ProPublica and the Texas Tribune teamed up on a multimedia report about the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting. Like every report on every school massacre, it’s heartbreaking and enraging, and everyone in this goddamn country should be required to read it.
Here’s the inescapable conclusion: The cops and kids both received active school shooter training. The kids followed their training, and the cops did not. We knew the cops bungled the response almost immediately after the incident. But the report lays out in devastating detail how the fact that the kids followed their training reinforced the cops’ impulse to ignore theirs.
The children hid. They dropped to the floor, crouching under desks and countertops, far from the windows. They lined up against the walls, avoiding the elementary school doors that separated them from a mass shooter about a decade older than them. Some held up the blunted scissors that they often used to cut shapes as they prepared to fight. A few grabbed bloodied phones and dialed 911. And as students across the country have been instructed for years, they remained quiet, impossibly quiet. At times, they hushed classmates who screamed in agony from the bullets that tore through their small bodies.
Then, they waited. Waited for the adults, whom they could hear in the hallway. If they were just patient, those adults would save them.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that day in May 2022. They, too, waited. They waited for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do. They waited for the right keys and specialized equipment to open doors. They waited out of fear that the lack of ballistic shields and flash-bangs would leave them vulnerable against the power of an AR-15-style rifle. Most astonishingly, they waited for the children’s cries to confirm that people were still alive inside the classrooms.
The kids had been told repeatedly to be quiet, and they were. The cops had been told repeatedly to immediately confront an active shooter, and they waited instead.
One Uvalde police officer told investigators two kids in his family died in the shooting but he didn’t attend their funerals because “some of his relatives ‘think that we fucking let ’em die.'”
The initial probe by the Texas Rangers, the DPS’ investigative arm, is complete but has not been made public. Of the hundreds of officers who responded that day, less than a handful have been fired, including Arredondo. An attorney representing Arredondo released a statement before he was terminated, saying that his client was being used as a “fall guy.” Several officers from various agencies either resigned, were reassigned or retired.
The relatives’ response is understandable, but I’ve got some sympathy for those cops too. I can tell you from experience that the overwhelming human impulse when someone starts firing a gun in your presence is to run away like a scared fucking bunny. But I’m not a cop whose job it is to confront active shooters.
The thing is, we’re not going to address the root cause of our mass shooting problem in America — that we’re ass-deep in battlefield-grade weapons — anytime soon. So it’s therefore our obligation as a society to develop the capacity to respond in ways that minimize the death and destruction to innocent bystanders.
The kids are doing their part. One girl in Uvalde was telling her classmates “just be as quiet as a mouse,” and they were. Now the grownups in law enforcement need to step up their training too and be fully prepared to hurl themselves at madmen firing 100 rounds a minute. If doing so makes all the participants realize how fucking insane this entire situation is, so much the better.
Open thread.
ETA: Scout211 in comments below shared a link to a trailer for a documentary the PBS series FRONTLINE produced while working with ProPublica and the Texas Tribune on this story. It airs today. Scout also shared a link to statement from the news organizations on why they’re publishing details that haven’t been officially released by the state investigators. Thanks, Scout!
Alison Rose
Oh, but I’ve been told by so many Big Tough People on the internet that cops are the ultimate Big Tough People and we should always respect their Bigness and Toughness because they are the only ones who can protect us!!!!!
Here’s an idea: If you are too scared to do the job you chose to do, then you need to stop doing that job because you are incapable. You don’t see my ass in pilot school, do you? No. These cops ought to be doing mall security.
Marmot
Thanks, Betty.
cain
@Alison Rose: Absolutely.
Being armed doesn’t make you fearless. You need training and to be able to deal with a situation. That’s why it’s just dumb when people think everyone should have guns. As you can see, even cops are going to run away from situations.
Scout211
And also both news organizations teamed with PBS on the documentary for Frontline
Released today, it can be streamed, or check your local listings. It airs next Tuesday on my local station.
A message from all three: Why We’re Publishing Never-Reported Details of the Uvalde School Shooting Before State Investigators
The Thin Black Duke
I believe what happened at Uvalde was a transformative event because it illustrated that you can give cops all the military toys they want and it won’t make a damned difference. This tragedy proved that the more guns there are, the less safe everyone else is. If the cops can’t “protect and serve” the public, what good are they?
Alison Rose
@The Thin Black Duke: It’s so convenient too that cops can use “I was in fear for my life” as an excuse for both killing someone and not killing someone. Nice work if you can get it!!
Betty Cracker
@Scout211: Post updated with those links. Thank you!
taumaturgo
People have the government they deserve and like, and in this particular case the town voted to reelect pro gun governor Abbott, children massacre notwithstanding.
Old Man Shadow
I could see this as evidence used one day to justify deploying U.S. troops on American soil.
Brachiator
Yes, the cops failed and there should be punishment and better training.
But I also think that what upsets some people, many the pro gun crowd, is that these cops failed to live up to the fantasy of the good guys who will magically show up just in time to take out the bad guy.
As always, the elephant in the room is the need to get rid of guns, not how we can turn every cop into a SWAT Team level super police officer.
Alce _e_ardillo
Perhaps the police need to realize that when you cosplay as Navy Seals, sometimes we are going to expect you act like one.
scav
Other interesting tidbit of cop mentality in there: “some of his relatives ‘think that we fucking let ’em die.’” It’s the cops that get the we, not his own family. Granted, on that side also lies his personal benefit of feeling he did everything perfectly, but still, it grates. Loyalty, allegiance and unquestioning support is always to The Blue, not to those others, even if they’re children, bleeding out on the ground after doing everything they were told.
Ol_Froth
After Columbine, I was trained to not wait for a SWAT team, but to gather three other officers and then go in. After Sandy Hook, I was trained to not wait at all; move as quickly as I could and neutralize the threat as fast as possible. It didn’t matter if I had a long arm, a shotgun, or a pistol, I was told and trained to go in with whatever was immediately available. And we trained multiple times a year on that very tactic.
E.
Blaming the cops won’t help. Those cops are not different from the others. It’s like blaming “inattentiveness” for pedestrian deaths at dangerous intersections. You won’t ever defeat inattentiveness but you can design for it.
RaflW
David Waldman sums it up horribly (I mean sums it up well, but the cynical accuracy is horrifying):
H.E.Wolf
The federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act (1878, 1956, 2021) is generally held to prohibit most such actions.
cain
@Alce _e_ardillo:
Fixed. We should make sure that we push that expectation on them and if they don’t like it refer to all the things that pro-gun people have been saying. We should hold them accountable for the things they say.
Dman
“but I’ve got some sympathy for those cops too. I can tell you from experience that the overwhelming human impulse when someone starts firing a gun in your presence is to run away like a scared fucking bunny”
No way F that. they chose the job, they knew the risks and they let them die because they wouldn’t do the basics of the job.
They deserve all that they receive.
Ocotillo
@taumaturgo: Yes, and Abbott has moved on to his next task, destroying the public schools.
I would venture to say Uvalde is majority Mexican-American yet Anglos hold the power and is how the county votes.
Abbott is battling with the Texas House over school ESA (Educational Savings Accounts) which would give vouchers to the Anglos in that community so their kids don’t have to go to the same school as those kids do.
There has been a real stand off with Abbott, the Texas House is as you would expect GOP controlled but rural Republicans realize their communities will be hurt not just from loss of funding for public schools but, those same schools are major employers in the smaller communities.
Abbot is now refusing to raise teacher pay unless he gets the vouchers. Democrats are hopeless in Texas and we need to get our you know what together and organize to defeat these facists.
Brachiator
@Dman:
The basics of the job is not to be part of a SWAT Team.
We supposedly harden schools. We supposedly train cops.
We do everything except the obvious and get rid of guns.
wjca
It will be interesting to see how (not if) the current Supreme Court majority manages to find that act unconstitutional.** Depending on which party the President ignoring it belongs to, of course.
** Doubtless they will manage to cite President Eisenhower sending the 82nd Airborne to Little Rock to enforce the Supreme Court’s school integration order.
Paul in KY
@Alison Rose: There are certainly times in war where a unit’s commander has to order his/her troops into action. Even though they have all been trained & know the scrore, etc., it is the commander who sends them to battle & for some of them certain death. I expect the same is true in these situations. Who was commanding there?
cain
@taumaturgo: Likely will still vote GOP because they still love tax cuts. It seems Texas has not yet suffered enough.
Paul in KY
@The Thin Black Duke: Arresting the evildoers who sell loosies…
WaterGirl
@Paul in KY: Apparently, no one?
Geminid
The one year anniversary of the Moore County, North Carolina substation attacks came and went with no apparent progress in solving the case. The attacks Saturday evening, December 3rd of last year disabled two electrical substations and left scores of thousands without power for 5 days.
