A few days ago, the Department of Justice released their report on the response to the Uvalde shooting in 2022. While we aren’t all working for public safety or emergency management agencies, there are a few important lessons we should all take away from the report. I’ll cover some of the more important ones, but if you do work for an agency, you’d better read the whole thing without skimming!

Before I get into the lessons, let’s get one big thing out of the way: the report didn’t say that semi-automatic rifles should be banned. Every anti-gun organization was quick to take to social media sharing news stories about the DOJ report, and nearly all of them had that takeaway. They basically told us they didn’t read the report without telling us they didn’t read the report.

The biggest takeaway is that you need a plan. Things obviously don’t always go according to plan, but having a plan means you’re thinking about the future. When you think about the future with friends, family, and coworkers, you put your heads together. You gather resources. You build working relationships. So, even if you come across something you didn’t plan for, you’ve got all that other stuff going for you. So, make plans!

But, making plans and practicing parts of them are two different things. The emergency managers in and near Uvalde actually had pretty good plans, but some of the agencies in the area weren’t on the same page. Some lacked important training, while others had training that wasn’t in keeping with the plan. So, even if you’re only concerned with keeping your family safe, run some drills. Teach your kids what to do and have them practice things you’d want them to do in a home invasion, shooting at the store or carjacking.

Here’s a great video that deeply explains the importance of practicing your plans:

The key thing: you don’t want everyone’s “mental hard drive” to be empty.

Another huge lesson is the importance of mental health and wellness. There are many people out there today who are well enough and resilient enough to get through their day to day life without problems, but would utterly fall apart under the additional stress of an emergency. In decades past, Hollywood stereotypically made most female characters this way, but if you think about it, we all know men who act like that.

I can’t go into great depth about how you can be more resilient and keep yourself out of the “emotional basement” during emergencies (I do that here if you’re interested). If I could teach every person in the world one skill, it wouldn’t be shooting. It would be Box Breathing. Being able to take a quick breather/meditation and calm the mind down can make for far better decisions under stress.

Sadly, the Uvalde cops should have been taught Box Breathing plus a bunch of other skills to maintain their brain during and after such emergencies, but few did.

Finally, communication is key. The Uvalde response team(s) didn’t communicate with each other, with the public, and with the victims very well at all. Some cops showed up to the scene and didn’t have any idea that there was still a breathing active shooter inside, and were never told this (“Go work the perimeter”). Public information officers didn’t form a joint public information effort, and gave out conflicting information to the media. Even families were sometimes told their kid was alive when they were in fact not.

Being ready to communicate with loved ones after a personal emergency is important. This requires some basic planning, and maybe even equipment if you’re thinking of a big enough emergency. You should also know that it’s NOT a good idea to have long, heartfelt conversations with cops after a defensive shooting (In fact, don’t talk to them other than to tell them you’re not going to talk to them). Failing at communicating or failing to NOT communicate didn’t mean any consequences for Texas cops, but it could put you in prison.

Did you read the report? If so, what big lessons do you think we should take from it?

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

73 COMMENTS

  1. I think this is kind of long winded. The basic problem was the cops were cowards. We didn’t need a report from a corrupt DOJ to figure that out.

    • *Some* cops didn’t react. there were what, 400 law enforcement personnel at the site by the end of the day? It’s not a fair assessment to call them all cowards if many of them were told the shooter was down, and go work the perimeter. Some of those may have reacted differently if they knew that the shooter was still active. Some did attempt to move in and were blocked by other officers/agents.
      Certainly those inside the building, in the hallway, who knew that the shooter was still up, and just on the other side of a flimsy door, should have moved very differently.

    • Given that 300 good guys with guns could not stop one 18-year-old with an AR 15, I guess that puts the whole ‘good guy with gun’ rescue plan in question.

      Maybe we should look for another solution besides ‘good guy with gun’ because it really didn’t work out that well this time.

