So many problems with the viewpoint presented here. First, we simply don’t yet know enough to render a verdict. Was it reasonable to assume that a storming of the classroom and the expected barrage of bullets flying in both directions was likely to lessen the child’s body count, or increase it? Second, the writer inexplicably assumes that the officers’ holding was driven by cowardice, ignoring the obvious fact that they were following orders. And third, keeping panicked parents from running into the building was the right call. Finally, the writer aims to focus our anger at the officers, rather than at the shooter, the culture that formed him or the government that armed him.
Police will go through protestors like paper though. Chickens and pigs on this animal farm. This isn’t a defense of the protestors, they’re the horse going to the glue factory.
I agree with your assessment on the actions by the officers at the scene. Please write / talk about the issue of gun control. We need an honest assessment of the subject.
At the heart of this tragedy lie some basic questions we politicize ad infinitum. How does a mentally challenged kid buy guns legally?. Why are the police not held accountable for bad behavior. How can a governor call for promoting a relaxed gun culture at a time when the same culture is producing more shootings and violence. And finally is my right under the second amendment greater than your right to live?.
There is no way to completely lock down schools. If you limit schools to a single entry point, then you're going to have kids die in fires. You need to keep fire doors and then keep people from ever using them (except in a fire). Then you put a guard at the entry point. But, in Texas, anyone can open carry from my understanding so the guard at the entry point is going to have to make a split second decision--is this person just a parent open carrying or are they a shooter? The shooter is always going to have the advantage because, until they fire the first shot, no one knows they're a shooter.
And, for argument's sake, say you CAN completely harden a school. Then a shooter will just go on a school bus rampage instead. Can you also completely harden every school bus? It would be crazy expensive and almost impossible.
That's why, as this article says, trust that the police will quickly respond is the only thing that can bring any peace of mind. I live in a small town and EVERYONE here--Rs and Ds--supports the police with money, attending events, etc. Demoralization of the police--as has happened in big cities--isn't an issue here and likely isn't one in Uvalde where it seems people also have (had?) a high opinion of cops.
Uvalde is a truly tragic and heartbreaking event rendered more painful by police ineptitude. But how could an article be written without focusing on the core problem.
An 18 year old, not old enough to legally buy a beer, was able to legally buy an AR 15 assault rifle. This is the problem. The solution is not putting the police in jail, adding locks and security guards to schools etc. 75-85% of Americans want some form of gun law to solve this problem, and yet our elected officials stand by and bicker and the President says his hands are tied. Who will you blame the next time when only 10 kids are killed because the police do their job? Please focus on the core problem and blame our inept elected officials who take the NRA’s money in the name of the constitution and our poor wise founding fathers who never knew what assault rifles were when they drafted it.
This 18 year old did not possess an 'assault rifle'. He had a semi automatic long gun, which aside from the passing similarity to it's military cousin, could have been any one of a hundred long guns or pistols that do not look like military rifles. An 'assault rifle' is commonly understood to mean a rifle that can fire on full automatic. That type of long gun requires a very special license to own, and is illegal to sell without said license.
While you are correct, most people want something done about gun violence, none of the current prescriptions being debated protect both the right to bear arms and the means to lower the prevalence of gun violence.
Finally, and this may not be the case with you in particular, but the selective outrage by the country when a mass shooting incident involving white people and/or children is quite the sight. In 2020, the homicide rate by guns among blacks was 26.6 per 100k, while among whites it was 2.2 per 100k. In Canada, for example, the rate of gun homicides is 2.1 per 100k. Among black males, the homicide rate by gun is north of 50 per 100k. 11.5k blacks were killed in 2020 by guns, and unless that gun was held by a cop, almost no body except the immediate family cared.
By all means, go through the grieving process over this tragedy in Uvalde, however once done, try to focus on policies that will actually lower the death toll in this country, and not on policies that make YOU less afraid.