I learned from a WRAL-TV (Raleigh) report that one death was attributed to the outage. An 87 year-old woman with heart trouble was found dead in her home; her oxygen concentrator lost power that Saturday night. This could lead to enhancement of federal charges, and possibly a state charge for murder.
But they have to find the guy first. My theory is that he was a very careful lone wolf, but that is just speculation.
The December 3rd, 2022 attack was one of a series of power station attacks including at least six in the Pacific Northwest. I have not read of attacks recently. Maybe companies have equipped substations with alarms and cameras and potential saboteurs are deterred now.
piratedan
while the mentality of the Cops in a “we vs them” is problematic in and of itself, it would be welcome to see more cops get onboard with limiting the types of guns available to the public.
Marmot
@taumaturgo: Ok, what percentage of the population voted?
wjca
Many of them chose the job for reasons other than the opportunity to play at Rambo. Believe it or not, they actually mean that “Protect and serve.”
Also, getting in a firefight isn’t a basic of that job. Witness the fact that, even today, most cops will go their whole career without firing their weapon except on the practice range.
Dorothy A. Winsor
OT: If anyone is interested, Kos has a live blog covering Wray’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ocotillo
@piratedan: I’m so old, I remember when cops and cop unions called for gun control.
Hungry Joe
The horror from military assault-weapon carnage obscures the fact that most American firearm deaths come from handguns. We could vaporize every AR-15 in the country — and if I could make that happen, I would — and the problem would remain largely unaddressed.
The Thin Black Duke
@Brachiator: Thing is, the police should be one of the strongest advocates for a rational gun policy in this country, but they refuse to do so.
The Thin Black Duke
@Paul in KY: Correction:
ArrestingShooting the evildoers who sell loosies…cain
@The Thin Black Duke: It is indeed a puzzle as to why they would not want things to be safer for themselves. Unless they are addicted to adrenaline rush of going into armed conflict.
Eyeroller
@Hungry Joe: A large fraction of those–I think the majority–are suicides. Still not at all good; making suicide easy raises the rate.
Paul in KY
@WaterGirl: If they were decorating the precinct house for the big Christmas Party, there’d be a ‘commander’. Not for this though. I want to scream & curse for all the beautiful young lives snuffed out that day!!!!! Arrrgggghhhh!!!! Fuckity fuck fuck fucking cops! & the scumbag murdering piece of shit loser!!!!!
Paul in KY
@Geminid: It’s someone who is comfortable/trained to be around very large concentrations of power/electricity (IMO).
Chris
What’s really insulting is that we’ve all been told all our lives, every time we have any questions about something a cop did, “how dare you insult these people, don’t you know that they’re true heroes who risk their lives for you every day, when you’re threatened, they’re the people who’ll save you.” We’re told this every time we see a video of a cop performing such a dangerous activity as shooting a kid with a water pistol, kneeling on a guy’s neck for five minutes, or shooting someone in the back whose only grave and immediate threat to society was selling weed.
Well, we finally got a situation like the one we’re told cops deal with all the time, an actual murderer killing his way through a classroom full of kids. And the cops were called, sure enough. And an entire army of them sat around in front of the school with their thumbs up their asses wailing “we’re police officers! We’re not trained for this kind of violence!”
Where, exactly, are the fucking heroes that all these people, their PR shills, and their groupies have been telling us every day that all cops are? Oh right. Nowhere.
Chris
@E.:
Yes they are. It’s their fucking job. They certainly tell us about it often enough.
Elizabelle
Haven’t read the report, and I will, but something that I don’t think gets mentioned enough in considering Uvalde police (non) response:
Do not forget that a mass shooting occurred at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, NY on May 14, 2022, ten days before Uvalde. A racist shot 10 Black people dead, among them the armed security guard/retired police officer who stepped up to engage the killer.
Those Uvalde cops had ten days thinking about that. Did they want to be that hero? Apparently not. (Uvalde happened on May 24.)
Mr. Salter, the Buffalo security guard with police training, did his job, and got killed for doing so.
The shooter, who is now imprisoned for life, was wearing tactical gear and armed with a Bushmaster with a high capacity magazine.
The ammosexuals, legislators, and cops should be honest. Once a military grade assault rifle is on the scene, it is very hard to stop the killing.
Get rid of the assault rifles. All guns are lethal, but we are not safe with military grade weapons in the wrong hands.
The cops used to understand that.
Marmot
@taumaturgo: With 45.5% of registered voters voting.
In this state, voter suppression is the biggest impediment to change. Your eagerness to wash your hands of the whole state (>25 million people, in several distinct cultural areas) because the old power structure still holds power—it’s not a defensible moral stance.
“Reprehensible,” maybe?
Suzanne
@RaflW:
A reminder that there is a not-small amount of misogyny at play here: teachers are (majority) women and therefore hated. Cops are (majority) men and therefore respected.
Geminid
@Paul in KY: He (and I assume it was a he) just blasted away at electrical equipment with a rifle. Various militias had been calling for power station attacks for some time and instructions were widely available. So this person did not neccesarily need familiarity with the equpment beyond knowing what to shoot at from a safe distance. He evidently hit the right pieces because Duke Power had to hunt up replacements. That’s why the outage lasted 5 days
Ed. A Homeland Security memo was sent to law enforcement and utility agencies before the attack. It detailed methods used in previous attacks including flinging a chain onto exposed electrical terminals. Rifle attacks are noisier but probably safer.
Marmot
@cain: How certain are you of your answer here? Do you think there are maybe some factors you haven’t considered, and which could benefit from your assistance?
Of all people, I’d expect you to express some empathy, some interest in what’s actually happening.
Salty Sam .
Thank you Marmot.
Hungry Joe
@Eyeroller: Correct. Still, according to the Pew Research Center, of the approximately 22,000 murders in the U.S. in 2021, only (!) about 700 were from mass shootings — four or more people shot. And of those 700, more than half were from handguns.
So — and I expect people to recoil from this — mass shootings perpetrated by lunatics with assault weapons aren’t the big problem. It’s almost (I said, ALMOST) like watching your kids go for a swim in the ocean and keeping a lookout for sharks instead of watching to make sure they don’t drown.
Paul in KY
@wjca: For those SWAT fuckers that showed up, I consider eliminating the bad guy ASAP to be a core portion of their job.
Dman
@Chris:
Amen, I am surprised at the responses to my comment.
Paul in KY
@The Thin Black Duke: Correction sadly noted.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Well said, Chris.
H.E.Wolf
@Marmot:@taumaturgo: With 45.5% of registered voters voting.In this state, voter suppression is the biggest impediment to change. Your eagerness to wash your hands of the whole state (>25 million people, in several distinct cultural areas) because the old power structure still holds power—it’s not a defensible moral stance.“Reprehensible,” maybe?
****** quote rectangle not working for me today *****
“Deplorable”.
And thank you for the valuable reminder – which, alas, we do need from time to time – that there are Voter Suppression states, rather than Red states.
Paul in KY
@Geminid: He/she evidently knew where to shoot. Maybe they found out on the intertubes…
scav
And, as for the supposedly macho habit of rounding the wagons and going into immediate justify any and all actions taken routine, even athletes, big he-men revered football guys after a bad game stand back up and (publicly even! on the record! befire the fans have left the stadium sometimes) analyze and admit what they did and what they could have done better. They, at least, try to improve their game. Cops, not so much: shut up and admire us.
Baud
@Hungry Joe:
Conventional arms kill more people than weapons of mass destruction.
Crime kills more people than terrorism.
Heart disease kills more people than guns.
Not everything about how to respond to threats involves summing up numbers on a spreadsheet.
H.E.Wolf
@Geminid:
They caught the Pacific Northwesties a few days after the sabotage. I was gleeful.
https://www.kptv.com/2023/01/04/feds-reveal-motive-behind-washington-power-grid-attacks-christmas-day/
H.E.Wolf
@wjca:
Might could be. But I think the weirdo right-wingers on the Supreme Court are suckers for a catchy Latin slogan, so we’re probably okay. :)
Tony G
Yes, the cops were cowardly and incompetently led and, ideally, the entire police force should have been fired and replaced. (In reality, I suspect that none of them were fired.). However, the real issue — the elephant in the room — is the power of a weapon like an AR-15 (the semi-automatic prototype of the M-16s that were used in Vietnam and wars). One lunatic with an AR-15 has about as much lethal firepower as six or eight people with bolt action rifles. I suspect that many of these cops — and, indeed, many of the residents of Uvalde — are in favor of Texas’s flimsy gun-control laws that enabled the killer to get his hands on an AR-15 in the first place.
Citizen Alan
@Ocotillo: Crap like this is why I still think the endgame for the Federalist Society Justices is to overturn Brown v Board of Education. I am certain there are at least five votes to bring back separate but equal and reinstate Jim Crow. And Clarence Thomas is one of them.
