"... who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation."
Also: "[P]olice leaders struggled to answer questions about the horrific hour it took to halt a gunman who opened fire on students and teachers inside Robb Elementary School. No school police officer confronted the gunman before he went into the school, a state police spokesman said...."
ADDED: If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.
AND:
I've always remembered this passage from Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller:
Insofar as the Framers focused at all on the tiny fraction of the population living in large cities, they would have been aware that these city dwellers were subject to firearm restrictions that their rural counterparts were not. They are unlikely then to have thought of a right to keep loaded handguns in homes to confront intruders in urban settings as central. And the subsequent development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, would have moved any such right even further away from the heart of the amendment’s more basic protective ends.
Posts
212 comments:
1 – 200 of 212 Newer› Newest»I want them to explain the horrific 40 minutes it took them to respond to the 911 call, including the over 10 minutes when the gunman was firing from outside of the school--before going in to shoot some more.
It's a most cautious guy effect, if they have to act as a team; instead of the least cautious guy.
How in the hell can anyone stand outside of the school while hearing gunshots coming from a classroom full of kids and not do SOMETHING.
If you're a cop and you have a gun, you damn well better beat down that door after the first shot.
If there is no shooting, I get it...maybe a hostage situation.
But once a shot is fired you go.
I understand that law enforcement officers are not obligated to risk their lives to protect anyone.
If true, that's even more reason to own a gun ad learn how to use it.
Start thinking of the police as revenue generators for your town/city and that would be an accurate job description.
They carry guns to protect themselves. You? Not so much...
The liberals have demonized and feminized law enforcement at every turn, and this is the result.
The officials had to deal with a horrible situation, with many gaps in their knowledge.
Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic.
So does that mean the previous locals called in the border patrol story is no longer operative?
100% planned operation. Your government is doing things you think only other governments do.
As Glenn Reynolds says, “The police aren’t there to protect the citizens from the criminals. They’re there to protect the criminals from the citizens.”
I despise these articles drawing early conclusions or like this one, making bold statements about “stopping” the Border Patrol. It conflicts with other reporting and whether eventually proved correct or not this is too early to pile on the “cops fucked up” narrative that Big Media loves to peddle. For example the cops holding parents back theme. Other reports say some cops were around the classrooms (2 interconnected) at the same time others were controlling the perimeter, including the mob of parents gathering. Even though I find the framing of the Times story detestable I reserve judgment on any of the subjects— school, LE, parents, teachers— until everything is sorted out by the Texas DPS.
"If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns?"
Because once we ban guns, gun violence will end and the police will not be needed to protect us from gun violence. You see, he would have never been able to purchase the guns, nor would he have been able to get them any other way, nor would he have used some other means to kill people. There, it's so simple.
I don't know what to believe since the story "evolves" so requently.
But the current time line is the shooter fired shots outside the school an took several minutes to walk, unopposed, into the school.
Even without the failure to act quickly many of those kids would have died.
Schools need hardened entries, limited in number with armed, trained officers ON SITE. (Take the money out of the CRT, Equity positions... there will be plenty left over.)
Side note: How embarrassing that our lefty friends do not understand how a fire door works.
How much classroom time is spent on these useless "drills"? I remember drop and cover (K thru 4)----way back, but that was maybe once every 3 years. But, these active shooter drills, every three weeks? That's what I'm reading.
So, in between CRT, promoting self-mutilation/puberty blockers, and endless time spent on active shooter drills, not much 3r's going on.
Time to abolish public schools.
I was initially defending the local PD, who were outgunned. Until this.
The call to police went in at 1130 that the shooter was outside the school. He was out there for 15min, I have read at other sources. So, he entered the school at 1145. The PD went in early and got shot and backed off. Fair enough, don't take a handgun to an AR-15 fight.
Border Patrol SWAT team arrived 1200-1210 and were ordered by PD to stand down, and ultimately didn't go in until 1300, killing the guy then. Why, you ask? Because..."the gunman was locked in a pair of adjoining classrooms and had already shot a number of students there in the first few minutes; with him pinned down there, they said, the local police initially focused on evacuating students and teachers from elsewhere in the school."
If the shooter is *pinned down* in a classroom full of kids that he is shooting, what is the rationale for evacuating the rest of the school instead of immediately taking him down where he is trapped? What explains this? Heads up asses is at the top of the list.
The local PD screwed up and cost kids' lives with this boneheaded decision.
Lots of stories going around. Not yet able to see what really happened. The Texas DPS Director on TV rambling like Biden. Maybe that is part of the problem.
The White House will not call for an investigation into the police response.
And they won't fire the FBI hacks who fucked up the Nassar case either.
The entire federal government needs to be moved out of DC and distributed among the states, and funds to all agencies cut in half...for a start.
I have watched the TV media in vain listening for any criticism of Salvador Ramos. They act as if the gun forced Ramos to do it, rather than Ramos forcing the gun to do it. I believe that the gun is an innocent victim in this. It wouldn't have killed those kids if Ramos hadn't made the gun do it. So I think that Ramos should be subject to at least some criticism.
Breyer's point is an interesting one, and just shows how Judges can think up any kind of Bullshit to justify anything. That reached its peak when Roberts decided that Obama's DACA excecutive order was "Unconstititional" but Trump's excecutive order RECINDING it was invalid!
Or Kavanaugh's recent ruling that Congress can investigate Trump without executive privilage in THIS ONE CASE. Or you can look at the actions of the District Judge in the General Flynn case, where he decided to extend the trial ans seemingly prosecute Flynn himself with his sidekick buddy.
Make no mistake, we only have 2nd Admendment rights because 5 SCOTUS judges say we do. If Trump had lost in 2016, there would be no 2nd Admendment rights. Or rather, the rights would be worthless. One tries to get Center-right types to understand this, but most find it hurts their heads to think about it.
The police only storm in if it's a susposed black drug dealer in the middle of the night, not when the suspect is white or they might be put into personal risk.
That said, I'm doubtful armed teachers would be any more likely to have solved the problem.
Allowing armed parents to respond is never going to be acceptable to any insurer, plus any responder would be taking on a huge liability if they shot the wrong person.
It really falls in the police's lap to respond here.
But don't worry, our overlords will find a way to stay safe.
The Second Amendment is not about protection, it's not about hunting and it's not about sport. It's about the people having the means to overthrow the government. When the Founders wrote the Bill of rights it had just won a war against a far superior foe primarily because the people owned weapons that were often superior to the ones used by the British army. This war began with an attempt to seize privately owned weapons and ammunition. During that conflict the government issued Letters of Marque and Reprisal that allowed individuals to use their privately owned ships and cannons to attack British targets.
The men who wrote the Second Amendment also explicitly gave the new government the power to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. This meant the writers of the Second Amendment believed that it allowed private individuals to own and operate fully armed naval vessels.
Under the original meaning and intent of those who wrote the Second Amendment, U.S. citizens would have the right to own and operate a Ford class aircraft carrier, complete with an operational airwing, let alone city people being able to own a pistol.
The primary job of the police today is to protect criminals from vigilante justice.
It seems this situation is going to lead to a lot of armchair quarterbacking. At this point, condemning anyone other than the murderer is a mistake.
It’s an unfortunate pattern these days. Establish a “perimeter.” Wait for the Brass to arrive.
Not Justice Breyer, but Justifier Breyer. Like many of his compadres, including Chief Justifier Roberts, Breyer knows where he wants to get and searches for or invents the justifications to get there.
“Protect and Serve” who? That’s the question I ask and more and more the answer isn’t the citizenry but the state.
ADDED: If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.
Professor Althouse wins the day.
Now, every single cop who sat outside there should be fired.
Which means the voters need to carry out a witch hunt this year.
The city has a mayor and 5 city council members. The mayor and two members were up for election in 2020, which I hope means the other 3 are up for election this year.
Hopefully, they weren't just elected Tuesday. because there needs to be massive pressure on the elected officials to sweep the Police Dept clean of anyone who thought it was a good idea to let Ramos murder more kids
Progs know, if they can convince us to give up our guns, they will be able to do many things they can't currently do because we would shoot them.
Not only do the police not have a duty to protect, they apparently will arrest you for attempting to do that yourself. I grant that there might have been no good scenario once the boy got into a classroom, but with many active shooter situations, the only good defense is to be in a position to stop the shooter, and this cannot be done through modern police tactics which revolve around perimeters, negotiation and waiting. If my 10 YO were in that school, I'd have charged through a flurry of bullets to try and take out the gunman, hoping that my sacrifice would have been enough allow someone else to take him out if I failed. I don't blame the police for not wanting to do that themselves (though some apparently worked to take care of their own children in the school.) So, the argument that the police will care for urban citizens against threat is simply not valid.
Mike Sylwester said...
The officials had to deal with a horrible situation, with many gaps in their knowledge.
Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic.
According to the reports I've read, there were gunshots coming from the building during the hour they were "coming up with a plan".