David French makes a good point about the selfishness of power. We live in time of me, me, me and what I want, need, must have: incredible self-centeredness. I have often mused that most Americans have never had to struggle to survive. Well, we do now: for our jobs; gasoline; food; health and everything else we have taken for granted. All of this thanks to our power-hungry politicians who have betrayed our trust. I am sadly not convinced it will ever get better.
Thank you David for softening some of my cynicism about how "me, me, me" I find our present culture to be.
As a long ago vet, your final words reminded me of how growing up in the 40's I was constantly told "we" can do this or that. Later on I needed to examine my young self and learn to add "love" to "we," thus forming a most important concept.
Most Vets, and the men and women in civilian life who strap on a gun each day know what you mean. So do most parents.
Your work is often filled with grace, which is why I read your missives.
The moral center and leadership of the nation has been captured by the pay-to-play, big tech, corporatist, political/bureaucratic surveillance state and the communist Marxist plunderers it employs. Family and religious community, small business, industry and legitimate education are seen as direct threats to its power. In short: the functioning healthy adult human being must be criminalized for its survival. The constant reports we receive here of the criminal destruction of worthy lives, both inside and outside academia by the D.E.I. commissariat, the open censorship and willful crippling of truth speakers by big tech, and the continued lies and open grift of line my pockets political operatives touting the latest "citizens are terrorists we need thought control" is our daily bread.
This has everything to do with Uvalde. The stand down chain of command individuality murdered wait for the bureaucracy can't take action police, handcuffed parents (as in school board meetings) listening to the massacre and victimization of their children, the technicolor horror of yet another parentless child fallen through the cracks of a disintegrating culture. A country and a generation left looted and futureless. The exploitation of guns as the problem. The entire nation has a been crippled by a cabal of elitist thugs. Uvalde is just blowback.
The D.C./financial cabal has abandoned America. It has looted and gutted American industry and economy. It has made the decision that America is no longer a sound investment. Its money (your looted tax dollars and labor) and future is elsewhere. American citizenship is the problem. It sees a system of feudalistic perpetual debt and big tech bureaucratic police state surveillance as the solution to YOU.
This is grimly poetic and painfully accurate. It feels too late for correction. A start might be 2 years of civilian or military service following high school, no exceptions. A nation without shared values cannot hold.
It strains credulity to believe that 50-100 officers from local, state, and federal agencies stood down for 78 minutes listening to gunfire as children were slaughtered, based on the order of the police chief of the schools squad. And for 12 minutes the gunman was shooting outside. And a door was left open for 3 minutes while a teacher called 911. And nobody went to the windows to evaluate and stop the shooter. And it happened 3 days before the Texas NRA convention. 78 minutes without a door key, a master key, a brave outlier, a superior taking command. Cops who went in and got their own kids. Parents who went in. Parents handcuffed to prevent their entry into the school. We are left with one conclusion by the media: 50-100 officers allowed a classroom to become an abbatoir due to being outgunned by an AR-15 in an 18-year-old shooter’s hands. And then an off-duty Border Patrolman takes him out, no details provided.
We are tortured trying to explain the inexplicable, poisoned forever by a multitude of conflicting stories, while we dissect every angle and probe the what-ifs and the why’s. Could you fault me for suspecting that the stand-down order came from a place much higher in the chain of command?
I highly doubt the primary reason the cops didn't rush the room was because they were scared, that seems like quite a reach and there's no evidence of that so far. Besides, it doesn't really make sense.
Much more likely is they 1) thought there's a chance the shooter was alone and wanted to take the time for a solid breach, 2) didn't want to accidentally shoot a kid. That second one is probably what they really might have been scared about, and not getting shot themselves. Not only would that be a career ender, they would basically be eternally branded as a kid-killer for the rest of their short life (short, because of suicide).