MomSense
@Ol_Froth:
The resource/police officer who was at Parkland FL also did not go in right away if at all. I can’t remember the details but I think there may have been charges filed against him.
JaySinWA
@The Thin Black Duke: I thought strangling was the preferred method of dealing with loosie sellers? Did I miss a shooting or two?
H.E.Wolf
I think you might like this:
https://nitter.net/designmom/status/1225052129238421505#m
Ohio Mom
It’s probably wrong to paint every one of the thousands (maybe hundred of thousands?) police forces across the country with the same brush but I’m going to, anyway: police, ugh.
Tony G
@scav: That’s an excellent point. Throughout my “career” in I.T. it was always standard practice to review each step of a project (successful or unsuccessful) after the fact to summarize the lessons learned and to make preparations to do things better next time. Somehow I can’t picture rank-and-file cops — or their “leaders” — doing something like that.
Brachiator
@The Thin Black Duke:
We passed the “should be one of the strongest advocates” point with respect to the police and many elected officials a long time ago.
The opposition to gun control has hardened into “nothing can be done” and “the Second Amendment is sacred.”
It doesn’t even matter anymore that children are slaughtered.
Still, we have to keep fighting for a sane gun policy and try to convince more people that things can get better.
ETA. It’s sad that even police departments go for more weapons and armor and play down gun control.
Tony G
@Ohio Mom: Ideally police officers are like the heroes in TV shows. In real life, many of them are just dumb guys who like to hurt people.
trollhattan
@H.E.Wolf: Too many caper movies led to that mess.
“Let’s go do crimes.”
“Great, but I don’t want to get caught.”
“I have a foolproof idea, we cut off the power first, then break in.”
“How do we do that?”
“Have any guns?”
Narrator: “Two weeks later.”
Citizen Alan
@wjca:
Many of them start that way. Most of them don’t stay that way. I have seen 3 very dear friends go into the police academy as moderate to liberal people, all 3 of them college educated and compassionate individuals who wanted to become cops to make a difference in their communities. And within five years, they all reached the point thinking BLM is a terrorist organization, that the Democratic Party was the enemy of all police officers, and that all police shootings are justifiable under any circumstances short of a cop on the take literally assassinating somebody to conceal a crime. I call it Cop’s Disease.
louc
@MomSense: That’s correct. He was found not guilty, though he’s well hated in the community.
Geminid
@Paul in KY: There are a lot of internet resources for people who want to know how to disable components of the electrical grid. The same sites probably gave a heads up about efforts after the Moore County attacks to harden substations with alarms and cameras. Now it’s a higher risk proposition, and with a low “reward” because the power outages are usually short in duration.
Authorities did catch two men who knocked out an Oregon substation, but they turned out to be common criminals. The two guys wanted to burgle some local businesses and thought knocking out power in the area would help. I think they may have overthought the project.
trollhattan
@Citizen Alan:
Marketing Dept. has determined that “Separate, but equal” was an inadequate slogan and therefore, they’re going forward with “Separate, and darned awesome!”
Tony G
@Hungry Joe: Good point. I think that the reason why mass shootings are more in the public eye is just the fact that — as common as they are — they are still relatively rare enough to be categorized as “news” by the media. On the other hand, shootings that kill “only” one or two people are so common now that they don’t qualify as “news” unless a celebrity is involved. Those “smaller” shootings are just a commonplace part of life, like traffic accidents or heart attacks.
Hungry Joe
@Baud: Quite right. I’m just concerned that the horror/drama of mass shootings deflects attention the from the quiet(er) horror/drama of “ordinary” deaths by handgun.
Marmot
@H.E.Wolf: No problem. And to be clear, that 45.5% of registered voters voting, that’s for Uvalde County during the election for governor.
It’s deeply offensive to condemn a heterogeneous group because it looks homogeneous on an election-night red-blue state map. I get snarly.
A large number of us are trying very hard, and we’d love everybody’s support.
Matt McIrvin
@Hungry Joe: Mass shootings do have a greater collective effect beyond the body count–they’re akin to terrorism; they terrorize–so I do think it’s legitimate to give them some special attention.
But… it’s worth noting that these crimes use different guns. The vast majority of gun deaths including homicides are from handguns, not from assault rifles. So the policy response needs to be different.
Matt McIrvin
(I’ve also seen people–not all of them Republican voters–justify carrying a handgun in public on the grounds that they want to be armed in case of a mass-shooting incident. The statistics about general gun deaths vs. mass shootings might be helpful in dispelling the notion that this makes sense. The people most likely to be shot by your gun are still you and the people in your household.)
Holofcener
Terrorism feeds on special attention.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Maybe people are carrying AR-15s because of all the handguns.
coin operated
“Protect and serve” needs to be replaced with the unofficial Coast Guard motto:
You have to go out…you do not have to come back.
And, yes…that’s *exactly* what we should expect for someone who willfully commits to wearing a badge and a gun.
Marmot
@Ocotillo:
Yep. Abbott is choking schools now so that he can bleed them later.
And I want to add that the school vouchers scam will cost everyone money or educational quality—except the rich.
brendancalling
“I’ve got some sympathy for those cops too. I can tell you from experience that the overwhelming human impulse when someone starts firing a gun in your presence is to run away like a scared fucking bunny. But I’m not a cop whose job it is to confront active shooters.”
I teach at a middle school in Philly, and all I gotta say is “fuck those cowardly-ass cops.” I have no sympathy for them, at all. As you say, they are TRAINED to confront active shooters. If the cops in Uvalde are anything like the cops here, they have bulletproof vests and tactical gear that they wear/carry ALL THE TIME. They have those “thin blue line” stickers on their cars, which —reminder—”was adopted by law enforcement professionals to represent their courage and sacrifice while protecting the American people.” And boy, do they love to shove that in everyone’s face. “Lookit me, ma, I’m servin’ and protectin’!”
And while I’m sad for the cop who lost two kids and didn’t feel he could go to their funeral…
…well, that’s because they DID “fucking let ’em die.” That’s exactly what they did. Specifically, “they waited for the children’s cries to confirm that people were still alive inside the classrooms.”
They. Let. Those. Kids. Die. No amount of breast-beating and 20/20 hindsight and official excuse-making changes that. I don’t remember any cops (or fire fighters) running away or waiting to run into the World Trade Center after 9/11, despite that being almost certain death.
@Alison Rose: They should’t even be allowed to do mall security. They should be relegated to cleaning up the elephant cage at the zoo.
I’ve always said two kinds of people join the police: people who actually want to serve and protect their community, even when that means pushing people around; and those who join simply to push people around. And as always, ACAB.
The Thin Black Duke
But that’s my point: you’d figure the cops would get behind the idea of keeping easily accessible AR-15s out of the hands of homicidal nutjobs if only for self defense.
Unless police department are planning on upgrading to nukes, they’re already outgunned and outnumbered.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Ol_Froth: thank you. This is what I don’t understand. At Sandy Hook as far as I remember, by the time the police could get there all the victims and the shooter were dead. Not surprising when you realize what an AR 15 can do… why don’t d Law enforcement wait at All??
RedDirtGirl
@H.E.Wolf:
That’s a great thread. I think I’ve seen her stuff before. Is she a Mormon, by any chance?
Old School
Baud
@Old School:
Where’s Kamala?
Doing her job.
Archon
@cain:
If society was safer people might start to wonder why 50 percent of the local budget is going to law enforcement.
Old School
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
Yeah, and the kids are supposed to all rush the gunman because one of them will supposedly get through. But the cops? Not so much.
Ol_Froth
@MomSense: He was charged, but I don’t know off the top of my head what the outcome was.
Matt McIrvin
@Hungry Joe: As politically difficult as banning AR-15s would be (and it’s amazing that it’s so difficult), getting control of handguns would be far more difficult.
I think we need to attack the idea that it makes sense to have a handgun in your house, or on your person, for self-defense. For the vast majority of people it really doesn’t. But even a lot of American liberals think it does, that this is a reasonable thing to do. Especially if they’re in some group that is a frequent target of violence.
And I feel ambivalent even saying that. I mean, maybe it doesn’t make sense now, but when Trump gets back in and tells the Proud Boys to go wild and kill all the weirdos? Yeah, probably not even then, but am I gonna tell people that? Do I want all the guns on their side? It’s the kind of thinking that worms its way into your brain.
Ol_Froth
@Matt McIrvin: I see too many open carry enthusiasts making the point that they’ll stop the bad guy, without ever realizing how tactically unsound it is. If I’m intent on mayhem, and I see you carrying a weapon openly, guess who the first to die will be? And now the bad guy has the good guy’s gun as well.
Matt McIrvin
@Ol_Froth: Not to mention, if the cops actually do show up and try to stop it, who are they going to shoot? The guy with the gun, right?
