Texas School Shooting
A state trooper carries a sign handed to him to be place at a memorial honoring the victims killed in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas Saturday, May 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

By Dan Sanchez

Why did they wait? That question must haunt the families of the nineteen children and two adults who were massacred in Uvalde, Texas last week in light of recent revelations about the police response.

Accounts of what happened have been shifting and inconsistent. But according to a timeline published by the Associated Press, while children were trapped with the killer in two adjoining classrooms, as many as nineteen armed officers waited in the hallway outside for over an hour before a rescue was finally executed.

During that time, some of the trapped children called 911, begging for police to be sent in. On one of those calls, gunshots could be heard.

“Roland Gutierrez,” reports The New York Times, “who represents the area in the State Senate, said the family of one of the children killed told him that their daughter had been struck by a single bullet to the back and had bled to death. ‘It is possible she could have been saved, if they had done their jobs,’ Mr. Gutierrez said.”

Just as “justice delayed is justice denied,” rescue delayed can be rescue denied.

A harrowing video circulating online shows family members desperately pleading (some of them screaming) with officers outside the school to rescue their children. Two officers seem to have one man detained on the ground.

Again, why did they wait? The question has undoubtedly baffled many around the world, especially parents of young children. Such a delay seems unfathomable.

While “why it happened” is even less certain than “what happened,” certain reports about the police response raise important considerations about government delays in general that may be relevant to this troubling question.

It is important to remember that all government law enforcement agencies are bureaucracies. And all bureaucracies have certain behavioral tendencies owing to their institutional structure and the incentives that structure generates.

The great economist Ludwig von Mises analyzed these tendencies and incentives in his 1944 book Bureaucracy.

In that book, Mises identified “slowness and slackness” as among the inherent features of government bureaucracy that no reform can remove.

We have all experienced the “slowness and slackness” of government bureaucracy: with the post office, the DMV, the public school system, etc. That’s why the animated movie Zootopia had sloths working at the DMV and everyone got the joke. And police bureaucracies are no exception to this reputation.

Why is this so? In part, it’s due to another indelible feature of bureaucracy: that it is, as Mises wrote, “bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do. His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.”

Sometimes a delay is simply due to the fact that the government employee is too tied up in red tape to respond in a timely manner. The timely response may be outright prohibited by the rules. Or the delay may be owing to Kafkaesque procedural mazes that first must be navigated or chains of command that must be climbed for permission.

This may have been a major factor of the possibly deadly delay in Uvalde. According to The New York Times, command on the scene . . .

“…fell to the chief of a small police department created only four years ago to help provide security at Uvalde’s eight schools. Its chief, Pedro Arredondo, had ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth-graders locked inside with him, the state police said. (…)

Officers were told, under Chief Arredondo’s direction, that the situation had evolved from one with an active shooter — which would call for immediately attacking the gunman, even before rescuing other children — to one with a barricaded subject, which would call for a slower approach, officials said.

That appeared to be an incorrect assessment, according to the state police director, Steven McCraw: Gunfire could sporadically be heard inside the rooms, including on continuing 911 calls by the children.”

The Times also reported:

“The degree to which some law enforcement officers on the scene disagreed with the decision to hold back became more apparent on Saturday, as more became known about their frustrations in the protracted chaos of Tuesday’s shooting.

Specially trained agents from the Border Patrol, who arrived more than 40 minutes after the shooting had begun, had yelled for permission to go in and confront the gunman. ‘What is your problem?’ they asked, according to an official briefed on the response.”

If any officer on the scene earlier harbored a similar disagreement, it may not have made a difference, because “his discretion to act according to his own best conviction,” to use Mises’s words, would have been seriously restricted by “pedantic observance of rigid rules and regulations”

Again, Mises considered such features of bureaucracy to be unreformable. Why? He argued that it is the only way that a government bureaucracy can be made at all accountable to the public. A bureaucrat with a free hand is even more dangerous than a bureaucrat with his hands tied.

“If one assigns to the authorities the power to imprison or even to kill people,” Mises wrote, “one must restrict and clearly circumscribe this power. Otherwise the officeholder or judge would turn into an irresponsible despot.”

“Ultimately,” reports the Times, “the police officers assembled outside won permission to enter the classroom. A team of tactical officers from the Border Patrol and local police agencies breached the door and killed the 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, after he had killed 19 children and two teachers inside.”

The officers who confronted and killed that murderer of children did a magnificently heroic deed. But we have to wonder whether any of those deaths were due in part to bureaucratic delay—to the need for officers on the ground to “win permission” to save lives. We may never know. And even if so, are such delays unavoidable when it comes to responding to crime? Mises seemed to think so, believing that “coercion and compulsion” (including policing) must necessarily be delegated to government, and so is unavoidably bureaucratic.

Whether he was right about that or not, Mises argued that the problem with bureaucracy is not that we have failed to reform it, but that we have overextended it far beyond what he, as a classical liberal like America’s Founders, regarded to be its proper domain of protecting rights.