In an earlier time, one could probably wait it out and manage some sort of life after that. But these times we're in now magnify everything to the Nth degree. Right now, being a cop is a damn hard job.
yes. The training given to the police there is that they are indeed to “stop the killing” as the first priority. They are NOT to wait for back up. And, furthermore, they’ve been told if they are unwilling to put their safety at risk in such a situation, they should look for a new line of work. Apparently, these guys never thought that their oath to serve and protect would ever be put to the test.
So You have found some convenient scapegoats to blame for this latest carnage. Two police officers who might not have done all they could to stop it.
That might be the case, but what You really need to talk about is the true elephant in the room: All kinds of guns are way too easy to obtain in the US for everybody, including guns that where especially designed to enable any shooter to kill as many people in as short a time as possible. Why is that? Is it a god given right that everybody should be enabled to go out and obtain the tools he needs to massacre as many people as he likes when he feels like it? I can see the need of hunting rifles being accessible to those who wanna use this food source. I'm also fine with small calibre firearms for sport, but I think it's insane to allow people the possession of war style weaponry like sniper rifles and automatic or semiautomatic killer guns. Only trained professionals should be able to access those kind of weaponry.
And that's Your main problem in your country. Nobody wants or dares to address this elephant in the room, exspecially no politicians in positions of power because the gun violence lobby NRA is way to powerful and can stop any political career in its tracks when a politician is actually trying to do something against the carnage instead of just talking the usual bullshit like those ridiculous "thoughts and prayers to the loved ones" and other stuff that fails to address the root causes of all this senseless killing and dying.
Everybody everywhere in the world knows what needs to happen in the US to keep American children safe, everywhere except in some backward states in the US, with Texas being one of the worst. (I watched a news conference the other day with some Texan officials and immediately realized that they were as useless to fix the problem as their cowboy hats were large. Who could ever vote such pathetic relics of centuries long gone into positions of power?)
I grew up in Germany, where quite tough and efficient gun control laws have always been in place. In our school there was no need for drills what to do when some nut with an big gun shows up. No one ever got any funny ideas about arming teachers. What for? I was never afraid to go to school (except when I had skipped homework and my math teacher was a tough one). Nothing ever happened that exceeded the occasional black eye when we students had our disagreements. No need for armed cops in the vicinity. School shootings were unheard of, at least in our country, we only heard about that weird place half way around the world where they cultivate their gun problem and end up having to bury some of their kids from time to time.
So, American politicians.....just quit talking bullshit and start acting. If You still don't know what to do, look around in places where they don't have that habit of shooting dead their own children and see what they do different there. If You still don't get it. It's called GUN CONTROL, the stricter the better. And if You're no politician, than do not donate any money to the NRA, those rotten promoters of gun violence and do not vote for any official who takes even a single cent of bribe money from those morons.
That's how You fix Your problem. By now You should have noticed that anything else, like arming teachers, have armed security in all schools etc, does not work and is only suggested all the time to distract You from seeing the true elephant in the room.
What is everybody waiting for? Don't say anything more, just get to work. You've got it cut out for You!
"Sustained by selflessness." Yes. Selflessness is the problem, but not the solution.
No self-respecting adult more than 40 years old would take a job as a cop today. Only someone who has no intention of getting killed on the job would take a job where people are encouraged by the elites to hate the police. A person with no self-esteem, self-respect, or self-reliance is genuinely selfless. Yep, the only good cops are dead cops. We've all heard that. If it's self-sacrifice, they might be praise-worthy, unless they shot a hostage child in the process of dying themselves.
You can call it cowardice, but after 20 years of school shootings, I consider the shooters and the people in charge of stopping them all selfless - no self-esteem, self-respect, or self-reliance—just a lot of ineptitude and anger.
If selflessness is the problem, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-reliance are the solution. We need a self-empowered culture to end the culture of selflessness. Sacrifice is death. A culture valuing death more than life is on borrowed time.
Well said.