Hildebrand
My god – those kids. All of our kids who have grown up learning these ghastly live-shooter drills, the kids who have been in that fear-soaked situation and found ways to do what they could to keep each other safe. I just cannot imagine.
How anyone could read these accounts, listen to the kids, and be unmoved – I will never understand. I cannot fathom such heartlessness, such a lack of compassion, such a lack of seemingly basic humanity.
Quiet as a mouse. That is haunting.
Omnes Omnibus
I am not defending the cops here. God knows that they, as a group, posture about being tough and doing a dangerous job. I do have to say that none of us can know, until we are in a moment of danger, how we will react. Most people aren’t heroes. Most probably aren’t cowards either. We tend to fall somewhere in between.
Martin
I said at the time this would devastate how active shooters are handled. In my job I worked frequently with everyone from our campus police to the Orange County Joint Terrorism Task Force, because my institution was a high value target with frequent ‘terrorism’ incidents. I put that in quotes because not everyone would consider animal rights activists trying to release lab animals to be terrorism, but the task force did.
Anyway, the current protocol is ‘Run. Hide. Fight’. That’s a change from the previous protocol that didn’t recommend fighting. The prior protocol was ALICE: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. Counter meant to barricade, lock doors, etc. But not fight.
ALICE was a delegation of trust that victims could rely on law enforcement to correctly engage with any attacker. Victims job was to evade and escape. That system was breaking down because it was evident that law enforcement couldn’t reliably arrive on scene quickly enough to allow for evacuation.
Run Hide Fight was a concession to that reality, that fighting might be necessary because law enforcement were inadequate to the threat. You couldn’t rely on there being cops close enough. But that was getting shaky after Margery Stoneman Douglas when the on-campus officer didn’t engage with the cops. It was also being criticized because hiding under desks, as was common in K-12 did nothing (as opposed to hiding in closets, etc.) But it was still a contract with law enforcement that if we run and hide, they’ll rush to the scene and we might need to fight until they arrive, but once they arrive, they’ll do the fighting.
Uvalde destroyed that. We could wave away MSD as a single cowardly officer, but Uvalde was everyone, and they didn’t do shit. So Run Hide Fight means nothing. The cops broke the contract and they’ll never regain the trust of the public here. We’re on our own – and that’s terrifying – because it means the only protocol is ‘fight’. Eventually the only rational reaction here is that if you see someone with a gun, assume they are a shooter and attack them and then call the cops, and it’s just a matter of time before that’s what happens. Administrators ability to steer a population to some kind of order is pretty much shot. How could I develop a protocol that anyone would follow after Uvalde. Nobody can stand up there and say in good faith ‘do this until the police arrive’. That was already pretty shaky before Uvalde. We already had people heckling the police in these training over MSD and questioning if they’d actually show up. People are just going to do whatever they feel they need to now because there is no trust.
This is going to continue to undermine teacher hiring, because this is even more on them. It was already forcing institutions to blow all of their spare instructional spending on security. That’s now worse, and it’s a fucking grifting bonanza from any company with any crackpot idea on how to protect from a shooter – none of which will work, but which the public will demand we spend money on it because surely there’s something which will work. It’s just a human centipede of unavoidable but bad decisions all the way down.
And I can’t think of any way out of it if Congress and the courts won’t act until the public just gives up and takes matters into their own hands.
lowtechcyclist
@Chris:
And the overall risk to them is pretty small: there are nearly a million LEOs in the U.S., and maybe fifty or sixty of them are killed by gunfire in a typical year. (578 over the past 11 years.) So yeah, when one of the relatively few moments in their careers occurs that entails real risk, those are the moments we pay them for.
If they don’t come through then, then all they’re doing is handing out traffic tickets, and they can be replaced by speed cameras.
Geminid
@Old School: Rep. McHenry’s 10th CD is a a rural/exurban area between Charlotte and Ashville. Its largest towns are Hickory and Mooresville.
McHenry is only 48 years old. I can see why he’d want to leave this Republican caucus behind though.
cain
@Marmot:
I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’m aware of how Texas makes sure the GOP makes sure that Dems can’t vote. My comment is really more towards conservatives that continue to vote – they apparently have no problems watching people suffer.
I’m not writing off Texas. There is going to be a tipping point where people have had enough. But given that the entire state legislature is doing things to make sure it is always a GOP majority – it is dependent on conservatives to do the right thing.
The Thin Black Duke
Unfortunately, most Americans really really believe that if there’s a gun in the house, they’ll be John Wayne. But more often than not, it’s going to be a scared old white asshole shooting a black kid who made the mistake of knocking on the wrong door. A gun in the house scares me because it makes a bad situation permanent.
cain
@Citizen Alan: That job exposes you to the worst of human nature.
Not surprising that they’d end up that way.
Chris
@Citizen Alan:
This doesn’t happen to everybody, but those that it doesn’t happen to tend to get bounced. One way or another.
Every now and then you’ll read stories from police academies where some people who demonstrated excessive concern for citizens or, God forbid, suspects’ safety as compared with their own end up not getting hired. For those who actually make it on the force, it gets much worse; reporting on your fellow officers when you see them doing something bad will usually “just” get you mercilessly harassed and your promotion opportunities and union protections evaporate, but some of them will literally end up conveniently dead.
It’s a mafia.
UncleEbeneezer
@The Thin Black Duke: They are mostly members of the Cult of Guns so rationality really is not possible.
Soprano2
@cain: My husband, who taught sharpshooting to South Vietnamese troops, says you should never point a gun at anyone unless you intend to pull the trigger. He says most people can’t do that, even if they think they can. It’s something most of us have to train to do, shooting another human being.
Jackie M
@Ol_Froth: It sounds to me that you are capable of carrying out that training. You clearly understand the objective and have committed yourself to it. Hope you never have a situation to use that focus on.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Hell yeah, if I saw a non-LEO carrying a gun in public, I’d feel quite genuine fear, and per the SYG laws in many states, I’d be justified in shooting them, since “feeling fear” is apparently sufficient reason to open fire in SYG states.
Not that that would happen, because I hope to go to my grave without ever feeling the need to possess a firearm. But it’s the sort of craziness our incredibly permissive gun laws have gotten us into.
Wapiti
@H.E.Wolf: Fantastic find.
H.E.Wolf
@Marmot:
Yes! I agree with you completely. I spent so much time wrastling with the Comment software that I forgot to make my original comment make sense. :-)
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: But most of us also don’t choose a career where we are literally required to be heroes in dangerous situations. If your house was on fire and the fire department showed up and just stood around saying “we’re too scared of fire to go inside”, how would you feel about that?
Ol_Froth
@Martin: I was a certified ALICE instructor, and the “Counter” component included “Fight.” Run, Hide, Fight existed before ALICE. ALICE is a way of marketing it.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: The infamous police training in “killology” all revolves around removing that inhibition and making police more willing to shoot somebody. It goes on and on about the inherent human aversion to killing, and the need to get past it.
But the interesting thing is that it just assumes that the other guy has already gotten past that human inhibition, or never had it in the first place (maybe because they’re not human?)
And it’s also interesting that it doesn’t seem to be any help at all in situations where somebody is visibly on a murder spree.
Baud
@H.E.Wolf:
👍
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, bullshit. The problem wasn’t that 400 cops all simultaneously realized they were cowards. The problem was that someone made a risk assessment that dead kids was preferable to dead cops and 400 other cops all deferred to administrative authority. This wasn’t a question of being brave against bullets, it was a question of being brave against authority, of being willing to be fired so you could do the thing you were hired to do rather than maintain the administrative hierarchy your boss wants you to maintain.
You’re making the same ‘I was just following orders’ argument that Nazis tried to hide behind. And I’m going to take this pretty personally because I’ve told the story here more than once of when I was nearly fired for trying incessantly to warn my leadership that I had a student who was a known stalker who was known to be shopping for a gun and was known to have made violent threats against his stalking target, and I would have been fired if it wasn’t for that student having been arrested after discharging a gun when hiding outside her house 2 days before my termination meeting. If you’re standing outside that school and you can’t go in because you’re afraid, you hand your badge over right there. If your boss tells you to not go in, you tell him to fuck off and you do your job. Everyone else is doing what they’re supposed to be doing – the students and teachers – but you aren’t, and you know it.
Soprano2
@RaflW: Our local NEA published a letter that they sent to the school board about how the school doesn’t follow their own policies when it comes to disciplining students. This is the part that stuck out to me more than anything else:
They are ordering protective equipment for teachers rather than disciplining the students! And I guarantee you those are probably special ed students, because they seem to be particularly afraid to discipline them. But the idea that a student told a teacher to “sit on my dick” and nothing happened to him…..geez, no wonder teachers are leaving! No one should have to put up with abuse like that in their job.
artem1s
we’ve been told over and over again we have to pay to arm our police departments with military grade equipment so they have a chance against an active shooter or drug lords. now they are trying to tell us we have to arm our teachers to the teeth too. now we know it’s because the police response to an active shooter will be – let the teacher or a kindergartner with scissors take them out. If it’s a black man/kid armed with a juice box or cigarettes, well, they are all over that.