      • There’s that agenda driven left wing anti-gun emotionally slewed and wrong narrow minded confirmation bias of yours showing again Miner49er.

        lots of things don’t work out at the time for a specific case. But it does not mean it will never work out at other times in cases, and it has. For example, there is nothing unique about it being a school when it comes to stopping that threat – a school shooting is just a mass shooting that takes place in a school building/campus like it would have taken place at, say, a shopping mall type of environment (where, by the way many ‘mass shooters’ have been stopped before they were able to begin because a lone ordinary armed citizen stopped them before they could begin). For example, this good guy with a gun > https://notthebee.com/article/update-indiana-police-say-good-guy-with-a-gun-stopped-mall-shooter-in-15-seconds-with-10-rounds

        • Minor, like dacian, thinks the police need to have more p0-litical awareness and indoctrination. And they need Commissars like him to provide motivation and summary people’s justice.

      • Perhaps, miner”69″er, you should get your head out of your ‘partners” crotch long enough to attempt to engage your logical thought processes..

        Lesseee, I’ll make it simple for you.

        The sheep have been turned out into the field.
        The wolf is starting to attack.
        YOU and your ilk, HAVE LOCKED THE SHEEPDOG IN THE BARN.

        Simple enough for your limited mental processes?

      • Where were the “good guys” you are talking about? I don’t see any of them there. All I see are the unprepared, the incompetent and maybe even a few cowards. None of those qualify as “good guys” in my book.

      • For all their faults, they did stop him. Yes, it took far too long, but don’t forget there were hundreds of kids in that school, and if it weren’t for the armed officers in the hallway preventing him from leaving the room the shooter would have killed many more. As bad as it was, it absolutely would have been much, much worse if they hadn’t been there.

      • In no way, shape, or form were any of those responding “good guys.” Cowards are not now and never have been considered “good guys.”

        • VNVet, read up on the situation. A BORTAC team responded to the shooting, arriving about an hour later during which time local police did not act — they then entered the school and took down the shooter.

        • Alien, they were the only ones with a level 5 shield so, maybe not as courageous as you make them out to be. Would they have gone in without it? People here are saying it was a “failure of leadership” when leadership should never have even been involved. The 1st few cops that showed up should’ve ended the threat or died trying. Certainly, by the time 4 or more were on the scene and shooting was still occurring, action should have been taken. How could anyone stand outside the door with kids being shot inside no matter what “orders” were issued?

        • VN, I’m going by the accounts that a BORTAC member received a text from his wife, grabbed his barber’s shotgun and drove to the scene, then organized others to go in and get the kids out — while another BORTAC team who arrived about an hour after the incident started and, not having breaching tools or proper shielding, obtained a shield from a US Marshal and went in after the shooter. I give praise to those LEOs. The rest on the scene who didn’t take action? I don’t.

        • Alien, I don’t see how you can say they showed courage. They would not go in until they had a level 5 shield. The barber’s guy arrived at the scene and waited an hour for a team, what good was that? It certainly does not show courage. Nope, there was no courage displayed by anyone that day.

        • “Alien, I don’t see how you can say they showed courage. They would not go in until they had a level 5 shield.”

          From my understanding, the BORTAC team did not have the proper equipment but was able to get one shield from a Marshal already on the scene. Then they went in and took immediate fire from the shooter. Going into the room where the shooter was barricaded, without a shield, and not knowing his exact location or what cover he had, would be rather foolhardy IMO — not courageous. Unfortunately the victims who didn’t survive, likely died while the local LEOs weren’t taking action.

          “The barber’s guy arrived at the scene and waited an hour for a team …”

          From what I read, it took him about an hour to drive there. When he arrived, he led others at the school to go into several rooms where students were hiding and escort them out. In the meantime the other BORTAC guys showed up and went in. The first BORTAC member may have coordinated with the other team members who were better-armed — a shotgun isn’t a match against an AR-15. I don’t know exactly how much time elapsed but it seems that the BORTAC guys, all of them, went straight to the job of getting the kids out and confronting the shooter.

