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We finally get lots of detail on Uvalde, and what it says about the police reaction – and the general preparedness of the school – is terrible — 101 Comments

1. Neo, thanks for your continued, considered interest and discussion on Uvalde. Despite my occasional emotional outburst(s) here, I nevertheless return red-faced because yours and your commenter’s insights are the best I’ve read online. Thanks.

2. I support not jumping to pre-mature conclusions. I did. I am going to wait a bit, now, to see what follows.

3. Erasmus:

   Thanks.

   My position has always been – to use a dramatic metaphor – I’d rather try someone in a court of law than lynch them.

   Have you watched the testimony today? It’s something like 7 hours long, so I’m really hoping for a transcript.

4. this does raise several questions, they had been locked down forty six times in the last year, because of border crossings, I could believe this could impair the response times, because repetition can wear down, rather than sharpen reflexes,

5. miguel cervantes:

   I don’t think the issue was response times. Police arrived quickly. If you mean response times for locking classroom doors, fron the little bit of video I’ve seen so far it seems many of the doors were unlockable. It was a little hard to understand the details of the part of McCraw’s demo that I saw, though. I certainly plan to watch carefully later when I should have more time.

6. Neo:

   I haven’t. I couldn’t sit through 7 hours of such testimony. But, I’m confident the jist of it will come out as a truthful telling of the tale. The high detail I’ll leave to those who train, prepare, and command law enforcement.

   From what I’m reading of DPS conclusions so far, this all must be terribly hard for the parent’s of the dead children to stomach: “‘Abject failure’ – Uvalde school massacre could have been stopped in 3 minutes, DPS says”

7. He said the class room door strike plate was defective and the door could not be secured. Locked or unlocked didn’t matter.

8. He also said that outside door was unlocked and because of the large windows next to the door that didn’t matter either as you could shootout the glass and use the push bar to open the door.

9. Chases Eagles:

   That’s how the Sandy Hook shooter gained entry to the school – shot out a small window. The door at Sandy Hook was locked.

   I know that McCraw talked about the strike plate problem with inner doors. But was he saying that ALL the classroom doors had defective strike plates? Or many? Or rooms 111 and 112 specifically? The portion I saw didn’t make that clear.

10. Chases Eagles:

    I would guess that older schools, in particular, have design flaws like that. And poorer school districts probably lack funds to go back and fix everything.

11. He was answering a question specifically about door they entered through I believe and said he would provide later the date that it was reported defective.

12. Chases Eagles:

    Reyes (the surviving teacher) had reported the door defective; we already knew that from Reyes’ interview. But I believe that Reyes had also said the perp hadn’t come through that door but through the inner one from the adjacent classroom.

    In McCraw’s earlier presentation in late May, I also found the way McCraw explained things to be somewhat lacking in clarity.

13. He said they had a Halligan (he kept calling it a hooligan which is another common name) very early. He said they got a sledgehammer right before they entered. That implies to me that they intended to force the door at the latch with the Halligan. Then they found out it wasn’t actually latching.

14. Chases Eagles:

    Did he say that the police found out at some point during the standoff that the door wasn’t locked? Or did they just assume it was locked and never realized it wasn’t locked and never checked to see?

    Did he ever address the whole story Arredondo told about trying the keys, or that the press had reported that the janitor gave the BorTac team the keys and they opened the doors with keys? Were these things lies or what?

    Or will I have to watch 7 hours to find out?

15. He also said that since locks had been replaced there were two different master keys. I guess that means one for old locks and a different one for newer locks.

16. The part I saw, he skipped from the sledgehammer to the team entered and killed the lunatic. He said the last three guys in the stack didn’t enter because the door closed again.

17. Well here we are, I watched over an hour of this and I have a good idea that this was a total disaster from start to finish, so many mistakes. Why not try the door and see if it is locked? I was impressed with the information and questions, and the demeanor of all present so far. I will watch the rest of this tomorrow, I sure hear my Texas accent in some of the folks talking. I have known and gone on hunting trips with some Texas DPS officers and I have always been impressed with their professionalism and their being good people well grounded in being nice folks.

18. His timeline covered the chief testing the keys and complaining that it wasn’t right master key. The chief kept saying the door was locked but nothing in the timeline showed any checking. I think the chief was intimidated by the AR. Neither the school police radios nor other agency’s radios were working in the school with the exception of the BorTac.