Sorry, not sorry. the local cops have gone all in on this idiotic system and are asking for more guns, not less. it’s hard to sympathize with those cops who become the fall guys for the bad apples.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: I don’t think that they should continue in their jobs. I also think that this country needs to do a lot of things to make it so that the need to rush a mass shooter is as rare as it is elsewhere in the world.
Martin
@Ol_Froth: ‘C’ stood for counter, not confront. And OCJTT insisted that countering was to barricade, distract and NOT to fight.
The ‘counter is not fighting’ was drilled constantly by the feds. The task force was always involved in our training and development of protocols.
I have no idea how you were certified that it was ‘confront’. I’ve never seen that.
[Sorry, I just reread and I don’t see ‘confront’ in your comment. I don’t know why I thought you said that. But the point remains that confront was always clearly stated to not fight]
Tony G
@The Thin Black Duke: “I’ll react like John Wayne!” Of course, John Wayne was an actor who never faced physical danger in his life and, in fact, managed to avoid combat during World War Two.
Soprano2
@Citizen Alan: I think it’s a real problem to have a job where you deal with the worst people all the time. After awhile I expect you become like that, thinking anything is justified if you think it would make the problem of “those people” better. I have a co-worker who thinks the solution to homelessness in our community is for the police to drive them all to other places. I’ve heard praise for other communities who “don’t put up with that homeless crap, as soon as they see one of those people they make them understand that crap isn’t welcome here”. They don’t want to solve the problem, they just don’t want to see it.
Brachiator
This reminds me. At my last job, we got a document about dealing with an active shooter and also had some training.
The whole thing saddened and infuriated me. Because of the layout of our office, depending on the actual location of a shooter, we might either be able to escape, or be set up as easy targets as we tried to get to exits.
Some general principles about hiding and trying to block a shooter from getting into certain areas were useful, but overall the training was not worth very much if we were attacked by someone with a lot of weapons.
ETA. I remember how some schools wanted kids to have to put their smartphones away or store them in inaccessible areas during class. Now phones can be essential in getting information to parents and authorities.
It’s all crazy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: I don’t disagree that it was a failure of leadership. OTOH, that wasn’t the point I was making, but don’t let that stop you from posturing.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
What’s really telling is that the fetishization of guns has been inversely proportional to their actual usefulness as an everyday item.
I can well believe that a gun was a useful and necessary item for settlers in the frontier days, i.e. a context where you’ll often kill your own food, predators coming for your farm animals is still a regular occurrence, and you have no fast and convenient equivalent of “call the cops” if that’s needed.
… That was then. None of that is true anymore. (By and large, not even in the rural areas). And yet at the same time that guns have largely disappeared as an actually useful object in your everyday life, they’ve skyrocketed as a political totem and the demand to make them as universally accessible as humanly possible has gone through the roof. (The NRA actually used to support firearm regulations, until the seventies or so when it was taken over by a far-right crypto-terrorist fringe).
Geminid
@H.E.Wolf: One good thing that came out of the Moore County attacks is that I encountered the work of local journalist Cheryl Christy. Her blog Moore Voices (moorevoices.net) has been chronicling the radical takeover of Moore County civic institutions since 2018. Since the attacks, Christy has put her research together in a series titled “Timeline of Terror.” She recently released Part 4, which covers events from late 2021 through the December 3rd attacks last year.
Much of the reporting relates to controversies over public schools, which Christy says are the major local political battleground. These including book-banning efforts. Bowman believes the events she describes are common in many rural/exurban areas like hers and that her work has value for readers generally. She is a good, efficient writer.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: There’s also this small but loud pool of pro-gun Marxists who like to remind us all that Marx wanted to arm the working classes. Makes it hard to talk about this in the more radical left political fora.
Chris
@Martin:
To cross this over with the role of “copaganda” in shaping public perception of the police, I’ll also point out that of cops in real life were anything like cops in fiction, Uvalde is the moment when all the cops take off their badges, throw them at the pencil-neck administrator’s feet, say something like “fuck you, I’m doing what’s right” and charge into the building.
cain
Tommy Traitorville has finally ended his blockade of military promotions:
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/tommy-tuberville-senate-military-promotions-b2458952.html
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: Okay, I agree. But you seemed to be saying “well hey, most of us wouldn’t run in there either” even though most of us are not in jobs that require doing so.
Alison Rose
@cain: Let’s all go get abortions in military hospitals to celebrate!
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: But the cop fiction is just that, fiction.
artem1s
@Martin:
Evacuation is no longer recommended because of situations like the Conyers, GA middle school shooting. The two boys set off a fire alarm then retreated to a nearby hill where they proceeded to pick of the kids one by one. I’ve been thru a couple of meetings with consultants on what we should do in our building during an active shooter situation. They are now telling us never to try to get out of the buildng – that we should always shelter in place. At the time I was working in basically a glass box. No sheltering in place for us! The consultants all but admitted we were fucked.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: I wasn’t clear then. My point is that no one knows how they will react until they are in the situation. No more, no less. That was it.
Martin
@Soprano2: The US military determined that as many as 75% of soldiers drafted in WWII could not be relied on to shoot at the enemy. It’s the primary argument they have against the draft in favor of professional soldiers.
But I don’t buy the argument that 400 Texas law enforcement officers suddenly came down with coward disease. I think the overwhelming majority of those officers would have engaged with the shooter. I mean, FFS, some of the parents had to be arrested for trying to go in.
The cowardly act wasn’t that they were afraid of the shooter, it was that they were afraid of their boss. They deferred to the decision that they *shouldn’t* go in, even from other agencies. This was bureaucratic paralysis. Someone in leadership was risk adverse and everyone just fucking went along with it, even when they heard kids begging for help and then getting shot.
I’m sympathetic to the officer that never faced a shooter and can’t do it. That’s a physiological response – that’s your brain being flooded with chemicals. That’s really hard to overcome, and it happens to everyone.
But that’s not what happens when your boss tells you to do something. And that’s not what happens when 400 people all get the same case of it. Most of these officers would have gone in if instructed to. Just as a matter of statistics, we can say that confidently. Police pretty reliably jump in. So this is something different. This is a Milgram problem.
matt
I think it’s the weak, soft culture of Texas policing that’s at fault in this instance.
H.E.Wolf
@Geminid:
Thank you! I’m very fond of a good blog; I’ll take a look at this one.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Except that when your leaders fail, you have an obligation to act. And you are giving them a pass on that. You’re defending authority over morality.
Chris
@artem1s:
Yeah, the idea seems to be that there are a lot of heavily armed bad dudes out there and that our cops need to be heavily armed so they can take them on. But in real life, it’s notable that the cops have repeatedly shown no interest in going after the heavily armed dudes. We hear about cops discharging their fireweapons in questionable circumstances all the time, but it’s never “cop gets into shootout with MS-13 gangster.” It’s always just some random unarmed guy, or protesters whose views offend them.
If cops actually did aggressively pursue violent criminals, even if the number of innocent or harmless people they harassed and killed wasn’t reduced at all, criticism of the police would drop by a lot. There’d be a much more widespread argument that we’re accepting one evil to stamp out another. Instead what we have almost everywhere is police departments that bleed the public treasury dry, that behave like armies of occupation, and we have absolutely nothing to show for it.
trollhattan
@cain: Well now, I hope to fuck he enjoyed his extended camera time executing the dumbest campaign for the dumbest of reasons I have heard of in years. Did he participate in tackling drills himself?
Citizen Alan
@cain:
This is the comment I made to one of them which nearly ended our friendship (and it still hasn’t recovered).
Martin
@Chris: Exactly. This is where we talk about the oath that public officials to take which is intended to get them to act in a reliably moral manner. We expect public services to be loyal to the constitution, not to their bosses, to the thing they swear they will do and uphold, not what might be written on their next performance review.
I’m not saying there’s an easy answer here. It’s a difficult thing to enforce because you don’t want all order to break down, but we should ask Adam what the consequences are of a military officer if they obey an illegal order. They are expected to exercise independent judgement and take reasonable steps when given such an order, which may include refusing that order.
But refusing to engage with the core problem will just lead to it repeating. Did anyone get fired after Uvalde? No. Guess what pattern of behavior we just institutionalized.
Martin
@artem1s: Yeah, ALICE isn’t used any more. In practice, I suspect nothing is used any more because the contract is irreparably broken and everyone is now on their own.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: True enough.
But any cop who is faced with a situation like we have been discussing and are not able to step up to protect the people they are supposed to protect and serve?