Instead, bureaucracy has encroached on matters that properly belong in the hands of families and the market: institutional domains that don’t require rigid rules and regulation to stay accountable.

Families tend to be held accountable by human nature: like the familial love that drove Uvalde parents Jacob Albarado and Angeli Rose Gomez to immediately race to successfully rescue their children themselves, at the risk of their own lives and in defiance of the officials.

And in the market, producers are held accountable to consumers by the pursuit of profit and the avoidance of loss: market dynamics that help keep places like amusement parks and retail stores for the most part expeditious and safe.

Governments have recourse to neither familial love nor profit and loss, and so must resort to what Mises called “bureaucratic management,” which is inherently slow and less responsive to its “customers,” even when those “customers” are literally begging for prompt service, like the Uvalde parents who begged for government agents to rescue their children.

Mises characterized the blob-like tendency of modern bureaucracy to absorb more and more of human life as a march toward totalitarianism.

“It is quite correct,” he wrote, “as the opponents of the trend toward totalitarianism say, that the bureaucrats are free to decide according to their own discretion questions of vital importance for the individual citizen’s life. It is true that the officeholders are no longer the servants of the citizenry but irresponsible and arbitrary masters and tyrants. But this is not the fault of bureaucracy. It is the outcome of the new system of government which restricts the individual’s freedom to manage his own affairs and assigns more and more tasks to the government.”

For example, our system of compulsory schooling has assigned educating and securing our children for most of the day to the government. And to the extent that private gun ownership is regulated, we have still further restricted the individual’s freedom to protect his own family and more fully entrusted the security of his children to the government.

Parents should realize that, as the appalling delay in Uvalde may exemplify, bureaucracies are institutionally unworthy of that trust.

 

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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100 COMMENTS

  1. Exceptionally well said. There may be individual heroes among the officers present that day. But as a unit, the police response that day failed miserably. To day anything less is spectacularly short sighted.

  2. I’d say about 21 too many.

    It’s simple, people, and why they *refuse* to harden schools.

    Leftist Scum ™ hates guns and the 2A more than they love little children.

    They need dead kids on camera.

    May every last one of them get cancer and die without pain meds… 🙁

    • Brutal, but it’s the harsh truth. If schools were hardened prior, it sure beats cleaning up the mess after the fact. Any response after the fact is never fast enough.

      • Yesterday a mountain lion walked right into a California school thru an open door. WTF.

        • A 4-legged cougar and not the stereotypical California 2-legged hussy Cougar always on the prowl? 🙂

        • I saw that! Again, another open door. That would habe sucked if it turned out to be an Active Eater. Years ago, a tiger got out at the San Francisco Zoo, because some shitbag taunted it. It’s was pure mayhem. Officer’s .40 cal, etc. What a sad mess.

        • on a bad day in pubic skul, your child could die. On a good day, they could be brainwashed in a “mostly peaceful” manner.

      • “but then our schools would look like prisons”

        … is the typical response I get when I suggest hardening schools. It’s always optics with politicians.

        • “but then our schools would look like prisons”

          but that’s better than our schools looking like a morgue…IMHO

        • “but then our schools would look like prisons”

          Next time it happens, lay the blame where it belongs, at the feet of those who allow un-locked doors.

          Leftists hate guns more than they love small children, full stop…

        • Schools built in the last couple decades are already indistinguishable from county jails and minimum-security prisons.

    • That school was a hardened school but security is only as strong as the weakest link. That weakest link was an unlocked door propped open.

      • Video shows the teacher who propped it open kicked away the rock and closed the door. It was supposed to lock automatically but failed to. The teacher who did that was already on the phone to 911, initially reporting the truck crash, and then saying that the person was shooting at the school.

    • We don’t need to harden schools. There are millions of people out there, including many teachers and school employees, carrying guns legally and safely every day. Simply remove the laws, rules, and regulations that prevent from them from carrying in schools. We would immediately have an anonymous armed force of unknown size and location in every school.

  3. Well said.
    I’m sure police will have meetings and will generate committee to draft standard work written by some lawyers and insurance experts.
    I am in awe of the parents who went in alone and got their kid out. Just think about that. No weapons, no training, just motivation. Can we give them a medal?

    • There are 2 kinds of parents. Those that would fight a lion bare handed for their kids and those that will get an abortion because its hard to raise a kid.

        • Unfortunately, possum, even HAVING the kid does not a parent make. Being a parent requires resolve and commitment. Imagine if dacian the stupid had found a woman as stupid as he is, and procreated (assuming that is even possible for dacian)??? Having that s***weasel as a parent would be a virtual guarantee of future failure.

          MinorIQ would be about as bad.

  4. You can be sure that there will be some juicy Wrongful Death Lawsuits that stem from those wimps that were too afraid to go into the school and take out one gunman that was actually a pretty poor shot. Look at the shots per hit ratio. The “chief” of police had best hold to his day job.

        • NO It was the Police Chief of the Uvalde SCHOOL Police Dept that won a seat on/sworn in to the city council.