Sorry, that's not in ANY way "reasonable".
Kids were bleeding out and dying, who could have lived if they got prompt treatment. Treatment they didn't get because the cops sat around.
Other kids were probably shot and injured / killed with those gunshots.
You don't negotiate with someone who's in the process of shooiting innocent people. you attack and kill him
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
I despise these articles drawing early conclusion
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/399317.php
"Generally I'd say we shouldn't rush to conclusions, but the Uvalde DPS is telling me that all of my suspicions are correct, because they won't answer questions about what the hell they were doing for that key hour. "
Yep.
Here's what we know, and what the cops on the scene knew:
1: Ramos had shot people
2: When people are in a medical emergency, like being shot, then the quicker they get treatment, the more likely they are to survive.
3: Or, to put it another but also correct way: The longer treatment is delayed, the more likely they are to die
4: Unless the police KNOW that every single person in the room with Ramos is dead, doing ANYTHING besides "immediately attacking" is killing innocent people.
5: The police spent an hour not attacking. Their spokes creature said they did this because the police didn't want to get shot.
Every single decision-maker involved with that decision needs to be fired.
Well, as Herr Doktor Reynolds has opined, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away."
Or hours. . . . .
Whoever thought the “good guys with guns” would be cowards?
This story is almost too sad for me to read about. I’m sure the local police were following protocols of some sort. My take is that training is a dangerous beast. We train people to follow protocols, to be methodical, to not react emotionally to situations … and nullify common sense in the process. If a person is in a classroom shooting kids here’s what you do: break into the classroom and try to kill him. Period.
'Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic.'
Not when shots are being fired from inside of a school!
Wow.
Except for a lunatics fringe, everyone agrees that in an active shooter situation, what is needed is good guys with guns. People generally consider that role to be filled by police. But if police can't/won't do the job, we need an alternative plan.
Note I'm suggesting not only a robust 2d Amendment, which guarantees the availability of weapons for use in self defense/defense of others, but also an affirmative and collective plan to deploy civilian firepower in a way that will deter and, if necessary, stop this sort of evil in its tracks. Uncle Billy's old 45 is just as useless as a SWAT team if neither one is actually engaging the bad guy.
I know the word "militia" is fraught these days, but it seems like the right word.
Lots of comments on FB about guns but not a peep condemning the shooter. Odd that.
"The police only storm in if it's a susposed [sic] black drug dealer in the middle of the night, not when the suspect is white or they might be put into personal risk."
The children of the Branch Davidians would beg to differ. So would the innocents executed by the the national police at Ruby Ridge.
Plenty of police raids storm into white people's houses in the middle of the night. Just because your fellow useful idiots in the corporate media don't report it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Cops know that they will be blamed regardless of their actions.
If, as a parent, you had the misfortune of being left standing outside your child's school while A.) a shooter can be heard systematically killing children in their classrooms and B.) the police are doing nothing to stop the slaughter, would you still be screaming about the banning of guns or would you be wishing you actually had one in your hands at that moment?
The cops should have given the parents their guns (if the parents didn't already have their own), and let them go into the school to rescue their kids.
A good guy (or gal) with a gun can stop a mass killing.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-woman-killed-man-fired-rifle-party-crowd-85002437
I'm surprised that no parent had a gun in their car and stormed the building themselves.
The officers (I've read 19 of them) who stood in the hallway for an hour after listening to gunfire coming from a classroom will have to live with themselves.
I hope they live a very long time...
It seems like the most important "special equipment" that the BORTAC agents brought with them was a complete set of balls apiece.
We need to end “gun free zones” and we need a tort of “duty to protect” for any location that is gun free and for police to respond to active threats.
And if it turned out this shooter was arrested for threatening to shoot up a school and was let go - and allowed to purchase a fire arm, then “common sense gun laws” have made things worse.
And, for parents, never rely on the police to save your kid’s life. The police don’t care.
Pete Arredondo
It has already been pointed out by others that we do not have all of the facts in hand yet. But we do know there have been false reports spread early about the shooter having been initially obstructed and engaged and that there were police who rushed the shooter and took him out. Both of these versions have been retracted.
And as more days pass, we will learn more. Like more about the supposed off-duty border agent who did rush the shooter, getting shot himself before ending the attack and the shooter. To Inga, I suppose this answers your cheap shot about "good guys with guns being cowards". There are always good guys with guns and courage. They just have to be allowed to act, or have the extreme urgency to act on their own with or without approval.
I can tell you- if I had had a child in there, they would have had to taser me to stop me from going in to try to save my child. There are times you don't think. You just act. And maybe that's all courage is: Taking action when a moral urgency is screaming at you.
What haunts me is that we watched this entire process happen at Parkland High School in Florida just over 4 years ago. The reaction, or lack of action sounds almost identical. Except that at Parkland, the Sheriff loved the camera and lied about his actions and those of his team. In Uvalde, they simply sound incompetent or over their heads- untrained- in what to do.
It does not lend great confidence to the idea of depending on your government to take care of you.
"Cops know that they will be blamed regardless of their actions."
So? That comes with the job.
What also comes with the job is a cornucopia of effusive praise and even veneration from public officials and most of the public, often deserved, sometimes not. Cops have weapons, the power of arrest, and license to use force and weapons against citizens. They should always be held on a short leash and criticized/reprimanded when their behavior warrants it.
Pete Arredondo, Chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District appears to be the man who had tactical command on the scene and the man who made the decision to back off and not breach the classroom.
He is not impressive as a law enforcement officer.
If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.
Exactly. Finally something Left and Right can come together on: Defund the police!
Jesus, watching that guy's presser this morning is one of the saddest things I'll ever do. He could barely keep from breaking down.
And by the way, I do not agree (as someone commented above) that you don't try to meet an AR-15 when all you have is a handgun. They both shoot bullets. And kids are being slaughtered. Get the fuck in there and shoot.
“If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns?”
I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020.
Let's recall that Ramos did not attend this school. That is, he did not choose this school because he was hostile to specific people he expected to find at this school. He chose the school because he knew that he would find a large number of vulnerable people there without any protection. The fact that the cops were utterly feckless is just a facet of that lack of protection. He knew that the very, very, very best place to kill lots of helpless people is at a thing called an "elementary school". Good thing those are very rare, there are fewer than one hundred thousand of them in the US, but perhaps we should look into making them even rarer.
Failing that, you might not want to let your kids hang out there.
Meanwhile, perhaps Dunkin' Donuts could produce a special "Uvalde Dozen" package in honor of the brave public servants who sacrificed their valuable time hanging out in the parking lot while this took place. Can you make a donut yellow?
You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020.
This is an argument that Althouse needs more firepower and you're making her point.
“The Second Amendment is not about protection, it's not about hunting and it's not about sport. It's about the people having the means to overthrow the government. “
I have to disagree. I would agree that the primary justification for the 2nd Amdt is leaving the citizenry the power to overthrow a tyrannical government. But this was in an era of Locke, etc, and the right of self defense was assumed. And arguably the fact that Thomas Jefferson put it first (before Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness) strongly suggests that self defense is the paramount right.
Ah, yes. Personal Safety. Another fundamental human need we have outsourced. How very good it feels, to no longer be responsible for my personal safety.
I will believe the Citizenry is serious about gun control when guns no longer appear in movies, video games, etc.
When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman...
As if that wasn't enough, hasn't the Biden administration subsequently adopted Juliette Kayyam's call to suspend immigration enforcement in the Uvalde area?
"I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020."
No, I think someone might have spoiled his aim a bit with a magazine-fed AR-15 shotgun. Especially if he were wearing his own body armor. I think at close quarters, the shotgun would be more effective than a rifle, although we've got those, too, should the need arise. I don't know what you think "hundreds of rounds of ammunition" has to do with it. And maybe you and your friends bought pistols in 2020, hoping to protect yourselves from what the people you elected were doing to the shitholes you live in. Some of us have studied the matter a little more closely than that.
I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor
That has already been corrected. The was no "body armor."
What wish casting by Breyer!
The man who ended up killing the murderer borrowed his barber's shotgun. God bless him and the second amendment.
I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020.
Well, one would certainly have a better chance of doing so than standing around blaming conservatives for the actions of a madman.
It's not uncommon for teachers in rural areas to prop open a door for the few minutes it takes to get something from their car, etc. I would hate to be that teacher who allowed the murderer easy access to the back of the school.
What appears unusual is for a 4th grade class to have a Jack and Jill bathroom with another classroom. My experience is that those classrooms are only found in K-2nd grade classrooms. This revelation of a Jack and Jill connecting bathroom only raises more questions. Did the murderer kill children in both classrooms? Did the police realize that the two classrooms were connected? Did the police take fire from only one classroom door or two? Such a tragedy.
Do the cops think that every school shooter is Hans Gruber, complete with a gang of skilled accomplices? No reason for them to waste time not going after him.
