It doesn't need to be men, though as a practical matter it probably mostly will be. And while it is necessary to have a backstop of violence to stop violence, when it is true it usually means we've messed up. There are countries with rates of crime at least an order of magnitude lower than in the U.S., for example, and there's little reason to believe that that's the floor.

Threatening people into behaving is a tenuous, poor solution. So we should both celebrate the risks and sacrifices made by those who take on that role and also view every necessary intervention as a likely witness of our failure.