19. I think the chief was intimidated by the AR. — Chases Eagles

    Yes. We have a transcript of Arredondo stating, in the first few minutes, something to the effect that we only have pistols here. Minutes later, cops with AR’s arrive and nothing happens. Even then it’s still an asymmetric situation, as the psycho can spray bullets (semi-auto style) with abandon, and the cops can’t.

    Neo mentioned this already, but the stills from the video are of excellent quality. What was this crap about poor video and waiting for enhancement?

    From the stills, it looks to me like the ballistic shields that came onto the scene early were small shields. Maybe 3.5 to 4 ft. high. I don’t know what the BorTac team used, but some of these shields are 5.5 of 6 ft. high.

    Why not try the door and see if it is locked? — OldTexan

    Well, bullets were coming through the door and the walls around the door. However, couldn’t someone crouch down behind one of those small shields and shuffle over to try the handle? Breaching the door with small shields is a lot better than no shield. You go with what you’ve got, IMO.

    Engaging in some speculation, it seems like these officers were waiting for an advantage that would give them at least a 90% chance of being free of serious injury. For any of them. I think that would be a problem. Perhaps a more general problem with police (but not all police by any means).

20. I haven’t commented on the police previously because I generally agreed with neo on waiting. My major complaint from initial information was arresting parents wanting to act while the police focused on the unarmed public rather than the active shooter. I understand it is protective custody, but I bet a number of parents would have rushed that room far earlier. They have every right to be upset with the police.

    I did listen to Jocko Willink’s podcast on the subject from about a week ago, and he made some salient points about poor decision making beginning with the police chief choosing not to take his radio and snowballed from there. Willink’s key message is lack of training as both a general problem for police forces and specific criticism of these police and school system’s security. It would be interesting how much DPS makes of the poor command and control of the scene.

    Willink’s rebuke that is delivered mildly while landing as thunder from god is the recitation of critical events with rising head counts of number of police present yet not engaging. I think his line of basic incompetence and confusion to criminal is when a girl inside the room contacts 911 a second time (clearly there is a person alive in the room) before 4 more shots are fired in the room. And still time would pass without action.

    The former police chief is now on city council. I think he needs to find a new home that resides in another state. He should do it before someone decides to bring him to justice. Kicking citizens out of council meetings won’t create good will with anybody.

21. I used to teach an Operations Course in a few different MBA programs. One of the points of emphasis was how to fix a problem with the use of Root Cause Analysis. There are number of very precise ways to do this. The gist is that solving a problem this way keeps it “solved”, it does not come back.

    This brings me to Uvalde, an event preceded and already followed by others like it. These events will continue as none of the folks “in charge” (I hesitate to use the term, “responsible”, as that seems to be a long lost concept.) have no clue how to do anything but to ascribe blame, another useless notion in problem solving.

    Now the US congress is going at the problem. Problem definition? It’s the gun.

22. The part I saw, he listed four distinct times when a ballistic shield arrived. however he didn’t say what kind, nor what kind of ammo the loon was shooting. Larger shields all seem to be IIIA, not rifle proof. Level III and IV all seem to be smaller. They are heavy. when I was researching this a level IV shield is about 2/3 the size and weighs about 20 pounds.

    The walls seem to be cinder block. The mighty 9mm (which I am assured can blow the lung out of the body) can go right through both cinder block and the steel door.

23. “Simply put – it was terrible. I have always said I would be more than willing to acknowledge that, if and when we got some evidence of it that was comprehensive and well-sourced.”

    There was lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of evidence, including actual video from the school on the day of the event as well as testimony from people directly involved, available long before this. My question is why was that evidence reflexively questioned while, for example, Neo’s reaction to the Uvalde school police chief FINALLY making public statements about the massacre TWO AND A HALF WEEKS later was “You are free to think he’s lying through his teeth in his description of the ordeal, of course. But I think he just might be telling the truth”?

    Mike

24. Don’t be a Bunge.

    Lots and lots ….. of stuff, some may be evidence. Evidence is often not the same as stuff in the press Bunge.

25. Chases Eagles,
    The big shield I saw was indeed a IIIA item. Good catch CE. Makes sense. Big and thick equals very heavy.

26. Old Texan; TommyJay:

    “Why not try the door and see if it is locked?” (asks Old Texan). That’s what McCraw asked today, too:

    According to McCraw, the door to the classroom containing the gunman could not be locked from inside, meaning it was likely unlocked for the duration of the shooting…

    McCraw later said it appears that officers on the scene never checked whether the door to the classroom was unlocked…

    “How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?” McCraw said he would ask the officers who responded first.