          We may not ever agree, but that’s neither here nor there.

          And my comment is awaiting moderation.

      • MINORLIAR, Here we go again. Clearly you did not read the report. But then the report does not echo your hoplophobic agenda. Before you criticise the report, I suggest you read it. (You can read things other than Karl Marx and Carl Anderson?)

    • Tommy, I don’t think so. Police are a “paramilitary” outfit. When a situation like this happens, they look to the leadership for guidance. To say the least, that “guidance” was LACKING. The School police chief did not even have his radio to communicate with his men or anyone else. There was NO CLEAR LINE of communication between the various police agencies that responded.
      The initial response was feeble to say the least.
      I have to ask, did you even read any part of the report?

      • With so many police units there was a confused chain of command, with ultimate command being the chief of school police who was a blithering idiot on a power trip.

        • Southern, that was well put. Unfortunately a LOT of police chiefs are like that. Their head becomes so swelled that they were selected, they forget where they came from.

      • “The School police chief did not even have his radio to communicate with his men or anyone else.”

        Why is there even a “School police chief” AND a town/city police chief. Recipe for disaster.

        • Sam believe it or not there are quite a few school districts that have their own police department.

  2. “Did you read the report? If so, what big lessons do you think we should take from it?”

    1. Police officers should be prepared to save lives as quickly as possible even if it means risking their own life to do so.

    2. Police officers should ignore the hand-sanitizer dispensers. It will not affect their evaluation or paycheck if they did not have ‘sanitized’ hands and instead acted to save lives.

    3. Police officers should put their damn cell phone away, and save lives. Plus all doors are not locked, maybe police should actually check school room doors. (the door to the room where the killer was at Uvalde was unlocked the whole time and all they had to do was turn the knob.)

    4. Lone ordinary armed civilians have taken on body armor wearing semi-auto rifle armed ‘active/mass shooters’ with nothing but their pistols literally hundreds of times over time and saved lives outnumbering (over time) police responses by ~95% more lives saved than police saved over time in such incidents when they finally arrive and get set up and organized and finally do something. Police have a lots more man power available to them and if they are going to have the ‘hero first responder’ and ‘trained law enforcement’ and ‘protect the public’ persona then by golly they should be able to do it to with the ‘many’ police responding to such incidents.

    5. Let school teachers/staff be armed with firearms. An immediate on scene response to active/mass shooter incidents offers the best chance. Waiting for police for any such incident, serves to decrease chances of survival. There has never been an injured or killed victim of such an incident that was saved by police before that injury or death happened as all of their ‘saving’ happens after they arrive and set up and get organized and finally act. But there have been plenty saved from that injury or death by an ordinary firearm armed citizen that was on scene when it started and in many cases stopped it from starting.

    6. The Uvalde law enforcement response was a cluster fu**, and people died, because of cowards and incompetence.

    7. All ‘mass shooters’ (which includes school shooters), 100% of them, are mentally ill and do not shoot up places because they have or can get a gun. They shoot up places because they are driven by their mental illness. They can not be ‘reasoned’ with to stop them, they do not care if police are on the way or not and do not fear the police, they care not for the lives of others or their own lives – all they want is to do as their metal illness drives them and satisfy that mental illness driving them. They are driven by their mental illness and need to be stopped quickly and definitively by deadly force application.

    The list is a lot longer, but I’m gonna stop here for now.

    • .40 cal Booger Agreed. We don’t need suicidal cops, for damned sure. But, any man or woman who puts that uniform on should be willing to die for the cause of protecting the innocent.

      As we now know, at any point from initial entry into the building, two or three officers could have rushed that unlocked door, and taken out the shooter. Multiple people, including the supposed on site commander, were AFRAID and UNWILLING TO RISK THEMSELVES. Those individuals need to be identified, and forced out of law enforcement.