I believe he was not in body armor, just a vest with no plates. And I’ll bet the LE guys did have bulletproof vests. But regardless. Kids being slaughtered. Yes, you take the risk of sacrificing yourself to save them. Or ask for a volunteer out of the 19 armed guys standing there. Is there no such thing as valor any more?
What good is a gun if you are afraid to use it when it is exceedingly clear that use of a deadly weapon is called for in such incidents? Good guys with guns and no courage are like tits on a bull. And to make matters worse, is when the cowards are police who swear to protect. 19 armed good guys (police!)with guns cheapened the idea of good guys with guns. It is widely known, especially in law enforcement ( since Columbine) that the first priority is to stop the killing.
It’s disgusting that parents had to scream, plead, cry, fight to get police to do their duty. The Golden Hour was wasted as kids were bleeding out and dying.
Greg the Class Traitor at 12:05 PM
You don't negotiate with someone who's in the process of shooiting innocent people. you attack and kill him
Joe Smith at 12:24 PM
Not when shots are being fired from inside of a school! Wow
============
It's too bad that Greg the Class Traitor and Joe Smith were not in charge of the police there.
Those two would have know exactly what to do!
Those two would have saved all the children!!
Cops have weapons, the power of arrest, and license to use force and weapons against citizens. They should always be held on a short leash and criticized/reprimanded when their behavior warrants it.
Show us where the bad policeman touched you, Cook.
Left Bank appears to think that when confronted by a guy in body armor, an AR-15, and hundreds of rounds, the only thing anyone can do is wring their hands and blame Republicans.
Well, "The arrow that strays may as well be thrown away" as it were. As James Hodkinson proved, just because you have a gun and ammo doesn't mean you can hit anything. A guy with a handgun at least has a chance. Body armor doesn't protect the head or the femoral artery. I'd rather go down firing my Colt tahn sit there and listen to my kid scream her last breath like Left Bank prefers.
Another early report that I believe has debunked is that the shooter had body armor like the shooter in Buffalo.
In a confined space, pistols in the hands of professionals should be a match for a rifle in the hands of a novice.
I divide my time between the city and the country, and in more than 35 years in the city I have never once felt the slightest need to put my hands on a firearm. The country is different. Talking with the sheriff a few years back he told me if I called with trouble his drive time would be close to an hour (and that’s assuming he wasn’t already busy with something else). We plan accordingly.
>> I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020.
When on patrol, I always had a department issue Remington 870 shotgun in my cruiser. I see lots of AR rifles in patrol cars these days.
What they lacked was courage and leadership, not armaments.
The same issue as Althouse highlights from Breyer's dissent in Heller showed up in the oral argument in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, but this time with several justices noting that the police are often not around when you need them. As she says, that leads pretty directly to a conclusion that the right to bear arms has considerable significance especially in urban settings where the local police are often nowhere in sight when you need them.
The 'defund the police' craziness has made the issue even more acute. See, e.g., Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago ....
Steven Breyer is the single most enthusiastic fellator of government and government power there's ever been or ever will be. Good riddance.
“This is an argument that Althouse needs more firepower and you're making her point.”
Yes, Althouse absolutely needs to go on her early morning runs wearing full body armor and carrying an AR-15 loaded with armor-piercing rounds. Best to keep that on all day, even when blogging around the house. Probably should sleep in full body armor too.
It’s turning out that the local police response was much quicker than had been hinted at by the incompetent Texas state officials who are running the press briefings into the ground. Someone should knock off their white hats and not give them back until they have earned them. But they weren’t the policemen taking fire and having to make difficult decisions.
Let us not forget the Supreme Court has also ruled the police have no duty to protect.
How Breyer doesn’t factor this into his argument is beyond me.
@Buce Hayden: I agree that the right of self-defense was assumed, and I don’t disagree with the discussion of the scope of that right in Heller. But if I remember my history correctly, the impetus for including the right to keep and bear arms in the Bill of Rights was that the new Constitution (unlike the Articles of Confederation) permitted the United States to raise an Army, and there was much concern about this new federal Army superseding the existing state militias (composed of citizens who furnished their own arms) in order to support a tryannical national government. The concern was addressed in the Bill of Rights with an express acknowledgement of the importance of militias and a guarantee of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. So although the right to protect one’s life may in some sense be a paramount right, protection of that right is not the principal reason we have a Second Amendment. Perhaps new history has emerged since I last visited the issue, but I think that’s how I learned it.
It certainly looks like Texas toughness was all a myth. If this was a just world, all those LEO who stood outside Robb Elementary while those kids were slaughtered should be fired. But they won't. The government never pays a price for its mistakes.
No, the shooter apparently wasn’t wearing body armor of any kind. He was wearing a ballistic vest that may have made him look like he was wearing body armor, but probably just provided the ability to carry more magazines on his body (he was apparently forced to dump his duffel bag of spare magazines).
This Texas incident of cowardice makes the 9-11 first responder only look greater.
New Yorkers are tougher than Texans. Who knew?
Left Bank of the Charles @ 1:28: actually yes. Especially if I can recruit 2-3 others similarly equipped and we can close on the school and neutralize his main advantage of stand-off distance. Then swarm him. Worth a try if the alternative is leaving him to execute dozens of children.
Bob Boyd @ 1:35: “…more firepower…”. Precisely!
>>I think at close quarters, the shotgun would be more effective than a rifle, although we've got those, too, should the need arise.
In WW I, the Germans claimed shotguns were prohibited by the laws of warfare, and they would shoot anyone captured with one, or shotgun shells.
A man armed with a shotgun, in close quarters, has all the advantages he needs. Two men with shotguns, approaching from opposite directions could have ended this in minutes, not an hour.
How many kids bled to death while the brass dithered?
The left does not want anyone to have guns because only the gun nuts would buy them, The left fear that all the redneck, truck driving, NASCAR watching, Beer-bellied Bubbas would be armed and they would be defenseless. They fear "shootout at the OK corral would be happening every day, and twice on Saturday in every city and town in the US. And armed citizenry is a dangerous citizenry. Fear is what drives gun control. so it is best to take the guns away. They think they can stop violence by disarming all Americans forgetting that those bent on violence will find ways to be violent. Criminals has a significant contempt for the law, and we would not like the society we lived in if we had a powerful enough government to actually prevent the existence of 99.99% of all guns. The first 80% are easy....
I’m reading a lot of comments but I also read a timeline in the WSJ that when all this was going on there were police and try resource officer of the school getting the other kids out. Now I read a lot about how the police were supposed to rush in - but what’s the choice -rush in with kids in the school and get bullets through walls or try to get the kids out then assault them? It’s triage - no easy answer. But guns blazing gets more killed.
I don’t doubt some of the police acted badly - but it appears a lot more complicated that just mad rush the crazy kid.
Yes, Althouse absolutely needs to go on her early morning runs wearing full body armor and carrying an AR-15...
It was your argument, not mine.
Mark said...
The police only storm in if it's a susposed black drug dealer in the middle of the night, not when the suspect is white or they might be put into personal risk.
The suspect was Hispanic, you lying douchebag
That said, I'm doubtful armed teachers would be any more likely to have solved the problem.
That's because your'e a moron.
There were two dead teachers, which means that if they'd been armed, there were two adults who could have had a chance to stop the attack, and had nothing to lose by trying to do so
Allowing armed parents to respond is never going to be acceptable to any insurer
So what?
"Gosh, we can't upset the insurer just to save kid's lives!"
Wow, you've got a world of stupidity going here
Readering, 2:14:
"In a confined space, pistols in the hands of professionals should be a match for a rifle in the hands of a novice."
Right. I'd been thinking that in response to some readers above. Approaching a hostile with a rifle from a distance, in the open, is one thing. But if I had to burst into a classroom armed with a pistol, my worry isn't that the bad guy has a rifle and therefore has me outgunned; it's that he's already aiming at the door with his finger on the trigger.
If that's one of my kids in there, I'm not very worried about that. Hell, if that's anyone's kids in there and I might be able to stop it – I think I'd rather take my chances then let them die and try to live with myself afterward.
Mike Sylwester having been called on his utterly stupid statement that "it's perfectly reasonable to stop, wait, and negotiate while the bad guy is shooting victims, and some of the victims are bleeding out and dying", now decides to double down on stupid by trying to claim that we don't KNOW that reacting and doing something would have made the situation better.
Well, Mike the moron, what we DO know is that it wouldn't have made the situation worse for the kids in there.
And that if you're not willing to put you life on the line to stop bad guys, then you damn well shouldn't be a cop.
When it comes to medical emergencies, like, you know, gunshot woulds, delay kills.
Nothing you babble will change that reality
The full story is not known. At the Parkland shooting, iirc, there was one police officer who didn't behave well....All this makes me more not less sympathetic to the police. They sometimes get caught up in in fluid situations where it's easy to make the wrong decision or mortal fear causes you to respond with too much or too little dispatch. Then afterwards, you've got to live with that wrong decision for the rest of your life. The cops on the scene will be second guessing themselves for the rest of their lives. This shooting will scar a lot of lives.
