Here in the Standard’s newsroom, we have a radio scanner tuned into Gillespie County Communications Center emergency dispatch. Throughout the day, our ears stay attentive to local happenings that require emergency attention, ranging from the hilarious to the commonplace to the tragic.

One of those difficult calls came a couple of weeks ago when I heard local dispatch send EMS to a four-year-old child who was drowning. The scanner call hit me especially hard and I spent a couple of minutes in my...