    That would appear to be an excellent question. TommyJay gave the answer a try (“Well, bullets were coming through the door and the walls around the door. However, couldn’t someone crouch down behind one of those small shields and shuffle over to try the handle?”).

    I have an additional idea as to why they might have failed to check to see if it was locked. And that’s this: in order to think to check a lock in the first place, especially if you know that checking it will expose you to live fire, it has to occur to you that the door might be unlocked.

    Originally, the testimony of one of the surviving kids, as well as a site about school door locks in general and how they are designed, plus the constant iteration that classroom doors were locked and the perp inside, led me to believe they were lockable from the inside and that that’s how the perp locked the door behind him after he entered. And if the doors are lockable from the inside, then the police could not ever assume the perp had locked them and it would ordinarily occur to them to check.

    But today McCraw apparently said they could not be locked from inside. Therefore, whether or not the locks actually were working properly that day, we can assume that the way they were supposed to function was that they were supposed to lock automatically when closed. Therefore, if that was what everybody (police, etc) had previously been told is true – that the classroom doors lock automatically on closing – and you see a closed door, you assume it is locked. Why would you risk your life to check to see for sure if it’s locked? You would simply assume that closed door means locked door, and you wouldn’t even think to try it because you think you know it’s locked.

    Of course, that assumes the doors were supposed to lock automatically, and the police knew that. I would have to watch more of the testimony to understand whether the doors were supposed to lock automatically, but that’s my impression from the small part of the hearing I did watch so far.

    If so, the failure would represent one of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”:

    Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know….it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

    It is possible that the door lock failure was an unknown unknown.

27. MBunge:

    You apparently don’t know what evidence is, vs. anonymous sources and photos with no specified provenance.

    Also, do you know the meaning of the word “might”? Let me help you out. It means that something is possible, and that’s all it means.

28. Bunge, you are a troll under the bridge, please add something worthwhile or just crawl back into the slime. We are finally getting the sorry assed terrible story of the actually horrific event as told with factual evidence. Watch the whole thing tomorrow and then give us your take on the stuff. The DPS officer had trouble reading the transcript, it is difficult stuff to read and hear, I will watch all of it tomorrow. What a terrible disaster, Murphy’s Law combined with the Peter Principle intersects procrastination, repair all of those doors next week.

29. He said the door had to be locked from the outside and the lock was functional but the strike plate was defective so I assume it was locked and the other classroom, the teacher didn’t get the door locked in time. The point is though, they could open the door anytime locked or not and didn’t appear to know that.

30. OldTexan:

    “Murphy’s Law combined with the Peter Principle”

    That is an excellent way to describe what happened, as far as I can tell. And the whole thing combined to result in an unspeakable tragedy.

31. I am currently watching more hours of this stuff, men and women talking Texan, my language and they are doing an excellent job of picking the facts out and making them known. When you all hear those folk sounding funny, that’s us.

32. So, basically, you’ve got a series of failures that allowed the shooter to do the damage that he did.

    – failure of anyone to report the shooter for his pre-shooting behavior. Killing cats by putting them in a bag and bashing them against a wall is a 3rd degree felony in Texas (Cruelty to Nonlivestock Animals, TPC 49.092). Felony bond conditions = no guns

    – facilities maintenance failures – both the outside and classroom doors. If either of them function properly, the whole thing probably ends with the shooter getting shot by the cops before he can do any major damage

    – the Keystone Kops routine. It sounds to me like the incident commander got fixated on a single solution to the tactical problem he faced. Now, I wouldn’t want to try to execute a Halligan breach with someone shooting through the door, because a Halligan breach involves two people, both right in front of the door, holding and hammering a big metal bar into the door. A full length shield capable of stopping rifle bullets is going to be really heavy and awkward, enough so that it would require a third officer (at least) just to move it in front of the door. Rifle plate body armor is good as far as it covers, which is more or less the heart, lungs, and liver, and only from the front or back.

    That said, the “we only had pistols” and the shooter had a rifle isn’t such a big deal – at inside the building (and especially across the hall/room) distances – what’s important is putting rounds on target, quickly. The bad guy’s big advantage in this scenario was his ability to shoot through doors and walls without caring about what he might hit.

    “The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.”

33. The police response appears to be totally damned in the same way many of us early on concluded.
    It’s mandatory to wait to pass judgment, but you don’t have to wait to exercise judgement given prima fascia evidence.
    Children were dying and cops sat still.