Irony. For the past several years, law enforcement has been criticized
relentlessly for its overly aggressive treatment of minorities. Now it is being criticized for its lack of aggression.
Inga said...
Whoever thought the “good guys with guns” would be cowards?
They're NOT "good buys with guns", they're cops.
the "good guy with guns" are private citizens. You know, the people the Left wants to disarm so that we can all die while the cops sit on their asses
>>New Yorkers are tougher than Texans. Who knew?
Humphrey Bogart knew.
Left Bank of the Charles said...
“If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns?”
I see. You think you would have stopped this gunman who was dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with the pistol you bought in the summer of 2020.
So, Charlie, what you're saying is that you're a complete and total ignoramus where weapons are concerned.
Not a surprise.
Exactly what there those "hundreds of rounds of ammo" going to do? Are the bullets going to magically jump up and intercept incoming rounds?
Are they going to shoot themselves at defenders?
1: He apparently didn't actually have a "bullet proof" vest
2: Even if he did, that leaves large parts of his body available to be shot. And a shot to the chest is going to affect him even if he DOES have a "bullet proof" vets on
3: If you're in a classroom with a pistol, facing off against someone with a rifle, the rifle is NOT an advantage
All the teachers being armed would have left them MUCH safer than waiting an hour+ for the cops
Cops who NEVER ACTUALLY DID ANYTHING other than stop parents from trying to do something, and slow down the border patrol agents who eventually DID do something.
I can't possibly be LESS safe while armed, than I am with all law abiding citizens disarmed, and waiting for the cops to "protect" us.
Richard Dolan said...
"The 'defund the police' craziness has made the issue even more acute. "
Defund the police was not an issue here.
"At about the same time, the school district was building up its own security. It hired two new police officers last year, expanding to a six-person force that serves about 4,000 students across several schools. The school system’s spending on security and monitoring services more than doubled in the past four years, budget records show."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/us/mass-shooting-school-security.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist
In the great movie, “Wind River”, the FBI agent (Jane) and the Tribal Police Chief (Ben) are approaching the bad guys lair. Jane is concerned…….
Jane Banner: Shouldn't we wait for back up?
Ben: This isn't the land of waiting for back up. This is the land of you're on your own.
The Uvalde incident simply reinforces that. Gun control is dead.
The event is a good argument for defunding the police. I mean, if they refuse to do their job.
"Yes, Althouse absolutely needs to go on her early morning runs wearing full body armor and carrying an AR-15 loaded with armor-piercing rounds. Best to keep that on all day, even when blogging around the house. Probably should sleep in full body armor too."
She probably has some left over from her teaching days. But what about poor Meade? As I understand it he applied to buy more firepower but unlike some 18 year old nutcase, he failed the background check.
The most disturbing thing I've read is that the shooter allegedly was one of two juveniles arrested in 2018 at the local junior high for planning a school shooting, and the shooter allegedly said that he would shoot up the high school in 2022 when he was a senior. If this is true, how in the Hell was he allowed to purchase guns? "Oh, it's juveniles, we have to purge their records when they turn 18." What bullshit! Someone like this was a "known wolf," and anyone who ever threatens to shoot up the school, juvenile or not, should never, ever, EVER be eligible to purchase firearms! The so-called background check system failed Uvalde.
I'm sorry. All this opining and "reporting" is just mindless. There are too many moving pieces, and too many hidden motives hidden in all the media content right now.
yes we need to know, but chasing unfounded statements is causing way more harm than not knowing anything.
I can't imagine an adult putting up with waiting even 5 minutes knowing children were trapped inside and hearing shots.
’Good guys with guns and no courage…’
…are not good guys.
'It's too bad that Greg the Class Traitor and Joe Smith were not in charge of the police there.'
They were standing in the hallway outside the classroom listening to the shots being fired. Little kids were being murdered.
I am not a police officer. I did not sign up for that duty and was not give that responsibility. But they all were.
And yes, I would know exactly what to do.
Old wisdom: Don't mess with Texas.
New wisdom: Texas is your bitch.
Those Texas cops have been exposed just like the vaunted Russian army.
Thank God for the Border Patrol.
Mike Sylwester said...
The officials had to deal with a horrible situation, with many gaps in their knowledge.
Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic.
You are dealing with keyboard warriors with no experience in law or gun crisis. Don't bother
If you guys think YOU can do a better job, shut up and join the police.
Was the police commander just unable to make a decision? You know if you say go through the door someone is going to get killed. But, I can't think how you could not make that decision. Someone choked and should not have been giving orders.
What does it mean if this incident is an argument against controlling guns? Does my 10 year old granddaughter go back to school in Sept with a gun in her backpack?
Ann, you would not go in there. Fear would freeze you like me.
Mom, dad, take a knee, beg, good. We'll stand for the children with a safe, equitable, and inclusive Choice... Uh, not that "choice", maybe.
Ironclad @ 3:20: you point to the triage problem, with cops trying to evacuate kids versus attack the killer. Yes: it’s a tragic trade off. But then I think: “75 minutes? What were they DOING? This is a one-storey school with maybe 400 kids? With the killer holed up behind a locked door, thus unable to see or attack anybody outside the classroom (at least on the corridor side; he might take shots out the window but that seems less of a threat to evacuation of the school). So suppose you had to get the kids out in a fire drill? How long would it take, even with extra care to get past the killer’s location?”
I have to believe that school had emergency exits galore. And apparently 19, count ‘em 19, cops. Doing nothing much useful. And 75 minutes? They should have been able to clear the place in 5 minutes, 10 tops. And then there would be no more excuses. Your “guns blazing” would not produce more innocent dead, and might well have saved many lives.
I am no cop, just another armchair warrior. But common sense tells me this was a total disaster, certainly after about 10-15 minutes. How these cops will live with themselves, I do not know.
They were just following orders.
"If you're in a classroom with a pistol, facing off against someone with a rifle, the rifle is NOT an advantage."
Greg, interesting you say that because I have read here multiple times that one reason assault weapons should not be banned is that they are very effective in defending against a home intruder. What am I missing?
>>I can't imagine an adult putting up with waiting even 5 minutes knowing children were trapped inside and hearing shots.
The *kids* were calling 911 and asking the police to come save them.
Strangely enough, not one child called 911 and asked them to set up a perimeter and wait an hour for federal police with breaching gear.
Temujin said...
It has already been pointed out by others that we do not have all of the facts in hand yet. ...
What haunts me is that we watched this entire process happen at Parkland High School in Florida just over 4 years ago. The reaction, or lack of action sounds almost identical. Except that at Parkland, the Sheriff loved the camera and lied about his actions and those of his team. In Uvalde, they simply sound incompetent or over their heads- untrained- in what to do.
This little town in Texas managed to find the money and deploy diverse SWAT team.
OMG, if you have the resources to do that, did they conduct a little training? If you are a little town in Texas, what is the most horrific scenraio you'd want you flashy SWAT to train on?
yeah, a mass casuality / hostage scenario in a gun free zone.
Where might we train? A church? too easy. In any given service, there are 3 DHS guys off-duty. How about a school? you think the city would let us practice in a school on Saturday? I know, overtime pay. let's just do another photo session.
Robb Elementary had about 600 students. Add other staff, maybe 650. The aerial photo shows a one-story rambling layout with wings so I am guessing over a dozen emergency exits. Getting 650 people to safety is not an all-day job. Would somebody with knowledge opine on the time required? My guess is 10 minutes max. Leaving more than an hour to go after Ramos.
It was far far more than just not letting BP engage...
Now it turns out there was three days of LYING about what happened.
It was an awful CLUSTERFUCK by the local police. Just FUBAR.
I can't imagine an adult putting up with waiting even 5 minutes knowing children were trapped inside and hearing shots.
Sadly we don't have to imagine it. We know of several instances where armed, sworn police officers did exactly that. We have become so risk averse that not even police officers are willing to risk their lives to save children anymore.
For the record, one of the scariest things I learned about myself is that I don't even make conscious decisions in cases like that, I simply react, which is very strange for me. The police would have had to taser me if I had been there.
The local PD screwed up and cost kids' lives with this boneheaded decision.
So, what are YOU going to do? Are you going to join the police?
Five men willing to risk their lives could have ended this by rushing him while throwing soup cans at him. One or two might get killed, but then the other three are on top of him. Fifty years ago, that is exactly what would have happened. We have become much too risk adverse.
stlcdr said...