So many problems with the viewpoint presented here. First, we simply don’t yet know enough to render a verdict. Was it reasonable to assume that a storming of the classroom and the expected barrage of bullets flying in both directions was likely to lessen the child’s body count, or increase it? Second, the writer inexplicably assumes that the officers’ holding was driven by cowardice, ignoring the obvious fact that they were following orders. And third, keeping panicked parents from running into the building was the right call. Finally, the writer aims to focus our anger at the officers, rather than at the shooter, the culture that formed him or the government that armed him.
Police will go through protestors like paper though. Chickens and pigs on this animal farm. This isn’t a defense of the protestors, they’re the horse going to the glue factory.
I agree with your assessment on the actions by the officers at the scene. Please write / talk about the issue of gun control. We need an honest assessment of the subject.
At the heart of this tragedy lie some basic questions we politicize ad infinitum. How does a mentally challenged kid buy guns legally?. Why are the police not held accountable for bad behavior. How can a governor call for promoting a relaxed gun culture at a time when the same culture is producing more shootings and violence. And finally is my right under the second amendment greater than your right to live?.
There is no way to completely lock down schools. If you limit schools to a single entry point, then you're going to have kids die in fires. You need to keep fire doors and then keep people from ever using them (except in a fire). Then you put a guard at the entry point. But, in Texas, anyone can open carry from my understanding so the guard at the entry point is going to have to make a split second decision--is this person just a parent open carrying or are they a shooter? The shooter is always going to have the advantage because, until they fire the first shot, no one knows they're a shooter.
And, for argument's sake, say you CAN completely harden a school. Then a shooter will just go on a school bus rampage instead. Can you also completely harden every school bus? It would be crazy expensive and almost impossible.
That's why, as this article says, trust that the police will quickly respond is the only thing that can bring any peace of mind. I live in a small town and EVERYONE here--Rs and Ds--supports the police with money, attending events, etc. Demoralization of the police--as has happened in big cities--isn't an issue here and likely isn't one in Uvalde where it seems people also have (had?) a high opinion of cops.
Uvalde is a truly tragic and heartbreaking event rendered more painful by police ineptitude. But how could an article be written without focusing on the core problem.
An 18 year old, not old enough to legally buy a beer, was able to legally buy an AR 15 assault rifle. This is the problem. The solution is not putting the police in jail, adding locks and security guards to schools etc. 75-85% of Americans want some form of gun law to solve this problem, and yet our elected officials stand by and bicker and the President says his hands are tied. Who will you blame the next time when only 10 kids are killed because the police do their job? Please focus on the core problem and blame our inept elected officials who take the NRA’s money in the name of the constitution and our poor wise founding fathers who never knew what assault rifles were when they drafted it.
This 18 year old did not possess an 'assault rifle'. He had a semi automatic long gun, which aside from the passing similarity to it's military cousin, could have been any one of a hundred long guns or pistols that do not look like military rifles. An 'assault rifle' is commonly understood to mean a rifle that can fire on full automatic. That type of long gun requires a very special license to own, and is illegal to sell without said license.
While you are correct, most people want something done about gun violence, none of the current prescriptions being debated protect both the right to bear arms and the means to lower the prevalence of gun violence.
Finally, and this may not be the case with you in particular, but the selective outrage by the country when a mass shooting incident involving white people and/or children is quite the sight. In 2020, the homicide rate by guns among blacks was 26.6 per 100k, while among whites it was 2.2 per 100k. In Canada, for example, the rate of gun homicides is 2.1 per 100k. Among black males, the homicide rate by gun is north of 50 per 100k. 11.5k blacks were killed in 2020 by guns, and unless that gun was held by a cop, almost no body except the immediate family cared.
By all means, go through the grieving process over this tragedy in Uvalde, however once done, try to focus on policies that will actually lower the death toll in this country, and not on policies that make YOU less afraid.
David French makes a good point about the selfishness of power. We live in time of me, me, me and what I want, need, must have: incredible self-centeredness. I have often mused that most Americans have never had to struggle to survive. Well, we do now: for our jobs; gasoline; food; health and everything else we have taken for granted. All of this thanks to our power-hungry politicians who have betrayed our trust. I am sadly not convinced it will ever get better.