          WTF does a SCHOOL have a popo dept (HUNDREDS of them in Tx).

    • Engineer, unfortunately, SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that the police have NO duty to protect citizens (despite the fact that it is literally their job description). Rational people know that the po-po can’t/won’t protect us. Idiots like MinorIQ and dacian the stupid allege that they are the only ones “trained” sufficiently to bear the burden of carrying a firearm. Up is down, down is up, we arent’t at war with Eastasia, we were always at war with Eastasia. Leftist/fascists can’t deal with reality, so they manufacture a fantasy and expect everyone to accept it – or they will call you a racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist/classist. I stopped giving a s*** about their idiot ‘insults’ years ago. Insults only matter if you accept them – I don’t.

    • There could be some interesting suits to come out of this. Normally, police have no duty to protect individuals (Castle Rock v. Gonzales). However, this wasn’t an independent police agency — it was a school police agency. It’s not something I’ve heard of before and I don’t know how it’s governed, such as reporting to the school board. That could open the school police or district to liability. I don’t know how the “chief” of a 6 man department wound up being to one calling the shots for 150+ officers on the scene. I wonder if he would have been any higher than sergeant in a normal police force, kind of like Massad Ayoob being a volunteer captain in a 4 man department in a rural city of 2000.

      • But Massad Ayoob would have had the moxie
        to go in and kick that punk’s ass, not like those
        wimps on the local police department.

      • NIMS (National Incident Mgmt System). The “Chief”, as he was on scene, is the head MF in charge unless he chooses to relinquish (or is ordered by his boss) command to someone else (present) that might be more qualified to assume command.

        Lessons learned from 9/11 lead to NIMS nationwide for law/fire/ems. Central point is that SOME SOB is in charge. Not a herd of dumbasses wandering around doing their own thing. See as a combat unit. NIMS is valid system.

        The school “chief” apparently was not up to the job.

  5. Bureaucracy kills free will, creativity, confidence and bravery.
    Deadens the human spirit. In all things.
    With bureaucracy killing our independence and the technocracy homogenizing and programming our behaviors we really aren’t very human anymore and more like circus animals.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npfShBTNp3Q

    • Which of course is why they keep expanding the government. It’s a way to increase their power. Don’t look now, but HHS is forming the Office of Environmental Justice. They’re bringing together the commie wings of BLM and the Climate Alarmists.

  6. RE: “Parents should realize that, as the appalling delay in Uvalde may exemplify, bureaucracies are institutionally unworthy of that trust.”

    Death and destruction follows Gun Control no matter where it has been or where it goes. Gun Control provides soft targets for tyrants and those who criminally misuse firearms, bricks, bats, knives, fists, feet, motor vehicles etc.

    Gullible parents left their children in the hands of individuals whose Gun Control based security policies were proven to be an accident waiting to happen. The buck stops with those in charge of school security.

  7. he’s the director of content.
    the real problem is that extra full auto double plus slaughter bomb.

  8. If any parent can rescue their kids from other parts of the school not immediately occupied by the killer, then those same areas could and should have been safely evacuated. For all we know, this was already happening with the extra personnel.

    • It was. The BP guy who was getting his haircut when it all started, and his barber, and others, both LEO and non LEO, were in the parts of the school where there wasn’t a shooter. They were getting their own kids out, and any others who happened to be lucky enough to be in those other areas.

      Meanwhile cops outside were holding back parents in another area, stopping them from going in.

      It was a total cluster fluck

  9. When things were breaking I said let’s wait and see. It looks like LE dropped the ball. I don’t know if it’s ever been said before, but in I’ve always thought that indecision is the precursor to defeat.

    • wrong/ dead wrong.
      they’re all yelling, “do something” now. but they did nothing then.

      • It’s one of the downsides of intellectual species. Big brain, sure. Caveat included is slow thinking, conceptualizing action/reaction consequences and forming a response before the event happens. Action by committee as it were, with all the slow plodding rise to action that goes side by side with.

        Compared this to the animal level intelligence minds, where pure active & reactive response dictates life or death when moments count, we thinking creatures are at a distinct disadvantage. And it has gotten us killed by them quite a lot, due to our minds not being geared for instantaneous action.

        This can be trained to a minimum. Though only with constant attentive and dedicated effort.

        However, this is not the case here even taking into account the human proclivity for slow action. Bureaucratic dodging of responsibility and no willingness to shoulder the risk to they themselves, whether physically, or politically is the real reason I suspect.

    • Pretty obvious out the gate that they took too long. Some of us noted that before others.

  10. How Many Deaths in Uvalde Were Caused By the Slowness and Slackness of Bureaucracy? Most of them….

  11. My attention span is short so I didnt read all that but one local polic chief in my county instructed his officers at roll call yesterday “do not wait at the door. You go in and engage.” That is zero bureaucracy. His stock just went up in my book. Wish he was running for sheriff of the county. Maybe next cycle. The current sheriff is a do nothing publicity hound.