34. So when did mcgraw know this or rather when did arredondo volunteer it, one assumes hes the source

    Yes the solution is to disarm the people and import another (gop are all in amnesty)

35. Not getting something here. Did McGraw say the door is not designed to be locked from the inside or that, while it may be designed to be locked from the inside, something–striker plate maybe–was defective and so the act of “locking” was useless?

    As to shooting, Ramos could shoot at the door and figure either he’d hit somebody or deter somebody. The cops, not knowing where he was in the room–and not even thinking about the kids in the room–would find it close to useless to be shooting into the room.

    I’m trying to give the cops the benefit of the doubt because so much has been said about them that was either false or irrelevant that what’s left at this stage may still be overstated.

    For example, “go in hard” is a mantra of massive magical power. All you have to do is say it, refer to Parkland, and everything goes right, or would have.
    But suppose the cops had gone in hard at Parkland. The place was such a mess that Cruz shot until his gun jammed and then he walked out with the others and was arrested later. What, exactly, would the cops have done in a hall swarming with kids, one of whom had an AR held behind him.? Or was around a corner?

    What, exactly short of going in hard, did the cops here not do? Those on the perimeter were holding the perimeter. Others were already in the building. That’s how the other kids got out safely. If, within three minutes, the cops were in a position to neutralize Ramos, that meant they got into the school pretty darn fast. But then what? At what point was Ramos no longer vulnerable to cops’ gunfire? Before or after the three minutes?
    Take a look at the layout from overhead. Does “in the building” mean…in a position to kill Ramos?

    Other questions arise, due to lack of specificity, about what was happening at the various points of decision.

    When Arredondo is standing in front of the door, what does he do on the radio to improve the situation? That wasn’t being done, I mean. How much of the no-radio issue is relevant to whatever happened. Yeah, I know, he should have taken charge and gotten some guys to…stand in front of the door. Everything else is irrelevant.

    Such questions still remain.

36. This info is heart breaking. How awful for all involved. We want to believe in and support law enforcement, but this is a tragedy of incompetence and over-caution that’s bad for law enforcement’s reputation. It’s even more heart break for the families that lost children and wives. More could have been done sooner.

    Like aircraft accidents, this needs to be analyzed and the results need to be disseminated to all police departments and schools nationwide. Learn from the mistakes. Put procedures and training in place to prevent making the same mistakes in the future. Don’t let the lessons learned at such cost be forgotten. It’s worked to make aviation safer. It can work to make schools safer as well.

37. Ms. Neo, again I appreciate your encouraging and exemplifying the desirability of waiting for good information rather than knee-jerk belief in media reports (which, by definition, are hearsay).

    You earlier asked why the quick reaction on some to judge and condemn. One significant encourager to judging is the fact (agreed pretty much by all) of police presence for ca. 75 minutes. In these sorts of situations, 15 minutes is considered a long time to react. So 75 minutes is a long long long long long time, which indicated major problem(s) in the response. The mind seeks to find causes, and possibilities become “facts” quite quickly.

    TommyJay: a minor to your post. The police also had semiautomatic firearms from the git-go (9mm pistols). While not as powerful per round, the ease of use in a confined space would lead some to prefer them in this situation.

38. CBI:

    I had already concluded almost from the start that the police response was chaotic and confusing, with obvious problems with the chain of command. There were possible other problems, too, with the doors and locks. In addition, I said I wanted to know what the police were doing during the wait – what were they trying, and that sort of thing.

    To me, all of that could have explained the delay – or much of it – without having to call them “lard-assed cowards” and the like. The rush to judgment I have been talking about was the rush to saying they were gutless cowards who didn’t give a rat’s ass whether kids lived or died, as long as their own lard-asses were safe.

    That is the kneejerk and rapid conclusion that I’ve objected to, and that I’ve tried to explain.

39. Dave L:

    Indeed. A cascade of failures, some a result of bad luck, some of bad maintenance, some of bad planning, some of bad communications, some of bad assumptions, some of bad training, some of lack of leadership, and possibly of failure of courage – but all coming to a terrible result because of one person bent on doing evil.

40. But sadly, we know there are people among us bent on doing evil. That leaves the rest of us with an irreducible duty to be as effective and courageous as possible in stopping it. Ramos can never be exonerated by the errors of the police, but the reverse is true as well: the whole purpose of the police (and failing police, all able-bodied humans present) is to take on people like Ramos.