Thank you David for softening some of my cynicism about how "me, me, me" I find our present culture to be.
As a long ago vet, your final words reminded me of how growing up in the 40's I was constantly told "we" can do this or that. Later on I needed to examine my young self and learn to add "love" to "we," thus forming a most important concept.
Most Vets, and the men and women in civilian life who strap on a gun each day know what you mean. So do most parents.
Your work is often filled with grace, which is why I read your missives.
The moral center and leadership of the nation has been captured by the pay-to-play, big tech, corporatist, political/bureaucratic surveillance state and the communist Marxist plunderers it employs. Family and religious community, small business, industry and legitimate education are seen as direct threats to its power. In short: the functioning healthy adult human being must be criminalized for its survival. The constant reports we receive here of the criminal destruction of worthy lives, both inside and outside academia by the D.E.I. commissariat, the open censorship and willful crippling of truth speakers by big tech, and the continued lies and open grift of line my pockets political operatives touting the latest "citizens are terrorists we need thought control" is our daily bread.
This has everything to do with Uvalde. The stand down chain of command individuality murdered wait for the bureaucracy can't take action police, handcuffed parents (as in school board meetings) listening to the massacre and victimization of their children, the technicolor horror of yet another parentless child fallen through the cracks of a disintegrating culture. A country and a generation left looted and futureless. The exploitation of guns as the problem. The entire nation has a been crippled by a cabal of elitist thugs. Uvalde is just blowback.
The D.C./financial cabal has abandoned America. It has looted and gutted American industry and economy. It has made the decision that America is no longer a sound investment. Its money (your looted tax dollars and labor) and future is elsewhere. American citizenship is the problem. It sees a system of feudalistic perpetual debt and big tech bureaucratic police state surveillance as the solution to YOU.
This is grimly poetic and painfully accurate. It feels too late for correction. A start might be 2 years of civilian or military service following high school, no exceptions. A nation without shared values cannot hold.
It strains credulity to believe that 50-100 officers from local, state, and federal agencies stood down for 78 minutes listening to gunfire as children were slaughtered, based on the order of the police chief of the schools squad. And for 12 minutes the gunman was shooting outside. And a door was left open for 3 minutes while a teacher called 911. And nobody went to the windows to evaluate and stop the shooter. And it happened 3 days before the Texas NRA convention. 78 minutes without a door key, a master key, a brave outlier, a superior taking command. Cops who went in and got their own kids. Parents who went in. Parents handcuffed to prevent their entry into the school. We are left with one conclusion by the media: 50-100 officers allowed a classroom to become an abbatoir due to being outgunned by an AR-15 in an 18-year-old shooter’s hands. And then an off-duty Border Patrolman takes him out, no details provided.
We are tortured trying to explain the inexplicable, poisoned forever by a multitude of conflicting stories, while we dissect every angle and probe the what-ifs and the why’s. Could you fault me for suspecting that the stand-down order came from a place much higher in the chain of command?
I highly doubt the primary reason the cops didn't rush the room was because they were scared, that seems like quite a reach and there's no evidence of that so far. Besides, it doesn't really make sense.
Much more likely is they 1) thought there's a chance the shooter was alone and wanted to take the time for a solid breach, 2) didn't want to accidentally shoot a kid. That second one is probably what they really might have been scared about, and not getting shot themselves. Not only would that be a career ender, they would basically be eternally branded as a kid-killer for the rest of their short life (short, because of suicide).
In an earlier time, one could probably wait it out and manage some sort of life after that. But these times we're in now magnify everything to the Nth degree. Right now, being a cop is a damn hard job.