  12. I’m sure there were some slobs. But eventually we’ll find out a play by play of every officer’s actions. But regardless of bureaucracies, action on active killer should be swift. But terrain and other immediate factors can still cause delays.

    It could be a combination of Active Killer and Barricaded Suspect, once the shitbag was no longer mobile. It’s always fluid.

    We all agree the objective is to stop the killing of innocents IMMEDIATELY, and drop the shitbag right then and there. But, not always that easy.

    If he hardened himself in a room, that’s not easily accessible or breached, an not visible in a position of advantage in the hard corner, and uses the kids as human shields, all while shooting at you through walls and doors because he has a visual and auditory indication of your presence, IT’S A SHIT SANDWICH. If you can’t see him, how do you take a safe shot without killing your own kid(s).

    A Deputy lost his own kid. I’m sure he didn’t care about bullshit bureaucracies.

    I’d like to hear HIS assessment of what happened.

    I’m not defending anyone, but heck. It’s gonna stink.

    To me, it might be a question of tools and capabilities to breach.

    As upsetting as it may be, officers ready to fight may still have to wait until realistic capable breaching can be made.

    First on scene officers (Any patrol officer regardless of agency) for immediate action can be done with a minimum of 2, best option is a 4 man diamond formation, especially for multiple suspects.

    The problem is, a Halligan tool and a sledge maul is not standard issued equipment. It also requires 2 ppl. One to hold the bar, one to swing the hammer. Who’s going to provide cover with guns?

    SWAT and Fire Departments have that stuff, typical of search and rescue.

    Problem: If the materials you’re attempting to breach are hardened ie; Metal door and frame with a door swing that opens toward the cops, shotgun breacher rounds typically won’t work. Maybe not even a common tire iron from your car has enough leverage.

    Those heavier tools need to be brought to the scene.

    If SWAT is still inbound, you gotta wait. If FD is staged and you can borrow tools, they’re at least a block away, but will not go themselves. They’ll be at the perimeter by protocol.

    In the meantime you gotta wait. Unless the suspect can be seen through a window. But we don’t know the layout yet. Also, after the bullet hits glass especially at an angle, the bullet doesn’t fly straight and also fragments. Last thing you want to do is shoot and hit your kids. Multiple coordinated shots can work, if you got a visual.

    These guys commandeered the key from the janitor. It sounds like that was the best tool to get in quickly. Not sure yet. Let’s get the facts.

    If you’re using breaching tools, it better work, or else you’re a bullet sponge in that fatal funnel while you work on the door for the time being.

    In the meantime you are giving the suspect a visual and auditory indicator, so he can shoot through the door at you.

    Your first on scene responders with rifles aren’t equipped or trained with explosive breacher tools like SWAT and Military.

    All of us are ready to DRT that fucker now, but if we can’t reach him now, it’ll take time.

    It’s a double edged sword.

    • Obviously, if the entrance to that specific classroom was easily defeated, no way on earth should any capable officer wait, regardless of orders. DRT that fucker, stop the killing and deal with your agency bullshit later. Even if I get fired later. Who gives a fuck. You do what you gotta do, now.

    • I hear excuses. I posted below – WHY DID NO ONE LOOK THROUGH THE WINDOWS?!?!?! The cops should have known what was happening. Blow the window out from a distance, if necessary – use bean bags for the purpose if you’re afraid of hurting children. Throw fricking ROCKS to break the window. Then follow up with a drone, if available. Put a sniper however far away is necessary to provide cover. Drive one of those armored vehicles up to the window.

      Don’t make excuses for this fiasco. The whole beauracracy explanation above is spot on.

      NO ONE HAD THE BALLS to make a decision.

      • One of the obstacles is that these small towns do not have the money to attract good officers. Also it seems that someone slept thru whatever training they had, if any. not making excuses but thats how it is. For myself i would have told the cheif to go f$#&k himself and gone after the killer.

    • “First on scene officers (Any patrol officer regardless of agency) for immediate action can be done with a minimum of 2, best option is a 4 man diamond formation, especially for multiple suspects….”

      this is wrong and has been for years. Current training is not to wait for a minimum of 2 during an active shooter. The whole ‘form a hunter pack’ or whatever language they used was the idea after columbine but deemed insufficient to the immediacy of the threat.

      • True, I meant as far as effectiveness. 2 person team for better coverage, meaning dedicated rear security capability. As OPFOR has advantages when coming behind the officer. Yes, first guy pushes forward and fast, but we also know they get surprised and killed from behind. Ask me how I know this. An active killer ain’t no different that a suspect with a gun running. They just haven’t stacked multiple bodies yet. But pursuit strategies and swift stoppage remain relatively the same. Just a bunch of fancy titles.

    • It’s called a breaching shotgun. Can remove hinges and door locks, every patrol car used to carry one. And don’t say they are expensive, they are less than $800 for a top notch one. What we had was mass “I’m not taking action until someone tells me to” from everyone there with their hands in their pockets. I think every officer there needs to be terminated. I think every school board member and or school administrator who might have voted to keep school “gun free” need to be terminated.

