Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Another LEO Screwup in Uvalde

Based upon my years of experience as a public high school teacher, I would wager that a student, not a teacher, propped the door open. The high school I worked in has 124 doors, and the kids were always doing such things to cut time getting to the next class or smoke.

We had armed resource officers in the building, but only two with a population of 3,000+ students. There were instances of outside adults getting into the building (in search of sex with students). Another time a teacher mistook chalk dust in a baggie for anthrax. We had a lockdown until the State Police brought their mobile testing lab up from the State Capital, Trenton, about an hour away. It was a hot June day. Students and teachers were stuck wherever they happened to be when the lockdown was announced. Luckily, I was in an air conditioned empty classroom. The whole affair was quite the clusterfark. I am so glad I'm retired.

In the case of my school, the police department was right next door.

Special Ed students couldn't be punished for bad behavior until a "determination" meeting was held to decide if the behavior was a function of the kid's "disability". I taught Special Ed. That was 12 years ago. I can't imagine what nonsense federal education law has come up with since then.

This is going to sound strange, but the Supreme Court has ruled that the Police have no duty to put themselves in harms way.

LEO run into trouble when everyone else is running away. Job description.

Instead, Rangers should arrest the cowardly officers for "obstruction of justice" for preventing parents and other LEO agencies from going in there to resolve what the cowards refused to do.

Ramos was known to be trouble. He got into fights, slashed his own face, told friends he hoped to join the military so he could kill people and posted multiple rape and death threats on the app Yubo. One girl reported him, but online harassment reports are probably common which led to these complaints not receiving a second glance. Where the line to inform authorities becomes clearer was when he posted pictures of bags of dead cats. He also drove around town shooting people with a BB gun. Texas courts consider BB guns as deadly weapons. Assault charges could have been filed, preventing Ramos from buying his weapons. There were plenty of laws that could have stopped this kid.

We’ve learned that a door was propped open or left unlocked at Robb Elementary School (the story keeps changing on what exactly happened), allowing the shooter to enter the building. We’ve also discovered the Uvalde police — despite well-established doctrine that a mass shooter must be confronted immediately by whoever is at hand — hung back for nearly an hour while children were murdered inside. We’ve seen chilling timelines showing repeated cellphone calls from students trapped inside, wondering why no one was coming to help. We’ve seen video of the police not simply failing to protect the children but blocking (and even arresting) parents who tried to get past them to help their kids. When a tactical response team from a nearby US Border Patrol unit showed up, the police even stopped it from going to the rescue right away.

The Uvalde police and school district are now stonewalling the investigation into their actions, refusing to cooperate with Texas authorities. Pete Arredondo, the police chief, hasn’t responded to investigators in days — though, incredibly, he did show up to get sworn in as a Uvalde city councilmember.

These children didn’t die because there’s some sort of dark moral stain on the American soul. They died because the people in charge of protecting them were cowards and frauds, and now those cowards and frauds are trying to avoid responsibility.

We saw the same thing with the Parkland school shooting in Broward County, Fla., where once again a dangerous student was repeatedly let off the hook by fashionably lax disciplinary policies until he committed mass murder. Then, when he did, the police were cowards who hid outside. There too, we were told that the real problem was a moral failing on the part of the hundreds of millions of Americans who were not involved, rather than on the part of the shooter and those who enabled him.

The folks in charge are free to be failures, incompetents and worse with virtually no risk of accountability.

The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always — always — to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.

It seems like these killers — Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz and Uvalde shooter Salvador Ramos, among many others — were known to be problems well before but weren’t properly dealt with. Then, once the shooting started, the police hid behind cars and let children die. Forget the thin blue line — in Uvalde, as in Broward, it was a thin yellow line.

But I don’t mean to just pick on cops. A year ago, the US embassy in Kabul was flying a Pride flag. A few months later, there was no US embassy in Kabul, as the United States made a humiliating withdrawal, a military defeat of cosmic proportions. Just this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted that she had been “wrong” on the threat posed by inflation. Last year she had said, “I think there’s a small risk, and I think it’s manageable.” One of her top jobs is to control inflation. Everyone with a brain saw it coming in the wake of the Trump and Biden administration’s reckless spending. But she didn’t, or pretended that she didn’t, and now Americans are paying top prices for gas, groceries and all the necessities of life. Yellen hasn’t stepped down. She hasn’t even really apologized.

Our ruling class keeps failing, and somehow it’s supposed to be because of Americans’ moral failings. But if Americans have a moral failing, it’s in tolerating rule by the cast of clowns in charge of our institutions.