I had planned on avoiding writing about the Uvalde school shooting entirely. At this point, let’s face it, nobody’s going to change their mind either way, so why bother? But a new detail has emerged about the mass murder which almost beggars belief. Almost – because we’ve seen this movie before.
While a deranged gunman, who had clearly signalled his intent multiple times, did exactly what everyone who knew him knew he was going to do eventually, police… simply stood by.
This is what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a teenage gunman went on a rampage in 2018: a Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy on duty at the school, armed and in uniform, hid behind a concrete column next to a stairwell the entire time.
It’s happened again.
Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.
“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.
Horrifying video shows parents screaming at police to do something instead of hiding behind their yellow tape. When some parents tried to do what the police would not, they were held back by officers.
Minutes earlier, Carranza had watched as Salvador Ramos crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home who ran away uninjured.
Officials say he “encountered” a school district security officer outside the school, though there were conflicting reports from authorities on whether the men exchanged gunfire. After running inside, he fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers who were outside the building, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine. The police officers were injured.
After entering the school, Ramos charged into one classroom and began to kill […]
Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him, though a department spokesman said later that they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.
According to one source, Border Patrol agents “had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key”. So, they not only stood by while a single gunman slaughtered a room full of children, they couldn’t bust down a door, either – and had to get someone else to operate a key in a lock for them.
Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner.
“There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said.
Unbelievably, it’s alleged that some police entered the school and rescued their own children during the active shooter situation.
As is also common in these shootings, as scholar Wilfred Reilly notes, are “three to four-plus major red flags (the Buffalo guy butchered a live cat on video just days earlier)”.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Ramos, a resident of the small town about 85 miles (135 kilometres) west of San Antonio, had no known criminal or mental health history […]
About a half-hour before the mass shooting, Ramos sent the first of three online messages warning about his plans, Abbott said.
AP News
But there’s more – a lot more.
The gunman who slaughtered 19 kids and two teachers at a Texas elementary school reportedly exhibited increasingly bizarre behavior leading up to the rampage – including cutting up his face with knives just “for fun”, friends said […]
[Santos Valdez Jr.] also described how Ramos used to drive around with another pal and shoot people at random with a BB gun – and also egged people’s cars […]
[S]everal other people familiar with the family said Ramos’ mother used drugs, which contributed to the trouble at home, according to the Washington Post, which said it could not reach her for comment.
NY Post
Sure, it’s easy enough to criticise police in hindsight, but in this case we have real-time footage of people begging police to do something. Others have argued that the police would be reluctant to make the situation worse, which begs the question: what could possibly be worse than a locked classroom full of dead kids?