It seems this situation is going to lead to a lot of armchair quarterbacking. At this point, condemning anyone other than the murderer is a mistake.
so true... this is what I wrote on Neo neo con
"People are looking for a “reason” to cope with sadness and fear. Ones they can control
“if only the door was locked”
“the cops should have been able to bust the door”
“the shooter gave red flags and been put in a psychiatric hospital”
“if teachers had guns, things like this would never happen again”
"In 2007, there was a conservative political website and the blogger talked about how some people treat guns as a talisman. This came after the Virginia Tech Massacre that year. He reminded the readers that there is no perfect, complete and everlasting way to guarantee your safety, guns included. You could leave the gun at the house or in the car. Even if you had the gun and tried to use it, the assailant could have a quicker draw. And I agree with Eva Marie – even if you were in the right, the jury may come up differently and the people who would call you a hero are no longer there because they’ve gone on to another problem."
"You can turn schools into ADX Florence – some nutjob will find a way to get in and destroy lives if they wanted to.
And don’t forget 1995. In Oklahoma City, no guns were even needed. Fertilizer-created bombs gave Timothy McVeigh a reason to destroy lives. The same with the Tsarnaev brothers.
Incidents like this and smaller ones that we see in everyday life reminds us how someone else could simply take our lives – and the people we love -and it terrifies us. We come up with ways in order to cope
If there was negligence we’ll find out. But as most everyone here says, we need to wait until we have the details."
Now we have SOME the details, everyone thinks if THEY were in charge they can be John Wayne or Dirty Harry when in real life they would be scared. Even the gun owners.
Greg The Class Traitor said...
"All the teachers being armed would have left them MUCH safer than waiting an hour+ for the cops"
Let me get this straight- Greg doesn't trust teachers to know what curriculum to teach but he does trust trust them to fight madmen armed with AR-15s, and to die to protect our children.
This crystallizes my belief, acquired over the past few years, that there is a shadowy third element to the phrase, "to protect and serve," and that is "and come home safe at the end of your watch."
All the static cops have to put up with, the static and tied hands and feckless criticism they have to deal with is unjust, except for that shadowy third element. That's the thing police should be rightly, justly criticized for.
"Come home safe at the end of your watch." As if you were any other member of city government, like the DMV, or a restaurant inspector. Get home safe to your family, yes, but even if you don't have a wife and kids, come home safe to keep piling up the days until you've got twenty years in and your pension fully vests and you can enjoy the rest of your life in the suburbs or another place entirely, somewhere other than the decaying city you're leaving to the next generation of civil servants.
But police are not that. They're trained to be fit and fast. They're trained to use all kinds of weapons. They need all that training because they will be in situations where they may have to risk their lives to protect others. But "come home safe at the end of your watch" turns a member of a paramilitary organization into someone who can know a criminal is committing heinous acts of violence on innocents and who chooses to wait for orders, or backup, or resources, or the SWAT team, or other law enforcement who actually care about something other than their pension.
Don't defund the police. But do get rid of these timid clowns. Because of the power of the union, you can't fire them, but you can put them on desk duty, and force the ones already there out the moment they hit 20 years. You can restrict overtime for paper-pushers, reserving it for the cops who know what the job is. And then you can go out and recruit some guys, probably from the armed forces, who will run into a building to save someone, even when he doesn't know the full tactical situation, who will use his wits and his experience to stop a catastrophe, instead of standing outside following protocol.
I want to support the police so much. Situations like this make it so hard.
"I know the word "militia" is fraught these days, but it seems like the right word."
I am thinking the same thing. It is perhaps time we stopped putting our safety into the hands of the hired help.
Mutaman- let me put this in a way that perhaps you would understand- I don't trust you or people like you to educate or protect them.
And we get this from lying sacks of dogshit:
"Greg, interesting you say that because I have read here multiple times that one reason assault weapons should not be banned is that they are very effective in defending against a home intruder. What am I missing?"
You are missing the the point that no one who supports gun rights has ever claimed that a rifle is completely ineffective.
The FBI screwed up first.
Let me get this straight- Greg doesn't trust teachers to know what curriculum to teach but he does trust trust them to fight madmen armed with AR-15s, and to die to protect our children.
They did die trying to save children. Unfortunately they had neither the tools nor the training to actually save them.
I’ll remind Greg and Inga they are unaware of the facts. It will take time to sort out. But the ugliness of the comments you made with certitude? You make me sick. Live and death situations are extremely difficult to sort out on the ground as they happen.
Getting 650 people to safety is not an all-day job.
Especially when those people have been repeatedly trained exactly how to react in such a situation using that exact location.
It is becoming obvious that there was a real failure of leadership at Uvalde. Those in positions of responsibility who should have initiated action did not.
I have been of two minds regarding Uvalde. I sympathized with the cops because I believed that they were not trained to handle this kind of situation. Turns out that I was wrong and that there are courses in Texas in how to handle this exact situation. My second thought was that these guys get paid to take the risks that they obviously refused to take - until one pissed off parent took matters into his own hands. If that's the case what the hell were they thinking? Certainly the "fog of war" was present, but it is pretty obvious that it should have quickly become clear that the shooter was in with kids and not otherwise. I certainly hope that the teacher who left the door open is looking for work in some other field.
It is interesting that in this case and in the Florida case the guys who were to step up to the plate did not. Clearly there is something wrong with the training or attitudes of the cops. Remember back to 9/11 and what the cops and firemen did there and realize that that kind of courage is not an everyday occurrence.
They teach you, in certain types of training, that you need to charge forward when you are ambushed.
If you drop and seek cover, you will all certainly die. If you charge forward and engage aggressively, some of you may live.
That, to me, ought to be the operational principle behind a school hostage situation. Yes, charging forward is dangerous. But not charging forward is a losing proposition.
Yancey Ward said...
" Mutaman- let me put this in a way that perhaps you would understand- I don't trust you or people like you to educate or protect them."
But most teachers are like me -unlike you we have gotten an education.
My husband and I have talked about how if something was happening at my granddaughter's school
we would go and storm the building alone, if we had to, and be prepared to die. Not depending on anyone else to save her or others.
My grandson's high school holds a "Grandparents' Day" every year. We were surprised to see how each classroom is trained to react in an "intruder" situation. One classroom had pails full of rocks. Another room had other projectiles hidden behind a curtain. The kids were instructed on how to defend themselves; not cower under desks. All doors were soon to be fitted with special locks. All entrance doors are locked during school hours. This is a private Christian school. So sad that the Uvalde children had no way to defend themselves, and the adults failed them.
I don't understand some of these comments, "hurr, durr you don't know what you would do in a situation like this.". Well I can use the example of kids who sacrificed themselves for the rest of their classmates. I don't expect fourth graders to rush a guy with a gun, but I do expect cops to do it, especially when high schoolers are with little planning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEM_School_Highlands_Ranch_shooting
’But most teachers are like me -unlike you we have gotten an education.’
Only an erudite person could craft such a sublime retort.
It's been the rule since Columbine: first officer/officers there go in. RIGHT THEN. Because it does no good to have a bunch of tac team guys all standing around making plans when people are being murdered and wounded.
Broward County either forgot or ignored that; so did these bastards.
Birches, that is SOME kids. Unless you were there, you will never know what you can - or can't do.
Why do people think that OTHER people should be gods and solve everything while they just sit at home?
And everyone thinks they could be heroes until there is a Glock 17 pointed in their face.
One person with a handgun could have ended this quickly. Yes, a ballistic shield, body armor, an AR or a shotgun would be helpful... but not necessary. Whether or not the shooter was wearing body armor, had an AR, etc. All it takes to stop a school shooter is to shoot that shooter, in the face. One bullet to start, then as many more as needed to ensure the shooter is no longer a threat. The key piece of equipment was courage. And yes, someone with sufficient motivation, minimal training, and a handgun bought recently could have stopped this. How much training did the shooter have? How long had he owned the rifle he used?
The police should have gone in. There were 19 cops, and one shooter who is murdering children. He's not going to get all of you. Part of being a cop is accepting the risk of getting injured or killed on the job; that's why society should and mostly does venerate our police.
Gahrie said...
Five men willing to risk their lives could have ended this by rushing him while throwing soup cans at him. One or two might get killed, but then the other three are on top of him
{time for some humor... Too Soon?}
NO sportsman Needs these high capacity soup devices!!!
What the? Do you think that the deer are walking around with ladles?
I wish to God others were as Brave as I am. I would've rushed the Killer with my barehands and killed him with a clever judo move. Those policemen would've been ashamed at their cowardice.
Its sad that working class policemen were at the school, instead of a group of lawyers or College professors. Or Journalists. Why, if only Megan McCain had been in charge!
Everyone's brave on the internet and knows EXACTLY what Should have been done. Even when they don't know the facts.
You know the saying that "the police are minutes away when seconds count?"
This isn't even that. It isn't that the police didn't arrive to save anybody. They were there and actively prevented others from saving anybody.
BTw, I'm not taking the policeman's side in this. Mistakes seem to have made. But I'm willing to let all the facts come out and understand the situation better, before rushing to judgement. But then, that's no fun.