41. My initial thoughts on the shields: the police were / are expected to be the shields for the children — particularly in a no gun zone. It doesn’t matter how the police were shielded. As a father of a middle school boy, I would much rather the monster were shooting at me, than my son. If you volunteer for the job of police, you should also be prepared to do that.

    In the worst case, the police should have used soviet ‘throw bodies at the shooter until he runs out of bullets.’ Harsh, but the state accepted (demands, really, in the absence of private schooling) custody of the children. It can damn well accept the responsibilities to make heroic efforts to keep them safe.

    For me, this is the infuriating part. Not the processes or facilities that failed. But the relative passiveness in response. Relative being key. The police did do a lot. But they apparently didn’t have a Teddy Roosevelt “Up and at ’em, Boys!” Until very (too) late. Get the shields you have, use them and the walls, and force the issue. You get shot at, but still better than shooting at the kids.

    And, let’s be real, the police involved in this are going to look back years from now and wonder if maybe, just maybe, they’d have been better off dying in a ‘Charge of the Light Brigade.’ They’d be remembered better.

42. I make no condemnations, only observations. First, this episode reinforces the truth of the hackneyed phrase, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes (or hours, in this case) away,” thus reinforcing the undeniable truth that NOBODY ELSE is or can be completely responsible for your own safety. (This of course, only applies to adult, responsible individuals, but can be extrapolated to include such people who have been charged with maintaining the safety of children and others unable to care for themselves by making sure that a responsible adult with the ability to provide protection is immediately available.) Second, I am reminded that on Omaha Beach in the morning of June 6, 1944, thousands of GI’s were disgorged into murderous enfilading fire. Some died with no chance of avoiding it, but others reached the sandy beach and were properly urged by those having command to GET OFF THE BEACH, even though it meant exposing themselves to the German machine guns. That is to say, it required heroic physical action, but that was the only rational choice under the circumstances. The Uvalde police chose to stay on the beach at the peril of the schoolchildren. Third, the police chief, Arredondo, who gave the early apologia for the actions (more properly the inactions) taken under his command was subsequently elected a Uvalde councilman. Among his first actions as such was to close the council meeting to the press! CYA uber alles!

43. So, what will happen to the Uvalde police now? We can condemn all we want but what is the next step to punish or improve the department?

44. Steve, my take on that is “Call the police, order a pizza. When the police arrive, offer them some cold pizza.”
    The second amendment is not about guns, it is about the right of self-defense.
    With arms. Arms are any weapons.
    When school teachers, janitors, etc. are denied the right to self-defense, this is what happens.
    The expectation is that if you are denied your right to self-defense, you will be defended.
    They weren’t.

45. Rae: “So, what will happen to the Uvalde police now? We can condemn all we want but what is the next step to punish or improve the department?”

    And this a real issue. Between the Police Bills of Rights in a lot states / jurisdictions (not sure about there), and using ‘victims protection laws’ to claim being a victim when involved in a violent incident to seal information, transparency is a problem. And with the Baptist / Catholic sinner shuffle the ‘sinner’ to a new jurisdiction (like Israel in FL), it can be hard. The vindictive part of me would require tattoos on the forehead ‘Arrived X mins after shooter. N kids died after I arrived’ and let them deal with THOSE consequences.

    Sadly, there isn’t a good (fair and just) way do assign consequences in a criminal or civil legal action. The ‘best’ we will do is societal opprobrium, dished in appropriate sizes.

46. Steve, “Arredondo, who gave the early apologia for the actions (more properly the inactions) taken under his command was subsequently elected a Uvalde councilman. ”

    The election was 5/7, if I am not mistaken, and shooting was 5/24. So, he was not ‘subsequently elected’, but ‘subsequently sworn in’, right?.

47. Why haven’t all the local cops and police chief been fired?

48. To some the expectations for LEOs have now become equal to that of the Secret Service. Will each child be assigned his/her own protective detail? Why not? And can the parents be trusted to protect the safety of the children? Shouldn’t the children be fitted with body armor and wear it always? Level IV and bubble wrap required. Can’t be too careful.

    “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now! For the children.” I’ll pass on that.

49. Don’t give me the “lack of training” excuse. The local cops were all cowards. Big fat Texas cowards.

50. “To some the expectations for LEOs have now become equal to that of the Secret Service. Will each child be assigned his/her own protective detail? Why not?”