    • Wow. Nice flex, B. Sing that song to Audie Murphy, Rodger Young, Richard B. Anderson, or about a thousand others I could name. If it’s your JOB, you do your JOB. They took an oath. There were CHILDREN being slaughtered. It was time for them to cowboy up, and they . . . were princesses. F*** them, I hope Uvalde fires ALL their worthless @$$es, revokes their pensions, and shames them until they leave town. They were useless scum, and we have 21 dead innocents because of it.

    • They’re damn sure ready to fight when they pull you over for speeding or there’s a fender bender. Immediate escalation by Generation Mag-Dump, unless, of course, the bullets are flying both ways.

    • You know, if I am ever in a situation like that, I’ll be the mutha flupping bullet sponge to get the door open. Whoever is behind me can be the hero.

  13. Add to that the fact that he was a well known troublemaker, whom while living with a criminally tainted family, still managed to pass a background check.
    This dude like Fla’s Cruz could have been stopped at the very first step

  14. QUESTION: Were there no outside windows in the classrooms under discussion? WTF were there no officers sneaking up to peer inside? They could have put a sniper somewhere to look inside with a scope, and possibly/probably nailed the gunman from 1/4 mile away if that was the best cover. Surely, one of the departments responding had a qualified sniper?

    Few classrooms are devoid of outside windows. Janitor’s closets, maybe a few offices, an auditorium if the school has one (not likely at an elementary school) and a gym if the school has one. I don’t remember ever being in a classroom with no windows, and that includes schools from Maine to Florida, to Arkansas and Texas, as well as Pennsylvania, where I grew up.

    COPS SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SPY ON THE GUNMAN!! They shouldn’t have emulated mushrooms.

    If all else failed, they could have busted out the window and put one of those new-fangled hi-tech drones into the classroom.

    • Drones and setting up snipers take time

      but breaking or shooting in the window does not. I cannot imagine why nothing at all was tried. Maybe the eventual report will give indication

    • Many of the schools built in the Southwest have block buildings with a door to one walkway and a rear door to another walkway(maybe 10 classrooms in a row) maybe opening on to the playground or area between that and the cafeteria. The windows are high up, so the can get cross ventilation/light, but the kids can not just stare out of the windows. It seems to me they could have gotten a camera up to see the classroom – why they don’t already monitor classrooms with cameras is beyond me – that would be cheap enough. Can you imagine the LEOs keeping back parents ready to lay down their lives for their kids – how can they tell them their kids are to be sacrificed to the anti gun lobby for the “better of the country”. Those officers that would not go in and actively kept parents away should have been shot, right then.
      I hope they all get fired and can’t ever get a job above flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. strip their pensions.
      Didn’t the excuse of “following rules” go out with the Nazi trials? A man is responsible for his job, don’t try to weasel out.

  15. I have a feeling that if this ‘chief’ had turned his radio off to take a shit at the nearest donut shop the cops on scene would have been in there a lot faster based on their training and without his brilliant executive decision making

    There IS a provision in modern active shooter training for dealing with a situation that has gone from active shooter to something else, but it’s really more of a “okay, we THOUGHT this was an active shooter but maybe it’s not” rather than how this guy used it as “well, he was an active shooter but he probably killed all the kids already.”

    I suspect that in the coming couple years they might drastically limit or remove that element because this guy shows that it can’t be trusted to be used wisely. Every incident just reinforces the need to use immediate aggression in a case like this.

    • It’s just like I say about hijackings before and after 911. Before 911 we had a lot of hostage situations and commandeering of planes to fly to Cuba or whatever. So the advice was always cooperate. After 911 the default assumption is “They are going to fly us into a building!” so the default response is “Let’s roll!” There will never again be another easy hijacking.

      Most likely now even if someone does take hostages in a school, they will be treated as an active shooter and steamrolled. Or maybe not. I thought after Parkland that ship had sailed. But here it is again.

  16. True, I meant as far as effectiveness. 2 person team for better coverage, meaning dedicated rear security capability. As OPFOR has advantages when coming behind the officer. Yes, first guy pushes forward and fast, but we also know they get surprised and killed from behind. Ask me how I know this. An active killer ain’t no different that a suspect with a gun running. They just haven’t stacked multiple bodies yet. But pursuit strategies and swift stoppage remain relatively the same. Just a bunch of fancy titles.

  17. Three presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama, have had their school-age children set to a School building that was itself turned into an armed Fortress.

    When you care about guarding only the children of the elite? There is no bureaucracy. Because the people who are guarding the children of the elite are actually inside the building. It’s possible they could actually be inside the classroom. With the child they’re guarding. And that doesn’t mean that they’re simply standing in a corner watching the entire classroom.

    At the time in the 1970s the secret service had stated they didn’t have any agents inside the classroom with the six year-old Amy Carter. They had several agents outside the classroom in the hallways. And in adjacent rooms. And that is where an intruder would have to come to and go through. In order to get to an individual classroom.