No, Mutaman- unlike me, you are a fucking coward and an idiot at the same time, educated or not.
lgv said:
"Because once we ban guns, gun violence will end and the police will not be needed to protect us from gun violence. You see, he would have never been able to purchase the guns, nor would he have been able to get them any other way, nor would he have used some other means to kill people. There, it's so simple."
Y'know... I can't even tell if this is sarcasm or an actual straightforward opinion. If it's sarcasm, I have to commend the author. If it's straightforward what the author believes, well... Yikes. I can't even begin evening, if you take my meaning.
I think it's sarcasm. I hope it's sarcasm.
I have to put in my ten cents here, and point out that the real problem is not guns, not security, or mental health: It's the mindset that says we're gonna collect up all these innocent victims in these "safe, gun-free zones" and then that's gonna magically work to keep those kids safe.
Doesn't work. People are failing to understand the mindset of these sick bastards who do these things.
You want to know what would dissuade them? Ridicule and ignominious death. Right now, this cretin that killed in Uvalde is getting exactly what he wanted--Notoriety. He wanted the exact reaction he's getting from the families, and likely watched the post-Parkland emotional festival with envy, wanting some of that attention for himself. He fed off the idea he'd be hurting people, making them react, respond to him in death in a way they didn't in life.
We are, as a society, giving these people exactly what they want: Fame and notoriety. You want to know what would likely do more to put an end to these things happening? Instead of reacting with fear and horror, and all the rest of the emo-fest BS we hand off after these things, mock the bastard and make an end of them as disrespectfully and in the most derogatory manner as possible. Dude knows that going into a school and shooting kids is likely going to result in him being torn to pieces by a mob, with the pieces set on fire afterwards? Maybe simultaneously? He's gonna find some other way to act out. If he gets nothing but ridicule as the coward he is, the attraction of attacking a school will evaporate. Giving them all this attention in death only encourages the other nutcases out there; why do you think you still have kids trying to emulate the Columbine killers?
Cease the histrionics, and the attraction for this crap will go way down.
And, on the other factor, gathering the victims together? How about teaching the kids not to lay down and die, as cooperative little victims in the scripted play these assclowns are running in their minds?
Lemme tell you a little secret, here: A weapon does a lone gunman very little good, when that lone gunman is taking on a group. No weapon will serve to defend you 360 degrees around, against all threats; it's a psychological tool, nothing more. If you are cowed by the weapon, it's working, but... He can only point that damn thing in one direction at a time; if he's busy shooting you, then someone else can be sneaking up behind him with a rock or a table leg, and beating his brains in. The fact that people don't do this is what leaves me questioning the state of things in our society.
Seriously--Every building has ample improvised weapons you could be using. The Cho character at Virginia Tech was wandering the hallways, going into classrooms; why wasn't someone waiting for him with a broken-off table leg and braining him from behind a door? Why didn't someone get some of those cleaning supplies out of the janitorial closets on each floor, and spraying his face with toilet-bowl cleaner as he came in the door? If he's on the floor, blinded by caustic agents, he's not shooting anyone, and he's ideally situated for being stomped to death.
What enables all this is learned helplessness. There's no damn way I'd ever put myself into the situation these guys do, were I in, say... Somalia. Yeah; right... Sure, lemme go by myself into some Somali village and just start lone-wolfing killing people. Odds are, I'd be a grease spot before very much time passed, because those folks aren't going to behave like sheep for the slaughter. While you're busy reloading, or whatever, someone will get behind you and it'll be all over but the screaming. Only in a "civilized" scenario will you find enough people with the engrained sense of helplessness to enable this kind of BS. You try it anywhere else, and unless you've got a bunch of your friends along with, who're also heavily armed, you're going to die very ugly when the mob deals with your stupid ass.
You teach the kids to react passively, and hide from their killers? You're enabling those killers. If the jackasses doing these things knew they'd stand a very good chance of going down under a swarm of kids and teachers looking for a piece of their flesh, and then might get set on fire outside the schoolgrounds by the parents? That everyone would laugh at them, for their foolishness? They'd be doing a different calculus when they thought about these things.
You're getting this crap precisely because of how you react to it happening. All the waily-waily woe, and the serious talk about the killers? You're giving them exactly what they want, and you're feeding the next guy to come along with a similar sick bent of mind. If these guys were ridiculed and treated like the mad dogs they are, torn to shreds by the mob of outraged parents who caught up with them? Broadcast that to the world, and watch this crap become very, very rare.
Instead, we feed it, nurture it, and wonder why we get more and more of it.
We are disgusted, Swetnik. Don't act like your leftist anti-gun bent makes you special.
It's a bit like the Nitwegian shooter a few years ago.Police on site with guns.It took over an hour to get permission to intervene.Police spent an hour listening to him killing teenagers but too bound by rules to act
This was not their finest hour.
Mike Sylwester said...
The officials had to deal with a horrible situation, with many gaps in their knowledge.
Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic.
No, it wasn't. Negotiations can be opened with people who appear somewhat rational- and someone shooting up elementary school students isn't somewhat rational, and won't appear that way to anyone, except, maybe you.
“I’ll remind Greg and Inga they are unaware of the facts. It will take time to sort out. But the ugliness of the comments you made with certitude? You make me sick. Live and death situations are extremely difficult to sort out on the ground as they happen.”
You would be among the cowards who were armed to the teeth, hesitating, waiting as the clock ticked by and more children were being killed, fretting about how much personal danger you would be in. Shame on you and those “good guys with guns” who act and talk a big game until called upon to act.
Remember-before 9/11 the "official" guidance was to do what the hijacker(s) said. It was always bad advice.
If there is an attempted hijacking- of a bus, plain, train, or even privately owned automobile, at the end, the best result is a dead hijacker. That way no money is wasted on a trial.
bobby @ 6:06: “…not charging forward is a losing proposition.”
Word. Seems to me that when you have one adrenalin-soaked angry adolescent doing his amateur fantasy version of Rambo, you have a fighting chance of swamping his circuits if you go in loud and fast while throwing things and putting bullets and 00 buck on his position.
But this is not my area of expertise. Just my instinctive reaction about how this savage moment plays out. Plus some logic about how to overload the enemy’s OODA loop.
It's pretty easy to know what to do if you have never been shot at: "Let's charge him and kill him!" Interestingly that is exactly the tactic that would have succeeded. Sure some kids would likely have gotten hurt, but they got hurt anyway. As someone mentioned above, though it is counterintuitive, you attack into an ambush. The border patrol guy and his two buddies proved that still is tactically sound. As someone also mentioned above it's too bad it took over an hour for someone with balls to show up.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
"No, Mutaman- unlike me, you are a fucking coward"
Not a coward? Maybe you should volunteer to provide security at your local elementary school.
Seems to be a general impression among contributors here that body armor lets you shrug off the effects of medium-caliber pistol hits. Not so. Even a single nonpenetrating hit on chest armor from a 9mm pistol will probably stun and disable you, and leave you in severe pain. Several online videos illustrate the effects.
"In WW I, the Germans claimed shotguns were prohibited by the laws of warfare, and they would shoot anyone captured with one, or shotgun shells."
Ironic, considering that the Germans introduced poison gas, flamethrowers and aerial bombing of cities in that war. And they claimed shotguns were against the laws of war?
I believe that the US Army and Marines used shotguns to a limited extent in some Pacific island fighting. Good in the jungle.
The cops fucked up. They should have been more aggressive.
However, if they had been more aggressive, they would have been judged to have fucked up.
That is the double blind that the Borderline Personality Disorders on the Left put people in all the time.
Double bind not double blind.
>>Part of being a cop is accepting the risk of getting injured or killed on the job
The Uvalde PD would disagree.
>>Why do people think that OTHER people should be gods and solve everything while they just sit at home?
You may not know what YOU would do in such a situation. Some of us have been shot at and returned fire.
One thing I am certain I *couldn't* do... sit around while little kids bled to death.
One man with courage makes a majority.
"There were 19 officers in there," said a police spokesperson. "In fact, there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done."
Some of the hostage children even spoke to 9-1-1 operators BEGGING to be saved while the police stood around or got their OWN children out to safety -- another "special" deal for the "special people.
Contemptible conduct.
>>How about teaching the kids not to lay down and die, as cooperative little victims in the scripted play these assclowns are running in their minds?
The large corporation I worked for had a training session on how to handle an active shooter situation.
The advice was "Run, Hide, Fight" in that order.
I asked "What will happen to all the women and handicapped while all the men are running and hiding?"
If you can, fight.
>>Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic. The officials had to deal with a horrible situation, with many gaps in their knowledge.
Bullshit. Little kids were calling 911 begging to be rescued. Some of their classmates were shot and bleeding to death.
What else did you need to know?
Not a cop. Observed, oriented, decided, acted. Threat neutralized right there, right now. No stack of bodies thus no news.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/west-virginia-police-credit-ccw-holder-with-saving-lives-stopping-a-mass-shooting/
Officers unwilling to put themselves in harm's way should consider an changing careers. This is your job. You failed.