      It only took a couple guys with balls to end the crisis. Until those couple guys arrived on scene, NO ONE WAS WILLING to try that unlocked door. Certainly, no one was willing to stick his neck out, and override the cowardly on scene “commander”.

    • One correction: they needed to pull the knob. The malfunction described in the service requests indicated the door latch didn’t property align with the strike plate, so even when the knob was locked and would not turn, the door could still be opened simply by pulling on it. You just made the same erroneous assumption as the police, but I did once as well. Fortunately, in my case, I just looked like an idiot in front of some people I wanted to impress; no one’s life was at stake.

  3. “we all know men who act like that.”

    These aren’t “men,” they’re things that are the result of the woke policies you support.

    • Bingo. Men protect women and children, invalids, elderly. Women long ago decided they didn’t need protecting, and they didn’t need men, many decided they don’t need children or family. Small wonder that we have today’s incels, and all the rest. They don’t meet any reasonable definition of “men”.

    • “These aren’t “men,” they’re things that are the result of the woke policies you support.“

      “”Small wonder that we have today’s incels“

      So your position is this the Texas Department of Public Safety are incels? Wow.

      So you’re suggesting that the Texas Department of Public Safety has ‘woke’ policies?

      Hasn’t the Texas Department of Public Safety been a part of a Republican governors administration for decades?

      The Republicans have held the TX governorship for 30 years.

      It seems this failure can be placed directly on the doorstep of the Texas state Republican leadership.

      We can thank Providence that a Biden / Harris Administration border patrol tac team took the shooter out.

      “The crisis came to an end after a group of Border Patrol tactical officers entered the school roughly an hour later, at 12:45 p.m., said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine. They engaged in a shootout with the gunman, who was holed up in the fourth-grade classroom. Moments before 1 p.m., he was dead.“

      https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-politics-texas-shootings-56a4d01fb1cda19947db89fcb6bd85fd

      It seems the Republican administration in Texas is ‘all hat, no cattle’.

        • .40, you are expecting much too much from the MINORLIAR. If it does not fit his agenda, he pays it no mind.

      • “It seems this failure can be placed directly on the doorstep of the Texas state Republican leadership.”

        Then explain why California leads the nation in mass shootings.

        (Watch the monkey dance.)

      • “We can thank Providence…”

        An atheist thanking Providence?

        b) capitalized : God conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny

        “that a Biden / Harris Administration border patrol tac team …”

        Nope — a Coolidge Administration Border Patrol created in 1924 under Republican President Coolidge.

  4. Kids are baby goats.
    Kinders.
    Kid gloves and Veal, !
    “How much a pound?”
    Uhh depends on how much I have to pound on it to quit kicking.
    Lessons from Uvlade: If the guys with bullet proof vest and machine gunms are hesitant and you have willing parents the guys in bullet proof vest with machine gunms ought to Get The Fck Outta My Way.
    How?
    “Aaggggh!!! my kids being killed, let me through.”
    Slam dunked handcuffed.
    How? Could you stand by and listen to gunfire as you prevent a parent from trying to stop it, as they have chosen their life disregarding.
    They stopped Heroes.
    and cowards they remain.

  5. 610 pages. It has taken me several minutes to look at the structure of the document, and to skim through it absorbing ideas. No one is going to digest this thing in ten or 15 minutes. There’s a lot to absorb here. My first skimming suggests there are probably about 400 pages of hard data that needs to be picked apart, to gain real understanding. There’s a nice scholarly bibliography at the end of the document, suggesting there are tens of thousands of pages more data available.