    Some points:
    Unlike the President, children are compelled to attend public schools unless the parents are able and willing to pay for private schooling. All people with SS protection CHOSE to accept that job. In that sense, the children, are, in fact, ethically more deserving of protection.

    The government duties to protect need to take into account ALL the policies. Such as, gun free school zones, districts that choose not to compel armed teachers (letting teachers, AKA government employees decide whether they can protect the children in emergencies), ill-maintained or obsolete school facilities that can’t be made secure, and so on. The police are part of that holistic custodial / security / in loco parentis situation.

    Bottom line, you compel attendance, you accept responsibility for safety. The police are not the only ones who should be raked over the coals. The school district, town / city and state all have blame in this.

51. You’re told a school is locked down, do you assume the doors are locked, or unlocked?

    Of course, tactically, responders need to be trained not to assume anything, but I can see the assumption being made that, either the school is locked down, so doors are locked, or someone else prior to you had checked that it was locked.

    I recall a time while off-roading, a group of about 6-8 guys were trying to figure out how to get a Jeep out of the mud and up a short berm, when it only had front wheel drive. Their solution was quickly moving towards a tow strap and 2 winch lines to keep the Jeep stable.

    My ex-wife piped up, hey, why don’t you guys just push it. Boop, problem solved in 2 minutes. Yeah, people got a little more muddy then they were before, but it’s 10pm and everyone just wants to get out of the woods anyway.

    Sometimes the simple solutions by-pass us, while we try to “solve” the problem with the tools on hand.

52. Kris:

    So you have heard of home schooling.

    The government must issue body armor and bubble wrap for all children because perfect protection of the children must be ensured.

    LEOs and teachers must be present at all times and randomly tested, say 10% per school year for their willingingness and ability to die for the children. Bring back decimation, eh, Kris? No more phony drills either. live rounds. For the children.

    We also need MRAP school buses, and escorts along all routes. SS-level motorcades, compulsion is your rule after all.

    Just trying to sort out your solutions. Tell me more.

53. “So you have heard of home schooling.”

    Yep. I do it. And it is also a big commitment, and almost impossible to do if both parents work out of the house. That is why I said ‘able and willing’ to use other than public schooling for COMPELLED education. It is odd, that we have moved since the founding of this country from the state must provide education to the residents must accept education, but here we are. And bubble wrap isn’t required if other parts of the security in depth is competently executed. But, to the extent that is not, it still falls on the government to provide the security and response to the incidents, particularly if they prevent others from doing so (for whatever reason).

    Full body armor would have been useful in this case because everything else failed (threat assessment of the kid, facilities security, security force response, police response, and so on). But had the other been done right, the full body armor would have been the proverbial ‘an abundance of caution’: which is to say, too much. The only abundance that the state creates, is fear of what citizens might do. And then they create policies and duties (both on themselves and others), then don’t fulfil their duties, but hold others accountable.

    You aren’t going to change my mind that the state had a duty to protect kids, and failed. Where is failed is still be examined. But, at the end of it all, is the enforcement arms of the state, which is all to willing to do that for ITS purposes, but not for OURs.

54. You can’t have no cops going in to save the kids and cops standing in front of the door dithering about breaching it. Pick one.

55. Full body armor for school children says it all. Nothing about the transportation vulnerability? Its been an education.

56. If you can exaggerate for effect about SS protection details, then so can I, no? If no, then we are done.

57. Like many other conservatives, I’m torn between 2 conflicting concepts re law enforcement:
    1. They are the thin blue line that protects civilization from chaos.
    2. They are agents of the state that will enslave us all as soon as the coast is clear.

    I have tried to reconcile the contradiction by believing that when I call the cops, they are doing good, but when the cops call me, not so much.

    Here, we called the cops, and they did bad.
    I’m having trouble with this.

58. Kris:

    Compulsory education being a hook requiring unlimited (?) responsibility to protect public school children seems to be your mind space.

59. OK, I’m retired, so I have plenty of time to wait for almost everyone who has commented here on Uvalde to apologize to me/sarc. I rushed to judgement and said very early on that the cops were cowardly incompetents. I based that judgement on two simple facts that we all knew almost immediately. The active shooter entered the school at approximately 11:30 AM and was not killed until after 1 PM. Those two very simple facts are all that I needed to know to make my rush to judgement. After Columbine, every cop in the country knew that the way to stop a mass killer was to act immediately and at any cost to take him out. Obviously, that should have also happened in Uvalde, and due to cowardice and incompetence, it did not. Case closed.