But most teachers are like me -unlike you we have gotten an education.
What a creepy lie. Lefties cannot get beyond their feeling of superiority.
Police are not obligated to protect people who are not in their custody even when they know harm will occur. SCOTUS says so.
Students are not considered to be held in custody while in school or on campus. SCOTUS says so.
The public is obligated to pay for police agencies the public expects will "protect and serve" them because -- social contract. What happens when one party does not uphold its end of the social bargain? Very little if anything at all. SCOTUS says so.
Solution: 2nd Amendment. Damn, the Founders were smart.
Sabinal,
"Unless you were there, you will never know what you can - or can't do."
You've been reminding me of Mark Steyn's comments on the 1989 massacre of fourteen female students by some depraved loser at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Steyn decried the cowardice of the men who, ordered to leave by the gunmen, complied; and stood outside while the gunmen killed all the women.
"Whenever I've written about these issues, I get a lot of e-mails from guys scoffing, 'Oh, right, Steyn. Like you'd be taking a bullet. You'd be pissing your little girlie panties,' etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:
"When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances', we make cowardice the default position."
btw- any of these psycho murderers NRA members?
Will Biden give up his men with guns security detail? What about Hunter?
Why are the elites worth protecting, but not our kids?
Swetnik - I recall you had no problem with the authorities who f-ed up the Parkland shooting.
They were good Hillary loving democrats.
Inga Swetnik - how dare you call anyone here a coward. Fuck you. I don't know why Ann allows you here. You are nothing but a pile of garbage.
West Virginia Police Say Woman With CCW Stopped a Mass Shooting, Saved Lives
'If you guys think YOU can do a better job, shut up and join the police.'
The cops are admitting they fucked up.
"Col. Steven McCraw of the Texas Department of Public Safety said at a Friday news conference that in hindsight it was the wrong decision to not enter the classroom sooner in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman was located for more than an hour.
He said there were "plenty of officers" inside the school from the earliest minutes of the shootout, and as many as 19 officers from local and federal forces were in the hallway most of the time.
"From the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that," McCraw said."
This is from NPR, by the way.
I'm no Rambo, but I also didn't sign up to be a cop. Had I signed up for that duty, I would resign today had I just stood in the hallway.
It's not being a 'keyboard warrior' to know right from wrong.
'Everyone's brave on the internet and knows EXACTLY what Should have been done. Even when they don't know the facts.'
Dude, just take the L and live to fight another day, unlike those kids.
Every now and then a whole police department "freezes" and that's when the massacres occur. Columbine, Parkland. Uvalde seems like that but the story keeps changing so I reserve judgment. But maybe we need to know how police can "freeze" more than we need gun control. Also I'd like to know how this kid could afford two expensive guns and a lot of ammunition.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
" No, Mutaman- unlike me, you are a fucking coward "
Can you imagine the issues of someone who goes on social media and tells everyone how brave they are?
Free advice Yancey, find a professional to talk to.
As we've been finding out more and more about this, it is sounding like the first layer cause of the police failure was someone used the wrong tag for the situation. It sounds like he got identified as "Barricaded Suspect" instead of "Active Shooter". Basically someone who was either alone, or holding hostages, not someone who was actively killing as many people as they could.
So, they all locked into their Barricaded Suspect checklists, and couldn't get the blinders off to realize that was the completely wrong reading of the situation. This is extremely common in aviation accidents. Even very experienced pilots will controlled flight straight into the ground because they've gotten locked into the wrong failure checklist and mentally, cannot get out.
Second layer question appears to be, why did they miss-identify the situation so badly? My guess right now is training. Either a lack of training or being trained for other types of situations.
Which implies the third order root cause: reports are that that school had gone on lockdown possibly as many as 48 times this year alone, and mostly for human trafficking related crimes. That region is apparently bad enough the Customs and Border Patrol has a CBP SWAT team based there. In a human trafficking situation, you are far more likely to see a Barricaded Suspect or hostage situation than you are an Active Shooter. Most human traffickers are in it for the money or the other things, and are not in it to stack bodies like cordwood. In that context, sending in the negotiators and getting the breaching gear is the right way to resolve things. Most of them are not going to start killing hostages unless they panic, so keeping them from panicking is more important than digging them out.
So, the third layer root cause, right now, appears to be that the local crime level was so high that the police were reacting to the types of violent incidents they were most likely to see, rather than what was actually happening on the ground. The most likely solution becomes to deal with all the violent crime and human trafficking on the border so the local police forces aren't expecting that to be happening every day and can actually react to other types of violent crimes appropriately.
The correlary is, this is going to happen again, and in many permutations, and will likely include the police incorrectly treating a hostage situation as an active shooter situation and unintentionally precipitating a mass casualty event, in addition to treating active shooters as though they were simple hostage takers.
I wish I had a better answer.
Inga said: "You would be among the cowards who were armed to the teeth, hesitating, waiting as the clock ticked by and more children were being killed, fretting about how much personal danger you would be in. Shame on you and those “good guys with guns” who act and talk a big game until called upon to act."
Inga, don't project your cowardice on the rest of us. While it's true that for any one individual, we cannot know if they'll act in bravery, or cower in fear, in the moment of decision, we also know there are plenty of examples of people who rise to the occasion. Do not suppose that, because you wouldn't rise to the occasion, doesn't mean that others won't either.
Indeed, for all you know, you may very well be responding to someone who has risen to such an occasion. If that were the case, your comments would be particularly despicable.
But your comments are particularly despicable anyway, as they already understand. You mock the idea of a "good guy with a gun", claiming that "the good guys with the guns are cowards". This is particularly evil when one considers that people like you (1) insist that "ordinary people" cannot carry guns for protection, because they would just cower in the face of danger, and that we already have "trained police" to deal with these kinds of situations -- which, as the van massacre and the Charlie Hebdo incidents in France have demonstrated, don't go away just because you have strict gun laws -- so the need for armed response never really goes away .... yet, (2) when the need does arise, and the innocent disarmed victims cannot respond, the very protectors that you insist are sufficient for dealing with these situations not only sit on their hands, but hold back the very unarmed people willing to charge in unarmed to save their kids, you have the absolute disgusting gall to say "I guess the good guys with guns turn out to be cowards".
The proper lesson to take from this is: we cannot count on the "trained professionals" to act bravely when the situation is dire. We have to arm ourselves, and we have to be trained in the use of those arms -- because it's very clear that in the hour of need, it may be us that needs to exercise bravery, when our "trained professionals" are cowering in their boots.
Which is the entire point of the opening post, isn't it? Government fails, time and time again, and yet still insists they can protect us from the evils of this world. And you are a very vile person, Inga, to use government cowardice to justify disarming the brave.
Sabinal said: "You are dealing with keyboard warriors with no experience in law or gun crisis. Don't bother .... If you guys think YOU can do a better job, shut up and join the police."
No, you don't understand: joining the police isn't necessary, or even desirable.
Instead, this is the lesson we need to take to heart: We don't know when evil will arise and try to destroy us. We can't wait for the police to help us -- when seconds count, police are, at best, minutes away.
If we value our safety, and the safety of our loved ones, we need to be armed, and we need to be trained in the use of those arms (including self defense law).
Just over 200 years ago, Vermont's Supreme Court decided to take "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" very seriously. As a result, for the last 200 years or so, anyone over the age of 16 can carry a gun, open or concealed, without a permit. This is why other States describe permitless carry as "Constitutional Carry", yet nonetheless none are so extreme as Vermont when it comes to this fundamental right.
The lesson I take from this, is that we are well overdue in treating the right to keep and bear arms seriously. We should be teaching every 16 year old how to use a pistol and a rifle, and the fundamentals of self defense law, and then encourage them to carry their guns, open or concealed, wherever they go. And we should also bring rifle competitions back into high schools. There was a day that rifles were brought to school for that purpose, and for hunting afterward -- and students could carry their guns on the subway in New York City, of all places -- and mass murder shootings didn't happen nearly as often in those days. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to return to those days.
So, in light of the information coming to light about the Uvalde shooting, I wonder if Justice Breyer is changing his mind on the 2nd Amendment re: Urban centers.
Epsilon Given, I have told this story before, but I remember when I was in high school, if a fella got a new gun, he put that bad boy in his car or truck and brought it to school to show his buddies. I remember one morning a guy showing us his bright shiny new .270 deer rifle out in the parking lot (this was back when most of us had either a 30-30 or a 30-06), and the Principal came walking up and wanting to see it too. His only admonition was "Don't be late to class boys" as he walked off after checking it out.
Ann - You think the problem is that Texas' gun laws are too strict? Maybe the state should give an AK-15 to everyone on their 18th birthday.
A commenter above made the point that the right doesn't trust teachers to teach things like CRT and gender issues, but wants to trust teachers with guns.
