported Friday, citing two officials briefed on the situation. It’s unclear why the local officers stopped the specially-equipped agents from entering the building and engaging the shooter as the massacre unfolded.

Law enforcement leaders, struggling to explain the response and changing their story about what actually transpired in and around the school, have called the situation "complex." The first officers who arrived took cover when the shooter fired at them. They didn’t pursue him further because they were worried they “could’ve been shot,” a Texas Department of Public Safety lieutenant told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday. Others helped to evacuate students and staff. At one point they entered into "negotiations" with the shooter, who was locked in a classroom. Agents had to locate a key to get inside.

Without all the details, it's not appropriate yet to Monday morning quarterback the law enforcement response, Grollnek said. But even so, he said, it's clear that "If it all went like it should have, police would have engaged him sooner."

Law enforcement procedures for responding to active shooters changed drastically after the Columbine shooting in 1999, when police, who weren't prepared to engage the shooters, waited for SWAT. It took more than three hours for officers to find the Columbine shooters.

"In an active shooter situation, time is of essence, and we're trained to engage with the threat," said Patrick Yoes, president of the national Fraternal Order of Police, and a former school resource program supervisor. "If you allow the threat to continue, it does too much damage."

Yoes said officers need to first contain and then engage the threat. Yoes is not involved in the response in Uvalde, and he declined to comment specifically on that shooting. Every school is different, and an investigation will determine if the officers who were on scene outside Robb Elementary were properly containing the shooter, preventing him from moving to new targets.

"There's a lot of actions the officers could have been doing that fit into that category," Yoes said. "We should all pause and let all the facts come out."

While the post-Columbine training is clear that officers should locate and engage an active shooter, they don't always do that. Scot Peterson, the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., waited outside the school as a shooter killed 17 people inside.

Grollnek said every officer is now trained on what's called the priority of lives assessment, or POLA. In the situation of a barricaded subject, time is on the side of law enforcement. In that case, the first priority is protecting the hostages, followed by protecting bystanders, and then the police, and then the barricaded subject, Grollnek said.

"When you have and active shooter that is actively killing people, you invert POLA," he said. "You now make it, the only priority in my life is stopping the shooter. The second priority of my life is staying alive long enough to stop the shooter."

Even rescuing or providing medical aid to victims – so-called "doomed captives" – is a lesser priority than hunting, locating, and stopping the shooter. "You step over the bodies of the shot, wounded, injured, dead, and you keep going, and you keep hunting, and you don't stop until you find the shooter," Grollnek said.

If there is more than one shooter, officers should solve one problem at a time. "Solve the first one, and then go hunt the second one," he said.

Grollnek, who responded to an active shooter who attacked his police headquarters in 2010, said mass shooters are part of the landscape in modern America, and society needs to adjust.

"We live in a new world. That's all there is to it," he said. "I'm not saying we need to change our civil rights. I'm saying we need to realize we live in a new world. We need to create civility, and we need to understand that the world has changed."

While there is no magic fix to stop all mass shooters, Grollnek is a proponent of a new way of thinking about active shooters that focuses on prevention. He points at the fire prevention model as an example. To protect people from fires, schools and other public buildings have mandated fire sprinklers, fire alarms, and fire extinguishers. There are fire codes, and fire marshals and fire inspectors to enforce the rules.

Grollnek said the U.S. needs a similar prevention-focused mindset for active shooters.

A large number of mass shooters – including the shooters in Uvalde and Buffalo – tell someone they are going to attack before they do. Grollnek has advocated for emerging artificial intelligence platforms that reach into different silos – online forums, national telephone hotlines – to pull out information and flag people who could respond.

He's also an advocate for doing more to harden schools, including with ballistic shields that can easily be fitted into classroom doors to lock them down. Robb Elementary is actually a well-protected school, Grollnek said. But, he said, "the door was unlocked."

Falling back on the "run, hide, fight" model – a model that encourages people to run away from a shooter if possible, to hide if they can't escape, and to fight back as a last resort – isn't working, Grollnek said.

"Look at the Buffalo shooting," he said. "The people that ran got shot and killed. The people that hid got shot and killed. The guard that exchanged gunfire, or tried to, got shot and killed."

When prevention efforts fail, police need to respond aggressively, Grollnek said. Police officers aren't superheroes. Their badges give them no superpowers or super bravery. But, Grollnek said, they have the tools and the training to save innocent lives.

"Being a police officers is a dangerous job, and sometimes bad things happen," he said. "If I teach you that you have to go into a bad situation, and you may not come out, and that's the job, and you still take the job, that is your job."

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