60. Grandpagrumble,
    To be fair, there was a derelict chain of command. I suspect law enforcement, like the military, relies on orders– so some of LEO’s may have been waiting for an order.
    The flip side of that, LEO’s may have been using that as a convenient excuse to not take on the shooter, especially after they had armor that would stop a .223 round.

61. Grandpa. I’m retired, too. And your case is pretty far off.
    The active shooter entered the school and within perhaps three minutes was barricaded. The cops acted about as immediately as could be wished, presuming we didn’t have them on scene before the shooter.
    Very shortly, the children were dead or dying.
    What the cops did or didn’t do to prevent that is within the first few minutes after Ramos entered the building. And for much of that short period, they weren’t in the building because…Ramos got there first.
    Killing him later on saved probably no lives.
    Whether they should have killed him sooner is another issue.
    Charging in a la Columbine’s lesson would have availed nothing, which we know because the cops were in the building very shortly.
    “charging in” is a term which gets the keyboard flowing with adrenalin and testosterone but only works if the shooter is available to be shot. Ramos was not.

62. I watched/listened to McCraw’s testimony for 20 minutes or so. It’s unbearably sad. It leaves me wondering if there is any difference between gross incompetence and simple cowardice.

63. Richard, even tho I’m retired, I still don’t that much time that I have to join every fight that I’m invited to. Thank you.

64. Om: so would you have trouble with a school spending a few grand on a bulletproof whiteboard (on a trolley) that would be immediately available to the responding LEOs? Such things do exist. My own notion was a couple of six Level IV bullet-stoppers stored in the principal’s office along with some AR’s; or at least a cadre of trained teachers with carry permits.
    Why surrender preemptively to these evil nutjobs?

65. Richard Aubrey: your argument (don’t rush in, it’s too late) rests on the premise that the shooter must have killed everybody in the first few minutes. But why adopt that premise? Especially when it may take many minutes, even hours, to die from the kind of random mass-shooting-frenzied assault that this guy conducted?
    Why give up on those victims before you need to?
    If your child were among the wounded, when would you decide that rescue efforts were pointless?

66. Owen:

    Re your question at 2:32: of course there’s a difference. The difference is large but the effect may be the same.

    The problem is that both things – incompetence, cowardice – are interpretations of the facts that rely on an understanding of people’s perceptions and emotions, and how they affect behavior. That’s difficult to evaluate – we often don’t even know that about ourselves, much less other people. So interpretations will differ, given the same facts.

    Also, 20 minutes doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what McCraw said. I’ll be writing more about what he said; I listened to all of it, which was quite a lot and not something most people are going to do.

67. Heartbreaking.

    Slain Texas teacher’s officer husband tried to rescue her but was ‘detained’ and had his gun taken

    https://nypost.com/2022/06/22/slain-texas-teachers-husband-tried-to-rescue-her-was-detained/

68. Owen:

    Your Level IV ballistic shield on wheels may work in some situations, your AR-15 ready rack may be a case of the first thing the psycho murderer would plan to sieze. There are always downsides and tradeoffs; decisions made in the heat of emotion are often dodgy.

    Expecting all LEOs to take a bullet to the center of mass seems particularly emotive. It is the standard expected of the Secret Service (as Dan Bingino has noted Secret Service agents have to be specifically trained to “get big” to anticipate such situations. To “get big” is to put your body into the line of fire knowing you will likely be shot). So the emotive response “those cowards”, or “they should expect to be shot and protect the children” doesn’t comport with the reality of LEO training or prior expectations, but that’s just my contrarian, pathetic apologia, or my opinion based on not actually being in Uvalde.

69. Om: fair enough. I wasn’t there and the Monday Morning QB is a terrible distraction. I still think that maybe, just maybe, existing protocols are inadequate.
    About 20 dead kids might agree.
    I don’t want to get emotive. I am not good at that. I am seriously interested in improving how we do this, protecting LEOs as much as the kids and teachers. I think we can do more to flush out these nutjobs before they act, but pretty quickly we get to “root cause” speculation that goes nowhere.
    So in a practical/tactical sense we do need to look at bulletproof whiteboards and teachers who can put rounds center-mass with some equanimity.