  6. I don’t need to waste 500 pages of my time on anything Merrick Garland’s team wrote.
    10 years in public education, my own experience & Professor Eric Dietz’s Perdue analysis tells m what we need to do.
    1. When seconds count law enforcement or the Israeli army are hours away
    2. No one is coming, you are on your own
    3. Harden the schools and lock the doors
    4. Train students and staff to respond
    5. Let teachers and staff be armed if they choose to
    6. Have trained school resources or armed security officers on property

    • “armed security officers on property”

      And advertise it. Let it be known that an armed officer is present. Keep a police car parked in front of the school. When a would-be convenience store robber sees a cop car parked outside, he moves on to another target. When a mentally ill “tranz” woman thinks someone might offer some resistance to her planned school shooting, she chooses her target accordingly.

      • And make it known, that the UNIFORMED officers are NOT the only armed response people on campus…

  7. The first lesson to be learned is:
    If you have doors that are intended to remain closed and locked to keep nutjobs out – KEEP THE FRICKIN DOORS CLOSED AND LOCKED!!
    Hope that smoke was worth it.

  8. Cowards. That’s all I got. Were there any chick cops on the scene in Uvalde? I betcha they would have engaged the punk a mite sooner. Oh is the current iteration of TTAG covering Shot Show???

      • Mama bear protective instinct? Although men usually have the instinct to protect women and children. See: Titanic.

      • Funny, when I first got married, I found out my wife had been shooting since she was a kid. (And proved it to me on more than one occasion. Women DO generally have better hand dexterity..)

        Anyway, I asked her if she could shoot someone attacking her, and she said probably not. Why, I asked? She answered, because when I die, I know where I’m going, and that person may have not had the opportunity to make that choice.

        Hmm….. Ok. Not sure I agree, but..

        After our first kiddo was born, I asked her again.

        She gave me a brief glance and said ‘Absolutely.’

        Ok, why now?

        She said because I have a kiddo to raise.

        Never underestimate the momma bear instinct.

  9. You can either pull your children out of the public school system and home school them. Or you can do what I did. Carry a pocket gun and train with it.

    I took the “pocket rocket” class from Chuck Haggard. My responsibility as a parent is to force a break in contact. And allow the children time to escape. Or force the shooter to keep his or her head down.

    And yes when you ccw on campus you are breaking the law. Freedom is messy.

    • btw
      Carrying concealed means, CONCEALED!!!
      No printing. No gun grip bulging against your clothing.

      That thin shirt you wear helps to print your gun, when the wind is blowing against you.

      • Chris, that “printing” nonsense is put unadulterated NONSENSE. If the bad guy knows you might have a gun, he’s not going to act.

        “Pocket gun”? Don’t you mean a “belly gun”? If you get close enough you might hit something.

        • to possum
          Thank you.

          to WEB III
          The fact that I was never caught in all the years I went to school. Is a demonstration of success.

          And I’m glad I didn’t have to use the guns I had with me.

        • Chris, when and where did you go to school? When I went to school the worst thing you had to contend with was the school yard bully. We would not have thought for a nanosecond to bring a gun to school.

          Probably when and where you went to school, there was no real need. The gun made you feel better?

    • Note for the above video: Illinois has plans … they will revoke FOID cards for gun owners that did not ‘register’ their firearms under their unconstitutional law. When they revoke those FOID’s they will also revoke their driver license. In other words, this is two fold

      1. A means to force citizens to submit to a tyrants ‘dictatorship’ with his unconstitutional actions of ‘registration’ and ‘ban’.

      2. ‘revenge’ against citizens who did not submit to an clearly wrong and unconstitutional move by a tyrant unconstitutional actions of ‘registration’ and ban.

  11. “The biggest takeaway is that you need a plan.”

    A plan isn’t much good when law enforcement on-scene actively prevent anyone and everyone from actively going after the attacker and rescuing children. Yes, that is EXACTLY what happened at Uvalde.

    (See the video of exasperated parents just outside the building: some parents realized that cops were doing nothing, those parents then announced their intention to go in themselves and attempt to rescue their children and started moving toward the building, and then the cops actively restrained the parents to prevent them from going in to rescue their children.)