It is a fair point--but I believe that the opposite holds.
We trust teachers to take care of and teach our children--far more than any other group or profession.
We have a basic level of trust in teachers. And for the most part--with obvious exceptions--that trust is justified.
Why don't we trust teachers who are willing, able and properly trained to be armed--a gun in a safe in a classroom--to be in a position to try to deal with these situations?
I would note that for most of our recent history there would be little or nothing to stop a teacher who "went off the deep end" from getting a gun into a school and doing what the Uvalde killer or the VA tech killer did--or worse. And yet (to my limited knowledge) it hasn't happened. My theory is that the people who commit these heinous murders are (almost by definition) anti-social. Teachers are the opposite. They certainly have issues--but not those issues.
Anyway. I don't have THE ANSWER, and I'm not sure there is one. But that's my two cents.
A heartbreaking angle on what happened when the cops went through the door:
“When the cops came, the cop said: 'Yell if you need help!' And one of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," the boy said. "The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”
"I understand that law enforcement officers are not obligated to risk their lives to protect anyone."
Yes. Appalling. That should be the primary directive of their jobs.
"As we've been finding out more and more about this, it is sounding like the first layer cause of the police failure was someone used the wrong tag for the situation. It sounds like he got identified as 'Barricaded Suspect' instead of 'Active Shooter.' Basically someone who was either alone, or holding hostages, not someone who was actively killing as many people as they could."
Is this confirmed? Or merely a belated face-saving excuse fabricated by the police department?
"Lefties cannot get beyond their feeling of superiority."
Righties can't get beyond their perpetual sense of aggrieved self-pity and resentful contempt for others.
jim5301 said...
"Ann - You think the problem is that Texas' gun laws are too strict? Maybe the state should give an AK-15 to everyone on their 18th birthday."
OK
Ann Althouse said...
"I can't imagine an adult putting up with waiting even 5 minutes knowing children were trapped inside and hearing shots."
That's what I'm having trouble getting my head around. This could have been easily prevented. With that kids record he should have gotten therapy.
But most teachers are like me -unlike you we have gotten an education.
What a creepy lie. Lefties cannot get beyond their feeling of superiority
Teachers are among the most educated people in the country. Not only do we have to get a post graduate teaching certificate, we earn our raises by taking college classes.
That being said, teachers are also some of the most ignorant people on Earth, and many are remarkable incurious.
considering that the Germans introduced poison gas, flamethrowers and aerial bombing of cities in that war
It was the Luftwaffe that bombed the first city, but it was Guernica in the Spanish civil war, not World War II.
Mutaman said,
"Let me get this straight- Greg doesn't trust teachers to know what curriculum to teach but he does trust trust them to fight madmen armed with AR-15s, and to die to protect our children."
Well. According to my daughter who teaches middle school math, "Most of these idiots have no business teaching anything. They couldn't get a job as a greeter at Walmart." And she's a reliable Democrat. So yeah. Most teachers I wouldn't trust to even teach. That's why parent's and neighbors should get involved. Get you CCL and stand guard.
As I understand it, the cops on the scene deferred to the school district police chief. a chief with 5 officers.
Now this town had a SWAT team
mistake 1 seems to me, that town chief and then the SWAT team leader didn't take over
Regarding Breyer's dissent, he somehow forgets that police are members of the civilian population. They aren't exclusively allowed to use force against others, so can everyone else when under threat.
Leftists: De-fund the police!
Leftists: We hate the police because they are all cowards!
Note to leftists: Don't arms yourselves. Do not call the police. be consistent.
Tragically - someone propped the teacher entrance door open with a rock.
Inga the Internet know it all writes to me specifically,
“You would be among the cowards who were armed to the teeth, hesitating, waiting as the clock ticked by and more children were being killed, fretting about how much personal danger you would be in. Shame on you and those “good guys with guns” who act and talk a big game until called upon to act.”
I never claimed to be a well-armed “good guy with a gun,” and I wrote nothing to be ashamed of. It truly sickens me to see these cops slandered by you and others with no certainty of the actual facts. So much was reported in error already I find it strange you’re so cocksure in your asinine opinions. As you are with this one directed at me.
At age 18 I saw my friend Mitzi approaching the bank to put in her deposit, which was unfortunate because my friend Bryan and I had just seen two guys with shotguns try to rob another depositor. We yelled to her to warn her and she avoided being robbed but we drew some unfortunate attention from the robbers. I was unarmed and acting on instinct. Sheriff deputies showed up while Bryan and I were being pursued by the robbers and they pled guilty after we testified at the preliminary hearing. (Google People vs Michael Coon et al 1980 to see their plea.)
This I am recounting not because I or Bryan were/are particularly brave. We all have our moments of bravery and cowardice. But I learned that day that in true emergencies my brain slows time down allowing me to see and react to things much better than everyday life where I tend to be clumsy and hesitant. It was reinforced soon after when the car in front of me caught fire. California has given me several occasions in which that calmness served me and those around me well: earthquakes, brush fires, evacuations, near-drownings, motorcycles falling from the sky etc. I can’t explain. It’s a gift from God. It really only happens in life and death situations but I know enough now to believe that it is not common. The Flight 93 guys had it. They were also unarmed. I think many have this potential. Maybe it’s a fight or flight thing.
So while I try to avoid saying what I would have done in a given situation I do at least have a track record and two friends with children who might have lost them if I didn’t save them from drowning. You slandered the wrong guy Inga. For what? Did you even have a point?
Mr. Sylwester, I must object when you offer 'Trying to negotiate with the gunman was a reasonable tactic' without qualification. Maybe a brief initial attempt if one can be made without delay or loss of surprise; the leaked 'active shooter training' [classroom BS] material even said explicitly that quickly moving to engage is #1. When it would make sense to try talk instead of first trying to bust the door: perp's shooting stops and he invites or initiates conversation (by 911-routed phone call or shout through the door - were cops even near it in earshot of an open exterior window? doubt) - with explanations/offers. Yes, in general, immediate verbal requests for surrender and other negotiations should be a mandatory opening move when they don't cost too much. The traditional expectation is that you stop waiting and go in after the next one he shoots, no?
Perhaps your comment is in some way relevant to what actually happened; I have no way of knowing.
Blogger Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
So while I try to avoid saying what I would have done in a given situation I do at least have a track record and two friends with children who might have lost them if I didn’t save them from drowning. You slandered the wrong guy Inga. For what? Did you even have a point?
Preach
The police will get their punishment. And y'all will get your blood and move on to the next target. So go get outraged with something else.
jim5301 said...
"If you're in a classroom with a pistol, facing off against someone with a rifle, the rifle is NOT an advantage."
Greg, interesting you say that because I have read here multiple times that one reason assault weapons should not be banned is that they are very effective in defending against a home intruder. What am I missing?
Rifles are an incredibly shitty home defense weapon.
You want a shotgun, with pellets just small enough that they won't go through your walls.
Second choice is a pistol with hollow point bullets, so they mushroom when they hit something, and again therefore don't go as far.
Anyone who told you "get a rifle for home defense" either hates you, or your family, or has no clue what he-she is talking about
Mutaman said...
Greg The Class Traitor said...
"All the teachers being armed would have left them MUCH safer than waiting an hour+ for the cops"
Let me get this straight- Greg doesn't trust teachers to know what curriculum to teach but he does trust trust them to fight madmen armed with AR-15s, and to die to protect our children.
Correct.
The vast majority of "teachers" are left wing hacks desperate to push a partisan agenda. The only people who trust them on curriculum are ignoramuses, morons, and fellow left wing hacks
It only takes 2-3 teachers who are decent human beings to stop a killer. 2 - 3 decent humans beings out of 20 means the curriculum votes are bad, which is why you don't let them decide the curriculum
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
I’ll remind Greg and Inga they are unaware of the facts. It will take time to sort out. But the ugliness of the comments you made with certitude? You make me sick. Live and death situations are extremely difficult to sort out on the ground as they happen.
Well, Mike, I will wait with bated breath for you to share with us the facts that make this situation less horrible than I have claimed.
And, when you can't come up with those facts, because they don't exist, I will wait with bated breath for you to apologize, and agree I was right.
Which one of those do you think is going to happen?
Or are we going to get option 3:
The facts come out, it turns out I was right, and Mike will slink off, saying nothing
"They couldn't get a job as a greeter at Walmart."
Yet you want to put a gun in their hands and have them protect our kids.
Job (9:19pm yesterday):
As I recall, shotguns in World War II were not used in the jungle so much as in the Japanese multi-story underground bunkers on (e.g.) Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Our guys had to clear out 4- and 5-story underground bunkers with dark, narrow, concrete hallways, full of armed Japanese. It was specifically sawed-off shotguns that allowed them to pop around a corner and kill the guy in the next hallway before he killed them. Short range was OK, and the wideness of the blast was crucial: no aiming necessary.
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