That’s the day that cop should step down and stop being a cop or at least move to desk duty.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: No, I am not. I wasn’t making a larger point than what wrote. You are reading into it. Also, if you would read the very first sentence of my comment, you might notice that I said I was not defending the cops.
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s true. But I don’t think that’s all that germane. You may not know how you’d react, but taking a job where the required reaction is to go into the building and stop the shooter means it doesn’t matter what your natural reaction would be. Choosing to be a cop means you forfeit your right to the reflexive reaction of running from danger (or at least, the reflexive reaction of not running into danger to stop it). Cops don’t get the luxury of going with their natural reaction, because they have sworn an oath to supposedly protect and serve, and we give them weapons and absurd amounts of power to do so. Meaning they need to fucking do so when shit hits the fan. If in the moment they feel scared? Tough crap, do your fucking job.
Citizen Alan
@Soprano2: Not a violent incident, but back in my teaching days, I caught a girl standing around the side of the building with a cigarette in her mouth and holding up a lighter. But she had not actually light the cigarette yet, and that was the vice-principal’s basis for not disciplining her. Anything to avoid disciplining a child and have a parent come in and yell at them.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: As I said in a reply to Alison Rose, I don’t think that a cop who has faced this situation and not been able to respond should still be able to wear a badge.
Ol_Froth
@Jackie M: Thankfully, I’m retired now. I know work with kids that have special needs.
trollhattan
@Citizen Alan: How things change. My HS had not one but several smokers porches for students. One was sub-designated for weed.
Ah, the ’70s–Make America Fire Up Again–MAFUA!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris:
They have fictional cops on TV shows to do that for them.
Ol_Froth
@Martin: That’s contrary to what I was taught as an ALICE instructor. It may be that the training changed at some point from when you went through it and when I did.
Marmot
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed.
BlueGuitarist
@H.E.Wolf: @taumaturgo: @Marmot:
Precinct lines can be frustratingly weird.
Working from Dave’s Redistricting App:
7 precincts cover part of the city of Uvalde, only 1 of those is entirely within city limits. Beto carried that precinct by 15 points; 2 additional precincts are almost entirely within the city; Beto beat Abbott in those by 7 and 42 points. Turnout was about 46% of CVAP (Citizens of Voting Age Population).
sixthdoctor
@Alison Rose: OK, this made me burst out in laughter so I just wanted to thank you…
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: Part of what I was doing was riffing off things that I had to think about and face when I was thinking about being a soldier and while I was serving. Did I think that I could do the things I might be asked to do? Yes. Was I trained to do them? Yes. Was I tested on it? On some things, yes. Not on others. So I don’t know how I would act in certain situations.
Chris
@Martin:
The other thing that reduces my sympathy here is that cops are not, as a class, particularly known for their respect for authority or their strict adherence to rules. They’re not soldiers. They break the rules and refuse to follow orders all the fucking time, and due to the ludicrous amount of protection we’ve agreed with their unions to give them, they generally get away with it.
So I’m going to look a lot more sideways at you when I hear you invoke rules and orders than I will the average guy. Your profession has a chronic problem with turning off body cams, planting evidence, and assaulting people in broad daylight that would have had most any of us average joes fired a long time ago. Don’t fucking tell me that all of you suddenly turned into assiduous order-followers just in time for this crisis to happen.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: You are wiser than a lot of people I’ve talked to, who are certain they could immediately shoot someone who broke into their house. My husband says they have no idea what they are talking about.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, it increasingly feels like that’s exactly the role that crime fiction fulfills in society, and it’s why the “copaganda” discussion has arisen in the last ten years.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: But your point doesn’t fit what happened. I agree that police don’t know how they’ll react. But that’s not going to happen to 400 police simultaneously, when every previous interaction with a gunman (and good lord do we have plenty of examples to choose from) the policy reliably confront the gunman. Sure, maybe they’re a cop here and there that doesn’t, but in generally they reliably engage.
You’re making an excuse – assigning a very human and uncontrollable response to a large group of police when we have plenty of data to suggest it doesn’t happen with that kind of frequency and on that kind of scale. Even if we take the US Army observation that drafted soldiers refuse to engage at a rate of 75%, there would still be 100 officers ready to engage. That’s more than enough. And yet, they didn’t engage. So your excuse doesn’t make sense for what actually happened. Some individual officers – sure – no question. Further, I don’t think being afraid of engaging with a gunman is a fireable offense – reassignment instead. (I was going to say if you have a punisher logo and refuse to engage you should be fired, but I think you should just be fired if you have a punisher logo. Just immediately disqualifying.)
And that’s why I say it’s an excuse. Because we *should* be compassionate to people who can’t execute in a situation like that. But if you give all of these officers that pass, we’re completely fucked. And I think it’s patronizing to make that argument, because I think the problem is an entirely different one that’s pretty goddamn obvious if you apply just a bit of critical thinking, and you’re just excusing that.
And maybe it’s a bit unfair of me, because I expect you would see that because there are direct mappings between this and people in military service. And if we look at military failings they are rarely if ever individual soldiers refusing to engage, and almost always failures of leadership combined with being overly deferential to authority and not stepping up or speaking out against illegal orders. That’s a recurring theme.
That some of the officers may have been unwilling to engage is irrelevant to what happened at Uvalde. We should assume that at least some were unwilling to engage. That wouldn’t have any impact on that day whatsoever.
Martin
@Ol_Froth: Could be.
wjca
As long as the Latin phrase in question isn’t stare decisis. :-)
trollhattan
@wjca: More like scary decisis, amirite?
“We shall now unsettle this settled law.”
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Decades ago the guns themselves were not AS dangerous. A semi automatic clip loaded AR-15 or even the .45 semi auto pistol I carried on in port duty in the Navy over 50 yrs ago could be reloaded a lot faster than a revolver like most cops carried at the time and for the most part that is how much of civilian and police arms were until around 4 decades ago. And yes a revolver could still kill someone but it was a lot more difficult to reload and didn’t carry the number of shots as that .45 pistol was capable of.
That said, that police revolver was still a deadly weapon. But the last 4 decades this country and humanity has changed in so many ways, not all of them good and the growth of the population is one of them, because of other issues in this country, such as racism. Economic growth and/or almost non growth has played a part in that as well. Unfettered gun sales, AR15 style guns, population growth, conservative politics, have all affected life over time and in some ways are connected. Conservatives see their concepts of politics and life being pushed aside. Liberals see that not happening fast enough. That can affect humans in many different ways, some of them really not good. Please do not take what I’m saying as we don’t need/shouldn’t change, I believe we are on a better path, but I also believe that not everyone in this country will agree with that.
Barbara
Well, okay, it’s not natural to run into a burning building but we are unlikely to accept that as an excuse for refusing to do just that if you train to be a fire fighter. There may be other excuses for why police refused to engage the Uvalde shooter but fear of being shot can’t be one of them.
Martin
@Chris: They are extremely selective about that. They are highly deferential to other cops, and much less so to other civil institutions. And these dynamics also change depending on visible they are. This is true for all groups. It’s harder to stand up to authority in larger groups because we are extremely conditioned to conformity – especially if you are conservative. Similarly, apart from a group it’s easier to ignore rules.
There are real challenges to actively creating environments that can counter these instincts. See Israel’s 10th man policy. Sometimes you have to institutionalize the role of dissent – it’s your job to argue the boss is wrong, because we _know_ groupthink and deference to authority is a serious problem, especially in communities where discipline and hierarchy are strongly reinforced.
Tony G
@Baud: Maybe — but I think that is’s more of a make-believe macho-man fetish. I know a young man who uses an AR-15 to hunt deer. He should be wearing a big sign that says “I am such a lousy hunter that I need a semi-automatic rifle with a 30-round magazine to shoot a deer.”
UncleEbeneezer
@Chris: If they were the principled heroes that Copaganda shows portray them as, they would’ve also lined up to get the Covid vaccine, both for the public good, not to mention the fact that Covid was the actual number one Cop-Killer for a while.
wjca
My recollection is different. It is that they were taken over by the gun manufacturers (to be a group marketing organization), with the far-right crypto-terrorist fringe being merely useful idiots.
Chris
@Martin:
They’re deferential to cops so long as cops abide by the groupthink consensus. But as soon as they get a reputation for being on the side of reform, even police chiefs tend to simply be ignored. There are some of them who’ve tried to enforce rules regarding things like body cams in the last decade, for example – they simply get ignored, and the union means they can’t really enforce any discipline anyway.
Chris
@wjca:
I wasn’t born yet, this is what I’ve read, so I’ll take your word for it. But this sounds like the general thing in movement conservatism – there are true believing ideologues, there are profit-driven cynics, but the line between the two tends to get really blurry really fast.
Martin
@wjca: I think these were somewhat concurrent. The timing suggests that the shift of the NRA into conservative politics was either a reaction to the civil rights movement and the party realignment under Nixon, and/or was parallel to the abortion/religious liberty wedge issue for the same aims – to push voters off the democratic party. Looks more like the former with the latter happening later. The shift in the NRA was a specific event, not a gradual thing.