    A disciplined guardian (teacher) can perform multiple tasks and blend into a situation. And the people around them will never know what their real mission is. This doesn’t take a lot of training. It simply takes a dedicated individual.

    A good teacher is a good multitasker by definition. They can easily be trained to also carry a gun, and learn how to use it better than any police officer. They just have to want to do it.
    In the F.A.S.T.E.R. program there were teachers who didn’t want to carry a gun. But they did want to learn the first aid necessary to treat bullet wounds. So they received the kind of first aid training that only a battlefield military medic would receive.

    The solution is not complicated. What makes it complicated are individuals who cannot face the truth, that these measures are now necessary in the 21st century. And actually they were necessary in the 20th century the day after Columbine.

    The infrastructure already exist in the United States the train School staff in the F.A.S.T.E.R. program. And most of the people who are against this don’t have children. But these are the same people who will tell you a man has no right to make a decision about a woman having an abortion.

    As far as I’m concerned if you don’t have children you should not be part of this discussion. You can talk all you want in your Echo chamber.

      • Oh, btw Chris — Texas has a School Shield/Guardian program similar to what you’re describing with F.A.S.T.E.R.

        The Uvalde district chose not to participate.

        • Well then they entire school system needs to explain they think, IT WILL Not, happen to them???

          These school shootings are happening in small towns and in the big cities.

        • If that is correct that the school district chose to not participate in the F.A.S.T.E.R. program? Then what I originally said was correct. That the police department in the town is very comfortable having children being shot dead in their classrooms. Instead of the police officer’s risking their lives to save those kids.

          And I would say the same about the school district, the staff, the teachers, the principals. They’re all much more comfortable with children and the teachers being shot dead in their classrooms.

        • 30% of Texas schools allow armed staff. It is left tot he descretion of the district and school. I imagine that number will be going up.

      • Men make the same argument about abortion. Paying taxes.But especially since they provide the sperm. Have you provided the sperm? Like I have.
        Or do you swing the other way?

        • I have no children; you said that I should not be part of this discussion.

          I believe that argument is also used by women when discussing abortion.

        • The argument with abortion isn’t just taxes. It is also that the father will be forced to pay if the woman chooses to have the child. And by father the law means the man named by the woman as the father, with no confirmation by DNA or even blood type.

          So a man the woman names, with no proof, is obligated to pay for a child that may not even be his for 18 years, but he has no say what so ever in whether that child is even born.

          The woman can kill the child without even telling him the child exists. But he cannot veto the decision to kill the child if he wants it, and he cannot decline to pay if he doesn’t want it. And he cannot ask for proof that it is even his.

  18. This disaster is the result of poor or non existent leadership and training.

    Even a poorly trained group will follow a good leader.
    A well trained group will do what is necessary in the absence of leadership.
    What happened here with large group of LEOs on site?

    The Border Control officers showed how it should be done. Are they combat veterans?

  19. I see far little attention being paid to the teacher that propped a door open, only a minute or two before the shooter arrived, this was how he entered. Hardening a school is useless if basic protocols are not followed.

  20. Always remember….

    when seconds count………….

    .Uvalde LEOs stand around for an hour…………

  21. It’s my understanding that this was a newer school building, built with “hardness” in mind. That may be why the police had few options to breach the door.

    As far as the door being propped open, now the story is that the teacher heard the lock-down command and closed the door, yet it didn’t latch when it was closed.

    I haven’t seen a schematic of the school showing the door that the shooter gained entrance and where it was positioned in relation to the classroom where the shooter barricaded himself. Was the shooter positioned away from the windows where his actions could be seen? These details may never be forthcoming and we may still be guessing weeks from now.

  22. No one can possible answer that question with any clarity or accuracy. Undoubtably lives could have been saved. How many? Only God knows.

  23. Slackness=cowardice. FIFY. Another Floriduh school shooting cowardice white feather moment.

  24. ALL OF THEM – EVERY SINGLE DEATH, WOUND, GUNSHOT.

    The nation has been calling for hardened security officers and physical security enhancements to schools since the 80(s). All we’ve received is more restrictive gun laws instead and selective prosecutions against the elements/events in society that justify WE THE PEOPLE being armed.

    The leftists and liberals in the Democrat (communist) Party fought, demonstrated against our mental health system. The system functioned and was available to everyone. They ultimately demanded the system dismantled and they finally got it. Since then shootings, stabbings, rapes, and suicides have skyrocketed.

    The Democrats (i.e. communists) are responsible for all of these failures and they should be condemned, outlawed as a party, and those most responsible totally exposed.

  25. REALLY ALL DUE TO DERANGED BUTTHEAD KID , SHOULD HAVE SHOT HIM SELF FIRST AND NOT GRANDMA , HOWEVER AFTER GRANDMA , TOOK OFF THEN , ON KILLING SPREE .
    PRAY HE BURNS IN HELL FOR EVER AND EVER . .

