[The police made] the wrong decision [not to go into the building and neutralize Ramos], period. There’s no excuse for that. When it comes to an active shooter, you don’t have to wait on tactical gear, plain and simple.
Steven McCraw, Director, Texas Department of Public Safety
On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde Texas, and shot dead 19 children and 2 teachers. Initial reports were that the police acted quickly, engaging the gunman outside the school, but could not prevent him from getting inside and start killing. However, before the actual facts about what happened had become clear, the usual politicians and activists rushed to the camera to use the bodies of the dead children as props in their campaigns to blame Republicans and enact their longstanding agenda to enact major gun control.
Since the mass shooting of the children by a deranged gunman had literally nothing to do with the 2020 death by cardiac arrest of his beloved multi-felon George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Barak Obama rushed to the cameras to “gain street cred” by “romanticizing” Floyd and link these completely unrelated events. Later, in additional tweets, still knowing nothing about whether it was relevant to this case or not, Obama called for Criminal Justice reform and promoted “reimagining” the “policing pledge”.
Social activist high school degree Michael Moore, knowing nothing about the actual facts of the shooting, immediately ran to the cameras to inform the peasants that ‘It’s time to repeal the 2nd amendment” and, having read the minds of the “founding fathers” with his crystal ball, added that if they knew bullets would be invented after they wrote the [2nd] Amendment, they “wouldn’t have written it that way.” Moore also instructed the deplorables that “We don’t need … sensible gun control. … We need the hardcore stuff … “.
Joe Biden, not knowing the actual facts about what happened, ran to the cameras to attack the “gun lobby” and make transparently false statements about what everybody knows: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby. When in God’s name do we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” He also informed the plebes that their 2nd amendment constitutional right to bear arms in order to protect themselves is “not absolute”.
In order to get some momentum for his flagging campaign for Texas Governor, in which he was trailing Abbott by about 7 points, Beto O’Rourke barged into a press conference in which Gov. Abbott was trying to give information and console the families of the victims, yelling that “The time to stop the next shooting is now and you are doing nothing.” After being escorted out of the press conference, Beto added that “These kids died because the governor of the state of Texas … chose to do nothing.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, knowing nothing of the actual facts, ran to the cameras, invoking the Marxist notion of the “patriarchy,” to blame America’s “patriarchal society” and masculinity “rooted in the subjugation of other people” on the day after the attack.
Democrat Senator Ed Markey, seeing the bodies of the dead children as an excellent opportunity to push his political wish-list, ran to the cameras to call for packing the Supreme Court to counter the “threat which an illegitimate, far-right Supreme Court poses to gun safety in our country”.
San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler, eager to show how much he cares and, apparently, believing the view, trendy in San Francisco boutiques, that the Uvalde shooting is an expression of something deeply wrong with American patriotism, stated that he will no longer stand for the anthem until he “feels better about the direction of our country”.
Thousands of people angrily protested the standard scapegoat, the NRA, outside their convention in Houston and anti-gun celebrity Bette Midler, who is herself always protected by armed bodyguards, urged protestors at the NRA convention to “come armed.”
As so often happens in such cases, however, initial accounts of the shooting were wildly wrong. First, the “school resource officer” responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools” was not on campus at the time. Second, the police did not engage the shooter outside the school as originally reported. Third, despite the fact that Uvalde police already had a “security system” to deal with such shooters, they did not use it and did not go into the school to confront the shooter. Fourth, the shooter simply walked into the school through an unlocked door that was supposed to be locked. Finally, Ramos made threats of rapes and school shootings in the weeks leading up to the shooting on Yubo, and the Uvalde school district had been monitoring social media for threats but “failed to pick up” on the threat.
The culprit for the Uvalde shooting is not, therefore, Gov. Abbott, the Republicans, the 2nd amendment, the “gun lobby”, the Patriarchy, the NRA, the “far-right Supreme Court”, American patriotism, or any of the other standard bugaboos on the all-purpose leftist script. The problem is much simpler, namely that a lot of people in authority did not do their job.
It should, therefore, be possible to stop such shootings in the future without taking away people’s constitutional rights. One might start by locking school doors. One might require that the school resource officer is on campus at all times. One might require police officers to follow the protocols. One might monitor troublesome students closely and require that they get psychological help.
We have seen this farce before. When CNN held a town hall after the 2018 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School, the auditorium reflexively cheered Sheriff Scott Israel when he criticized the NRA. However, Israel is no longer the Broward County Sheriff. It turns out that before the shooting, Israel had earlier changed the department policies concerning active shooters from the instruction that they “shall” confront the shooter to the policy that they “may” confront the shooter. As a consequence, Israel’s deputies hid behind patrol cars outside the school while students were being gunned down inside. In April 2018, the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association voted 534–94 “no confidence” against Israel. In January 2019, Governor DeSantis suspended Israel and in October 2019 a special session of the Florida Senate voted to uphold the suspension.
The unnecessary death in the Stoneman Douglas shooting, like the unnecessary death in the Uvalde school shooting, had literally nothing to do with the NRA, Republicans, the “gun lobby,” the “Patriarchy”, and the “far-right Supreme Court” or traditional American patriotism. These leftist bugaboos provide useful deflections for incompetent buffoons like Sheriff Israel, just as they provide useful deflections for crass politicians who ignore real, often simple, solutions, like making sure the school doors are locked or that armed school resource officers are always present on campus in favor self-serving demagoguery designed to help their personal careers or political goals.
Listen, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, O.J. Simpson would still be in the record books.
Sheriff Scott Israel’s response to Jake Tapper’s Feb 26, 2018 question whether lives at Stoneman Douglas could have been saved if his Office had performed better.
By Richard McDonough
Richard Michael McDonough, American philosophy educator. Achievements include production of original interpretation of Wittgenstein’s logical-metaphysical system, original application Kantian Copernican Revolution to philosophy of language; significant interdisciplinary work logic, linguistics, psychology & philosophy. Member Australasian Debating Federation (honorary life, adjudicator since 1991), Phi Kappa Phi. Richard is a regular contributor to The Blue State Conservative.
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