The gun industry appear to have not been a big factor until slightly later once the NRAs legislative agenda was clear – that’s when they jumped in.
brendancalling
@Citizen Alan: exactly. This is why I say ACAB, because 99.99% of them can’t answer yes to all three of those questions.
gvg
@scav: You can have multiple “we” categories in your head and heart. In that case the cop was correct. His family was putting him in the group “cops who failed to protect our own kids”.
Geminid
@wjca: It was a bunch of ideologues led by Wayne LaPierre who took over the NRA. They probably had firearms industry backing, but their motivation was political. An immediate issue was an effort by the old leadership to move NRA headquarters to Colorado. The intent was to step back from politics and focus on the organization’s original purpose: teaching marksmanship and gun safety.
Coincidentally, there was an unrelated but similar takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1970s, by conservative preachers. They too had a political agenda, and it ran against the Baptists’ traditional belief in the separation of Church and State.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: I am sorry that I wrote something that was not exactly directly on point with the discussion in the thread. There were a host of failures at almost every level in the police response at Uvalde. I am not disputing or excusing that. I was making a point about human nature and, perhaps, people’s willingness to throw around the word coward. If you chose to interpret that as me excusing their conduct on the day, that is on you but it isn’t what I was doing.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I don’t know much about guns, but I see that some of these attackers try to harm as many people as they can as fast as possible before they are captured or killed. But I think I understand your point about the development of more deadly weapons and other changes.
Change and dealing with change is part of human society, and reaction to change cannot always be mapped as liberal or conservative. Did you ever watch the PBS Series Connections?
If not, or you would like a reminder, try Episode 1, The Trigger Effect.
cain
@Citizen Alan: It’s really hard to be an honest cop – especially if part of it is policing your own. I mean, that’s why you have internal affairs because you’re just not going to get cops ratting out other cops.
cain
@Alison Rose:
lol – I’ll readily admit that I aborted my pregnancy. :)
Marmot
@cain: Then I misunderstood your point. My apologies.
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
Would you say the same of an Army platoon that refused to defend the country during an attack? Oh, sorry! Some of us are cowards, some heroes and some in between, so we’ll just let go even though we are trained to attack and/or defend? Bullshit. They signed up for the job and if they refuse to do it after all their posturing, they deserve any and all crap we can throw at them. I think of 9/11 and the cops and firefighters doing their jobs despite knowing they were going to die. That. Is. Their. Job.
Chris
@Geminid:
Oh yeah, this was happening to institutions everywhere in society, as part of the general backlash against the sixties (and, less blatantly, against the success of left-liberal politics in general earlier in the century). It isn’t even limited to the United States. The Catholic Church experienced this too – John Paul II and Benedict XVI were one long extended backlash against the reformer spirit that had produced Vatican II.
ETA: honestly, this is as good a point as any to mark as the “where it all went wrong” moment, that kick-started the process that’s now culminating in the rise of fascist politics all over the world. An honest conversation with the New Left and assorted movements on the part of (forgive the hippie word) “the establishment” would’ve done society a world of good over the long run. Instead they slammed the door shut and leaned on the far right for support. And they kept feeding the far right for the next half century. What we see now is the result.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: And. They. Should. Not. Be. In. That. Job. After. That. Day.
Paul in KY
@Ol_Froth: These bozos will line up at the convenience store with their piece strapped on their hip. The person behind them just has to pull out the good ole 12th century blackjack & club them in back of head & bend down & take their $700 weapon.
Paul in KY
@Martin: As I said in #22 above, many times in war the troops (well trained, equipped & combat ready) have to be actually ordered to do their job. There was a complete failure of command there at Uvalde. All the police went along with it, as they were scared & the kids were brown (IMO).
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: I do agree that interacting only with losers & weirdos & asswipes (some of those being your fellow workers) all day, day after day, eats away at you. It has to.
Paul in KY
@Chris: That would have made a great movie…
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s where if you aren’t acting the ‘correct’ way, your superior is supposed to put a foot up your ass & motivate you to act the way your job should compel you to do (without the extra motivation, though that is sometimes necessary).
Paul in KY
@Martin: They weren’t afraid of the boss. The boss was afraid.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Soprano2:
I am one of those people that joined the military during a war, Vietnam. I did it because I got to the point the waiting for that letter in the mail was more stress than I could stand. They announced the draft lottery about a week after I walked in the enlistment office. When the lottery actually happened just a bit later, my number was 15. I was going one way or another. I liked my way just a tad better. And then after boot camp and training for months, I was assigned to a ship. On that ship I had to carry a loaded .45 semi auto pistol on in port watch. The order was shoot to kill any intruder. I stood that watch for 2 yrs. Never had to take it out of the holster except to hand it over to the next man on watch. I’ve not fired a weapon since getting out of the Navy. Only ever had to shoot it to qualify. That decision to use that weapon was like being a cop, it’s your discretion but it implies that you might easily be in the line of fire. I think I could have done it but I don’t think anyone can actually imagine how that feels to contemplate. I’ve sat in group at the VA listening to men that had to fight in combat, you cannot imagine how glad and relieved I felt that I never had to do that.
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think you were excusing them, but when it comes to an adult with the training to take on a shooter and who is wearing a uniform and a gun who instead lets children take the fall for them because they’re too scared to do the job they chose, I am 100% fine calling that person a coward.
If I were in a room with a small child and someone burst in with a gun and aimed it at that child, I would absolutely try to put myself between the gun and the child. And I don’t even like children and I sure as heck never held a job that meant my life might very well be at risk in the normal course of doing my job.
Paul in KY
@Alison Rose: Everyone in that kind of job (police/military) should feel some level of scardness. That’s normal. Your training & support from your leaders/fellow troops is supposed to ensure you overcome that & do your job.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: Ha! You hit the nail on the head there.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: You don’t know that. You hope that you would. Until you are actually there, you can’t know.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Excellent point! Tho, by that same standard, they do not face the same penalties that a soldier in battle would face for rank disobeying of orders. Thus, they can shirk their duties (if they wish) with minimal repercussions (compared to being shot by a firing squad, for example).
Omnes Omnibus
@Paul in KY: And there was a massive failure of leadership. I think that I must have failed to make my original comment as clear as I thought I had. I had no intention of defending or excusing the actions or, more accurately, the lack of action by law enforcement in Uvalde.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: Wheel guns generally are more reliable when discharged than slide guns (which are prone to jamming).
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, I can certainly say that in the moment, weighing putting my life at risk or living the rest of my life with the massive guilt and PTSD that would arise from standing by and watching a child be murdered, yes I would chose the former.
You’re starting to get ridiculous here. It is NOT the case that no one can ever ever ever ever ever know how they would react in a bad situation. I know myself. I know that if I watched a child die and I did nothing to prevent it, I would likely end up unaliving myself at some point because living with the guilt and terror that would leave me with permanently would be untenable. You seem to think you can read all of our minds, and you cannot. If someone says “I don’t know, I might just let the kid get shot”, that person is a sociopath. What would be the point of protecting my own life in that situation if the rest of my life would be a horrorshow because of my lack of action?
I did witness someone’s death once, in a situation that I had nothing to do with and zero ability to prevent, and I think about it almost every day. Not with guilt, but with horror and sadness. If I had been the one to cause it — which, if you stand by and allow someone to be shot, you caused their death indirectly — I can state with 100% confidence that I would never forgive myself for it, and that I likely would not be able to keep living with myself.
Look, I know you weren’t saying it was okay that the cops did what they did (or didn’t do what they should’ve done, more accurately). But you are digging a hole here by telling people “No, I know you and your mind better than you do and there’s a good chance you would totally let a toddler get shot in the face right in front of you” and I think you need to ask yourself why you feel it’s so important to make sure we all know we might turn out to be sociopaths who don’t mind watching people get killed.
Paul in KY
@Martin: The Romans (IMO) would have lined them up and officially decimated the unit and then the non-decimated ones would have been put into a penal unit that had to do what it failed to do multiple times to be back into respected status.
Paul in KY
@Tony G: Around here (Central KY) it is illegal to hunt deer with a .223 round. Not big enough to immediately put one down.
Paul in KY
@geg6: Hear hear!!!!
RAM
I’ve thought for a long time now that all serving cops, and all future officers, should be screened for mental and emotional problems on a regular basis, and especially for unreasonable fear, which seems to have led to all those murders by law enforcement. It looks as if the entire Texas law enforcement community ought to be first in line for that screening. When I was a youngster learning gun safety, we were taught that drinking and guns was extremely dangerous. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that a coward with a gun is the most dangerous person of all. Which is why seeing all those cowardly right-wing thugs engaging in open carry gives me the creeps.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: See the points you were trying to make above. Think I am in agreement with them.