  26. I get it. I ain’t defending anyone. But we’d have to compare apples to apples. I’m just saying, minus ALL the facts, it’s too easy to Chairborne Ranger this. Like I said earlier in this thread, a Deputy’s own kid was killed. I seriously doubt any bureaucratic bullshit slowed him down. So what happened? I want to hear HIS statement. Not speculation. I hear a lot of shoulda-woulda-coulda, and totally understand. I just wanna see factual details. But to blame ALL, including the Deputy who lost his kid, is premature. It’s possible he was a cowardly Deputy and Dad, but, I’d bet against it.

    • Really???? So then how have OTHER police departments (and even citizens with guns) managed to stop OTHER mass shooters????? Only Uvalde and Parkland had conditions which made it impossible for their police to act for nearly an hour, I guess??? Sell that bulls*** somewhere else. People have been in EXACTLY congruent situations, and ‘done the right thing’. The Uvalde “school police” and PD did not. You can talk all you want about “I want to hear their side” (yeah, like they’d be honest about it, at this point!!), but the simple fact is others, police AND civilian, HAVE acted; they did not. I pretty much don’t care what “their side” is. And, to put a cherry on that sundae, they handcuffed, tazed, and pepper sprayed parents TRYING to save their kids. Put all the lipstick you want on that pig; it’s still a pig. They were either inept, cowardly, and/or incompetent.

      • You mean stopped mass shooters BEFORE they killed in mass? Or do you mean stopped mass shooters AFTER they killed in mass. Mass deaths are mass deaths. The point is, there are specific details in which previous incidents proved more successful or disastrous than others. If YOU have ALL the details, then let’s hear it. Previous shooters not utilizing cover had different outcomes than those who barricaded themselves. Virginia Tech shitbird chained and locked doors too. We learned from those facts. We’re still getting details in. I wasn’t there. Inquiring minds wanna know.

        You wanna call the Deputy that lost his own kid a cowardly failure, go ahead. It’s a free country. I guess you were there, so sling it.

        • No, but I have some words for all of the BP, cops, deputies, and other parents, like the barber, who got into the other parts of the school and got their kids out.

          You are running into an antigun/media trap. They change the definition of mass shooting or mass killing to inflate or deflate numbers as they like. The most common statistic is 4 or more shot or 4 or more killed. Sometimes they use 3. Sometimes this includes the killer and sometimes they do not. they switch back and forth between “shooting” and “killing” to control the narrative.

          So any event where someone was intent on committing a mass shooting, and he was stopped before he shot or killed 4 people is not counted. This means events where someone did stop the shooter get heavily reduced statistically because the majority of the times when that happens the average is 2 victims.

          The recent FBI report on mass shooters included several incidents stopped by non LEOs. But it only counts events with 4 or more victims not including the shooter. So every incident where the shooter only got 2 or 3 people before Joe Sixpack punched his ticket are excluded.

  27. “A harrowing video circulating online shows family members desperately pleading …”

    where is this video?

  28. “How Many Deaths in Uvalde Were Caused By the Slowness and Slackness of Bureaucracy?”

    Its difficult to say for individual cases. But for the collective whole, eventually all of them.

    Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, this past Wednesday, made these statements…

    “The deranged gunman ran down a hallway to two adjoining classrooms and barricaded himself in…” with the 19 kids and two teachers who were shot dead all being in the same room.

    “The bottom line is law enforcement was there, … They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also insisted the school shooting “could have been worse” without the officers’ response and “They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives, … ” and ““They were able to save lives, … Unfortunately, not enough.”

    1. Law enforcement did not “contain (Ramos) in the classroom”. Ramos “barricaded” himself in there and locked the door before law enforcement even stacked up in the hallway to wait an hour before entering. Ramos “contained” himself, law enforcement did not “contain” Ramos. Just showing up does not mean you saved lives but… giving credit where credit is due “law enforcement was there” hmmm lets see, outside pepper spraying and tasering and handcuffing parents, and a while later stacked up in a hallway for about an hour listening to Ramos kill kids because some pretend-cop-political-position-job-security-bureaucratic ‘school district police chief’ said so.

    2. Law enforcement did not “engage immediately”. They may have arrived shortly after things started to happen, they may have entered the building shortly after things started to happen, but they never at any point “engaged” the shooter “immediately” when things started to happen or while they were happening before people were killed. The “engagement” did not happen until around an hour later and that is not “immediately”.

    3. No, it could not have been worse without the officers response. It was already worse because of the officers lack of response and it got worse as time passed while they waited that hour in the hallway.

    4. Two people “showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives”, the off duty border patrol officer and a mother. And not to forget that other parents tried to enter to save their kids but were stopped by the “amazing courage” of law enforcement pepper spraying, tasing, cuffing parents, or were showing “amazing courage” by sitting around in a hallway for an hour outside the door listening to Ramos kill people.