    While it angers me that the cops would not do their job (attempt to neutralize the attacker and rescue the children), it is nevertheless somewhat understandable that the cops were not eager to try bursting through a door when an attacker is sitting behind that door with a semi-auto rifle. What is absolutely infuriating, though, is when those same cops then restrained other people who were brave/desperate enough to attempt rescue. That is inexcusable.

    • Almost always, the police exist to protect the criminal from the retribution of the victim. The trial lawyers are the chief beneficiary.

  12. “it is nevertheless somewhat understandable that the cops were not eager to try bursting through a door when an attacker is sitting behind that door with a semi-auto rifle. ”

    They shouldn’t be eager. Resigned to performing the duties they signed up for would be more than sufficient. They had an abundance of officers geared up in bulletproof vests, helmets, they had shields, they had firepower exceeding what the shooter had. Lead officer hits the floor and slides in, second officer comes in crouching, third officer walks past and over the first two cops, everyone wearing full gear. That third cop can carry one of those shields to help deflect shots fired at him. Fourth through tenth officers do whatever, just so they get inside and support those first three. Every cop through the door is actively seeking the shooter’s location, and ready to fire.

    Cowardice has to be exposed, and excuses just don’t work. Every man and woman wearing a badge is sworn to do his duty, that is pretty much end of discussion. All those cops in the school building FAILED to do what he was sworn to do.

  13. After Columbine my sheriff sent me and another guy that assisted me on the range to an active shooter class. We were to pass along what we learned. It was a week long with a mix of class time, range time and training in a local high school. We were taught that as soon as you have 2+ guys on scene you make entry and drive to the sound of shooting. Hard lessons are often forgotten. Especially by administration.

    • Especially when the leadership was a confused school police chief on a power trip over the other officers.

  15. When parents say their kids are calling or texting their parents, don’t treat the parent as hysterical buffoon, it should be required to immediately consider the info as live intel.

  16. Only our .gov could take 18 months to come up with 600 pages of shite that we already knew and that we knew they would try to use in the wake of the tragedy. This is what our tax dollars fund for shame

  17. The Uvalde school massacre was the result of individual cowardice by every LEO that was at the scene. Don’t blame the inaction of LEO’s that day on command structure, communications, lack of coordination, training, etc.. Each LEO shares the blame of not fulfilling their #1 duty: To protect the public. Nothing else matters when innocent people need help. That’s why they give you a badge and gun. That’s your job. If you can’t or won’t do it, get into another line of work. Uvalde was way past Columbine when the training mantra was ‘wait for SWAT’. Belatedly, American law enforcement realized that terrorists and active shooters want to kill as many people as possible as quickly as they can and that any delayed response by police can and does cost lives. The Israelis learned this lesson the hard way back in 1974 with the Ma’alot school massacre. Afterwards, they adopted the ‘immediate response’ doctrine where the first ones on the scene go in after the shooters, no matter what. Israel still has a law on the books that makes it a crime for a LEO or military NOT to go in immediately upon an attack, regardless if they have back-up or not. As a weapons and tactics instructor, I and a few other instructors in our department also adopted that training philosophy in the late ’70’s and were criticized by our peers for being ‘John Wayne’ or ‘hotdogs’. As a parent/grandparent or normal caring person, especially being a cop, I don’t understand how those LEO’s at Uvalde could have stood there hearing those shots being fired and kids screaming and not gone in to stop the massacre. Thank God those Border Patrol agents ‘disregarded orders’ and went in to stop the threat. At least some LEO’s there had the balls to do their duty.

  18. If you don’t want to carry a long gun on to campus like I did concealed. Then I suggest you carry the ruger charger take down model. It’s very easy to conceal. And with binary trigger. It with give the bad guy with a gun many seconds thoughts.

  19. The biggest takeaway to the whole Uvalde situation is don’t submit your children to the public indoctrination system. Homeschool them where they’ll be safe. The government is not responsible for your children. You are! You can homeschool your own children. If there’s a will there’s a way.

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