You really do not actually * know * what you will do in a life & death situation, until you are confronted with it.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Alison Rose: like Vickie Soto. One of the Sandy Hook teachers who along with the rest of the school heard the gunfire when Adam Lanza shot out the window next to the front school door and then shot the school principal who confronted him in the lobby. Vickie hid her class in closet and when the shooter entered her class she tried to talk him down. He shot her and then six of her students who fled their hiding place in terror…school teachers are my heroes. But they shouldn’t have to be.
Chris
@RAM:
The thing is, a lot of those “mental and emotional issues” that you identify as cowardice aren’t native to specific cops, they’re something that they’re socialized into by the police groupthink. Everywhere they go the hive mind consensus beats it into them that the entire world is out to get them, that their job is uniquely and extremely dangerous, that all of society is biased and prejudiced and hateful against them, that any attempt to hold them to professional standards is an assault on them as a person, and that their first, last, and most important job is to go home alive at the end of their shift.
What we see now is the result of that.
Paul in KY
@RAM: Good points, but you can’t always believe the “I feared for my life.” card. Sometimes, they just like shooting brown (mostly) people who piss them off.
Now I will say that if you (an adult person or near adulthood) point an actual gun (loaded or unloaded) or a facsimile that sure looks like a gun at a cop, I say shoot your ass. I don’t generally have any problems with cops who shoot people who point firearms (or crossbows, I guess) at them. It’s the shooting of people who point cell phones & wallets & bottles of beer at them that enrage me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose: I am not saying that there is a good chance that you or anyone here would let a kid get shot in the face. I am saying that I have seen people freeze in stressful situations and I have seen people react quickly and calmly in the same situation. It isn’t always who you would expect who behaves either way, and we can’t know what we would do unless we are in the situation.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree.
But if you’re a cop and you freeze, and you don’t go in to try to stop an active shooter, you had better resign or ask for a desk job the following day.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I have stated something similar several times in this thread while apparently also offering a just following orders defense of the Uvalde police and calling jackals sociopaths. This has been a wonderful thread.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: There is a lot of free floating righteousness here, just waiting for a target. So Martin got jackal-piled a few months ago and today it was your turn. I commend your resilience though.. i don’t know if I could have done it.
wjca
My impression was that LaPierre was heavily subsidized by the gun manufacturers from the very beginning. But it might well have been that they selected him to back based on his preexisting ideology.
Ruckus
@Paul in KY:
They might be if they are not clean and lubed properly/regularly and manufactured properly. But in manufacturing these days tolerances that once were impossible is now achieved all the time. I know because most of my life I worked in specialty machining of metals. The last job I did a couple of years ago required tolerances of +/- 25 millionths of an inch. That’s 20 times smaller than normal tolerances that we used when I went into the business. My point is that slide guns do not jam all that often, any more than AR-15s do or the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) or the Thompson sub machine guns we carried on board the ship I served on. The concept that they did is old news from before the time of anyone alive today. And no, that is not to say everything is manufactured to such tolerances, but it is far easier to get to much smaller tolerances today than it was when my father did his apprenticeship before WWII.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: FWIW, I understood what you meant. Some people seemed to take something similar I wrote in the post the wrong way too — as if I were excusing the cops. I wasn’t, but as a survivor of a workplace shooting, I sympathize with anyone who has experienced that brand of trauma. It will haunt them for the rest of their days.
Geminid
@wjca: I really don’t know how the industry relationship worked. I figured that LaPierre was a “movement conservative” who saw a chance to capture a leading institution and made the most of it. The industry could definitely see the threat posed by gun control legislation so they might have helped
Ruckus
@Alison Rose:
I am not questioning that you know yourself or not, I’d bet you do.
What Omnes is saying, what the human truth is, is that you don’t know exactly what you would do in any situation. You might do exceedingly well, you might freeze. Some situations are such that we know what we would do but some situations are only hypothetical, until they aren’t. I’ve been shot at – once, on the outskirts of the city, walking back to my ship. If I had run that fast in an olympic race, I’d have a gold medal. As reality is, in olympic medal running terms, I’m a lead medal winner. On the plus side I do know what a bullet going by me about 1 foot away sounds like. It sounds like your life flashing before your eyes.
My point is we think we know, sometimes we’ve been trained on what to do, but some situations are such that we just don’t know. Every situation is different and no matter how well you train, how well you think you know yourself, how strong, fast, responsive, knowledgeable, well trained, until you’ve been in a deadly situation, you really don’t know. I’ve been hit literally head on by a pickup truck. I wasn’t in a car, I was going home on my motorcycle and I was wearing a helmet and protective gear and extremely luckily I walked away. I did break my thumb. Hand hit the corner of the hood while my head was under the bumper. After flying through the air with the greatest of ease. Good times.
lowtechcyclist
@Chris:
I have heard that that’s a common attitude among police, and if so, that’s a real problem. The world is full of jobs where that is not a problem, and there are a fair number where it’s actually a plus. And someone with that attitude should find a job in one of those categories. But policing isn’t one of them.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
I’ve had 2 buddies that were cops. One a deputy sheriff, one a highway patrolman. The premise of being a cop is, in my experience, quite different than what non cops (and potential cops) think it is. And it is different today than it was 50 yrs ago. Some of that is the weapons and in this country the availability of them. And some of it is that there are just so many more of us. US population, 1920 – just over 106 million, 2020 – just under 331 1/2 million.
Tony G
@Paul in KY: That’s probably the case up here in New Jersey too (I’m not sure, being neither a hunter nor a gun owner). The “kid” (mid-twenties — son or a relative) is not very bright, and he loves to brag about his “arsenal” of guns. Hell, he might just be making stuff up about hunting with an AR-15, under the illusion that somebody would be impressed. Not my favorite relative.
Paul in KY
@Ruckus: Sometimes it depends on the ammo. Hollow point bullets seem to jam much more frequently than a solid or FMJ round.
Paul in KY
@Tony G: A braggart young man! There is a few of them. Just not be around when he brings one out to show it off! Cause he will…
Tony G
@Tony G: I have nothing against hunting (I’m neither a vegan nor a vegetarian) but some percentage of hunters who I’ve met over the years have become fetishists with hard-ons for their semi-automatic weapons — I’m sorry, I meant to say patriots who have great respect for the Second Amendment. They love the NRA propaganda — but I suspect that they’d been the same way if the NRA were to disappear. Their semi-automatic weapons just made them believe that they have bigger dicks, and they’d feel emasculated without them. Delicate snowflakes.
Tony G
@Paul in KY: Yeah. Someone who I try to avoid whenever possible!
Ruckus
@Paul in KY:
I’m not that up on guns or ammo any more. Used to be – in the way, way back.
The small arms the Navy carried on the ship I was stationed on back when I was in were .45 semi auto pistol – what I carried, Thompson sub machine gun which used the same .45 solid round, Browning Automatic Rifle which used .30-.06. If there were other small arms, I never saw them. Also ASROC, 5 inch gun with separate cartridge and shell, Tarter SAM single rail guided missile, and torpedo tubes.
Ruckus
Betty, we got way off the post topic and while I am so troubled that this could happen, it did.
We as a country, as humans, need to do better. We have private ownership of guns because of our history. We have some who worship guns, possibly for the same reason, possibly for power or because they are adults who have never grown the hell up. We have a history of being a subsidiary of another country, which we fought a war with to become a new free country. We have a history of a civil war fought over hate/racism/money-slavery. The bigger we – humans – have been having wars and all sorts of conflicts over the same reasons for centuries. And I don’t believe we are done. But we are getting to a point, with the world’s population, food availability, housing, governing, that has improved, but not all that much in the last 200 yrs. Communications have made it more obvious to more people that we have to grow the hell up and do better for all of us. We have to look at all possible ways to lessen selfishness, to find ways to all live here and live better or we are at some point going to have another war which will likely kill most of us, and set the remaining humanity back several hundred years. This would not be the first time we’ve reached, if not this same point, similar points, in history. I learned long ago that holding one’s breath till it’s fixed really doesn’t work in any way shape or form. I’m on the downhill stage of life, I may have 20-25 yrs left, maybe not. I’m not holding my breath that humanity will grow up before it’s too late for me to see this animal kingdom become less selfish, less waring, less pompous, respectful rather than hateful, realistic rather than sanctimonious, forgiving rather than hateful, and just better all around and for actually ALL rather than for a few dollars, pounds, euros, yen, yuan, etc.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I hope you didn’t take my comment as disagreement. I was agreeing with you, and riffing off of what you were suggesting.
Communication is complicated.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: Hair triggers here lately, for sure.
AnotherKevin
@Alison Rose: Amen
AnotherKevin
@Alce _e_ardillo: Yep!
AnotherKevin
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think cops get that out. Its the job they chose.