    5. “They were able to save lives, … Unfortunately, not enough.”, yes, not enough and the reason is because of the very bungled response, the bureaucracy BS, and the gross incompetence.

    The only members of law enforcement on scene that had the balls to defy the bureaucracy BS and gross incompetence and do something in spite of the very bungled response – was an off duty border patrol officer, Jacob Albarado, with a borrowed shotgun who was able to organize with two other officers to enter the school in defiance of orders and the barricade of cops trying to keep people out. They entered the school and were able to rescue Albarado’s daughter and dozens of children and teachers. Three guys with one shotgun and two hand guns did what the whole of over 100 other law enforcement members did not do.

    In the situation aspect, in terms of number, physically, statistically, Jacob Albarado and Angeli Rose Gomez, and those other two unknown officers who entered with Jacob Albarado in defiance of orders, directly rescued and saved more lives than any of the other law enforcement at the incident.

  30. Bring back the Dirty Harry type cops,
    They always get the job done the right way.
    & they terrified the thugs & creeps that are among us.
    Too many occifers today won’t react without orders for fear of job loss or reprimand from higher up individuals who are mostly appointees of the gov.

  31. I would add that a certain level of responsibility goes to the family and acquaintances of the Shooter. Posting online pics and sharing pics of animal abuse is classic Psychopathic Escalation. Only a deeply disturbed evil individual shares pics like that, and it was a major Red Flag that this Sicko was going to snap.
    This incident, much like Buffalo, Parkland, Boulder, Arvada and many other shootings, was a classic fustercluck of the system.

  32. Since most public school teachers are liberals who recoil in fear at the picture of a firearm let alone seeing a real firearm, they are next to useless against an active shooter. Kudos to the few conservative teachers who would react positively to a shooter.
    I would do things differently…
    I would hire (non-law enforcement) veterans as janitors and maintenance personnel, deputize and arm them as part of a “quick reaction team”. Janitors and maintenance personnel have the run of the school and KNOW where the hiding spots are.
    Hiring (non-law enforcement) veterans–NOT law enforcement, is the key. Veterans in law enforcement will defer to their chicken scene commander and are pretty much useless in such situations
    Today’s “law enforcement” and “school resource officers” personnel consider their own lives and their pensions and retirement to be more important than that of the students (victims) and will almost always choose to “run the other way” or “cower and cover in fear”, while us veterans are trained to run TOWARD the sound of gunfire.
    “Law enforcement” and “school resource officers” are useless in school shootings. Almost every school shooting was responded to by “law enforcement” waiting for the shooting to stop–NOT ACCEPTABLE–PERIOD!

  33. HOw many deaths were caused by ‘slackness’ of the authorities- meaning I take itn the POLICE??> NOT A SINGLE one as far as I am concerned. They were ALL cauzxsed by an eighteen year old retard with some kind of ‘chip-on-his-shoulder’ who should not have been allowed to own a firearm in the first place. Unless the ‘authorities’ are prepared to put an armed officer outside of EVERY classroom let alone school, the killings will continue.
    As far as I can ascertain there is NOTHING that could have been done to prevent this latest tragedy. A disturbed and determined killing machine with access to the kind of firearms that this young person LEGALLY had will ALWAYS find a way.
    In stead of keeping on about their CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS the Gun Freaks of Amereica MUST come up with affordable means of gun control and must be themselves prepared to FUND them. Taxation on the purchase of unnessessary firearms [that is MORE than is absolutely unessessary. I would suggest ONE firearm of each type per household per person , no more than one hundred rounds of all types of ammunitionat any one time to be held in any household. Any more than that to be subject to a 500% tax per sale and a suitable yearly renewal fee per item of say comparable to that for an automobile PLUS regular SOBRIETY tests with withdrawl of license for those found to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol whilst in possession of a firearm of any description. This is already done with that other killing machine the automobile so a precedent has been set!

  34. NO DEATHS were caused by bureaucracy.

    All deaths were caused by the assailant.

    Some deaths could likely have been PREVENTED had the bureaucracy reacted sooner.

    End of story.

    • “End of Story” … ??? Depends on the story; Yes, the administration should’ve acted sooner. Instead of coming in to office after stealing an election all we heard from Biden was how he was going to rid the country of guns, patriots, and petro fuel-burning cars. HE COULD’VE SIMPLY STAFFED THE SCHOOLS WITH HARDENED GUARDS AND ENHANCED SECURITY STRUCTURES INSTEAD …. BUT NOOOOO … SOETORO WANTED SOMETHING ELSE. Biden could’ve insisted on a work group provide a plan to return our mental health treatment systems and facilities but instead he worried about ghost guns, crude oil pipelines, and opening the borders. Clearly the story goes on but in the wrong direction.

      I blame a lot of this on the current Republicans. They should’ve already had Bare Shelf Biden packing his bags and permanently out the door after an easy and much warranted impeachment. They’re obviously too weak to accomplish this and most of them unmotivated to do so largely because they’re absolute RINO(s) and all they care about is how much longer they have until they campaign again for re-election.

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