For several years now, we've been told that we need to hire police officers with a "guardian" mindset -- a desire to prevent crime by developing good communication with their community -- instead of a "warrior" mindset -- a willingness to use violence to prevent crime. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/police-training-programs-fostering-warrior-mindset-face-increasing-scrutiny. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190226155011.htm
Uvalde needed some warriors. They got what they THOUGHT they needed and what they probably voted for -- guardians.
yes. The training given to the police there is that they are indeed to “stop the killing” as the first priority. They are NOT to wait for back up. And, furthermore, they’ve been told if they are unwilling to put their safety at risk in such a situation, they should look for a new line of work. Apparently, these guys never thought that their oath to serve and protect would ever be put to the test.
So You have found some convenient scapegoats to blame for this latest carnage. Two police officers who might not have done all they could to stop it.
That might be the case, but what You really need to talk about is the true elephant in the room: All kinds of guns are way too easy to obtain in the US for everybody, including guns that where especially designed to enable any shooter to kill as many people in as short a time as possible. Why is that? Is it a god given right that everybody should be enabled to go out and obtain the tools he needs to massacre as many people as he likes when he feels like it? I can see the need of hunting rifles being accessible to those who wanna use this food source. I'm also fine with small calibre firearms for sport, but I think it's insane to allow people the possession of war style weaponry like sniper rifles and automatic or semiautomatic killer guns. Only trained professionals should be able to access those kind of weaponry.
And that's Your main problem in your country. Nobody wants or dares to address this elephant in the room, exspecially no politicians in positions of power because the gun violence lobby NRA is way to powerful and can stop any political career in its tracks when a politician is actually trying to do something against the carnage instead of just talking the usual bullshit like those ridiculous "thoughts and prayers to the loved ones" and other stuff that fails to address the root causes of all this senseless killing and dying.
Everybody everywhere in the world knows what needs to happen in the US to keep American children safe, everywhere except in some backward states in the US, with Texas being one of the worst. (I watched a news conference the other day with some Texan officials and immediately realized that they were as useless to fix the problem as their cowboy hats were large. Who could ever vote such pathetic relics of centuries long gone into positions of power?)
I grew up in Germany, where quite tough and efficient gun control laws have always been in place. In our school there was no need for drills what to do when some nut with an big gun shows up. No one ever got any funny ideas about arming teachers. What for? I was never afraid to go to school (except when I had skipped homework and my math teacher was a tough one). Nothing ever happened that exceeded the occasional black eye when we students had our disagreements. No need for armed cops in the vicinity. School shootings were unheard of, at least in our country, we only heard about that weird place half way around the world where they cultivate their gun problem and end up having to bury some of their kids from time to time.
So, American politicians.....just quit talking bullshit and start acting. If You still don't know what to do, look around in places where they don't have that habit of shooting dead their own children and see what they do different there. If You still don't get it. It's called GUN CONTROL, the stricter the better. And if You're no politician, than do not donate any money to the NRA, those rotten promoters of gun violence and do not vote for any official who takes even a single cent of bribe money from those morons.
That's how You fix Your problem. By now You should have noticed that anything else, like arming teachers, have armed security in all schools etc, does not work and is only suggested all the time to distract You from seeing the true elephant in the room.
What is everybody waiting for? Don't say anything more, just get to work. You've got it cut out for You!
"Sustained by selflessness." Yes. Selflessness is the problem, but not the solution.
No self-respecting adult more than 40 years old would take a job as a cop today. Only someone who has no intention of getting killed on the job would take a job where people are encouraged by the elites to hate the police. A person with no self-esteem, self-respect, or self-reliance is genuinely selfless. Yep, the only good cops are dead cops. We've all heard that. If it's self-sacrifice, they might be praise-worthy, unless they shot a hostage child in the process of dying themselves.
You can call it cowardice, but after 20 years of school shootings, I consider the shooters and the people in charge of stopping them all selfless - no self-esteem, self-respect, or self-reliance—just a lot of ineptitude and anger.
If selflessness is the problem, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-reliance are the solution. We need a self-empowered culture to end the culture of selflessness. Sacrifice is death. A culture valuing death more than life is on borrowed time.