If the least meaningful response to children being murdered is “thoughts and prayers,” one that is almost as silly is tearing down the school building and replacing it to help traumatized survivors.
In Uvalde, on the other hand, there is a building that could be razed to make a difference.
The police department.
By now you have doubtless heard that law enforcement officials arrived on the scene of the recent school shooting at Robb Elementary School in south Texas three minutes after being informed there was an active shooter murdering children.
Three minutes is a damn good response time.
The fact that it was an additional 74 minutes before the confronted the shooter is a national disgrace. By the time they took the shooter down, he had killed 19 young students and two teachers.
Even when additional shots were heard, police officers stayed back and failed to confront the shooter.
There has been widespread outrage at the video, but not for the reason you might think. Just as conservatives were outraged by the leak of the then-upcoming reversal of Roe v Wade, there were people shocked in this case that video critical of the police had gotten out.
The analysis in the second video asks important questions about the failure of law enforcement, and basically says officers on the scene were more concerned for their own safety than for the children under attack.
Uvalde is a small city — fewer than 20,000 residents — and it’s difficult to imagine that the cowardly officers involved didn’t know at least some of the families whose children were killed. Sadly, the only real contact they had during the incident was to prevent desperate parents from doing what the officers themselves should have been doing.
Gun lobbyists say the only thing stopping a bad gun with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Sadly, that implies that the good guy with a gun has the courage to act.
Forget whether they can continue in law enforcement. I cannot comprehend how they can continue to live in Uvalde.
There are mistakes that can be forgiven, that can be gotten past.
There are others that can’t.
Every time a grieving parent sees one of the cowardly officers around town, it’ll put them right back inthe moment.
Thoughts and prayers won’t help with that at all.