70. Neo: correct. I am trying to interpret action and inaction by strangers caught in a terrible situation, and somehow convert my (inevitably selective, biased) observations to a “true reading” of what they were “really experiencing/thinking” on that killing ground. I did not intend to issue what some might consider a definitive judgment of their behavior. But I can say that personal fear of harm can stall or alter one’s sense of what “can or should be done,” so that emotion undermines reason and experience and, IMHO, there is no longer a clear boundary between incompetence and cowardice.

71. I listened to Roland Guiterrez, state senator representing the district Uvalde is in was on Fox News, and he had a bone to pick with McCraw’s testimony and wants more answers than McCraw provided.
    According to Guiterrez, there were 91 Texas DPS officers at the school, of which 13 entered the building for a short time and then left.
    He said McCraw has been selective about the release of bodycam footage and has filed a suit with the DPS.
    He feels local officials are being scapegoated and thinks DPS also failed.
    He asked McCraw during the testimony whether the federal agents who finally killed the shooter had permission to do so. McCraw said no. Guiterrez questions why state law enforcement didn’t take the initiative after seeing that local officials had failed to do so.

    Guiterrez said there was a failure at every level, and we need to know exactly what happened so it doesn’t happen again.

72. Brian E:

    I listened to McGraw, and here are some things I heard him say.

    The first is that the AG is reviewing all the video footage, including bodycam footage, and that he expects it to be released later after she approves.

    Local officials are definitely the focus of the criticism, but I heard several people concede that everyone failed that day. Even McCraw may have said it – I think he did although I can’t swear to it. He was trying to explain, though, that ordinarily when people arrive they defer to those who are already there and who have been supposedly handling it.

    As for the question about ” whether the federal agents who finally killed the shooter had permission to do so,” and Guitterez’s suggestion that McCraw had said “no,” I watched the whole thing and didn’t get that. What I heard in general on that topic from McCraw was a description that involved a group of officers from several groups – BorTac in the lead, but others including local police – cooperating to form the final takeout “stack.” The stack consisted of seven people, by the way, not three as originally reported, but only four of them managed to get in and kill the perp because the door closed behind them on the other three (which McCraw said was not unusual with a stack situation). He said that Arredondo was fully in agreement that they should do this.

    I really don’t know what Guiterrez is talking about there.

    If Guiterrez is the person I think he is – and looking up his photo just now, I think he is – he was the only person questioning McCraw who was clearly hostile to him the whole time. I noticed that. In fact, the chair stopped Guiterrez at one point and said his questions sounded like a deposition and could he please not frame them that way.

73. Owen:

    There is nothing wrong with “trying to interpret action and inaction.” We all do it. But our interpretations aren’t always correct, and it’s hard to know because the internal states and frames of mind of other people cannot ordinarily be proven.

    In other words, we don’t read minds, but we try to. That’s natural to do.

74. Owen:

    One of the many things McCraw said is that he would recommend that every regular police officer have in his car a ballistic shield as well as a breaching tool such as a Halligan tool, and be taught to use it. Right now only SWAT teams have them.

    Of course, I bet some people would criticize this as the “militarization” of police.

75. Neo,
    Thanks,
    Uvalde is in Guiterrez’s district, so it’s understandable that he might be hostile to someone who called the response an abject failure– even if it were true.

    As to that question– I was listening to him being interviewed on Fox and I might have mis-characterized what he said. I wasn’t taking notes.

    I think his point was that the feds took charge one there, with the implication being why didn’t state cops take charge when they arrived and saw a chaotic situation.

76. Owen. I didn’t say don’t rush in, although pretending I did is predictable.
    What I said is that rushing right in may not be the cure-all it’s been sold to be. In this case, unless the cops got there almost before Ramos, there’d be no target for the rushers-in to shoot. In this case, they’d be standing in empty halls until the other cops started evacuating other rooms. Still, nobody to shoot.

    So rush in all you want and then…..we have a door. Now what? Completely new discussion with endless issues about what might or might not be true about who said what, what shields will do what, whether the door was locked, and what kind of unlocking procedure–breaching, keys, etc–might or should have been used. But rushing right in was, by that time, irrelevant.

77. Brian E:

    McCraw answered that question many times during the session.

    Apparently Guiterrez didn’t like his answer. But McCraw explained and I think his explanation was clear. For one thing (and there were others), they were getting bad information about what was happening.

    McCraw’s testimony was fascinating to me. As I said, I hope to deal with it later tonight or tomorrow, but I won’t be able to touch on many of the points he made. But it’s hard to emphasize how very difficult communications were that day, and there were a lot of misconceptions about what was actually happening. “Fog of war” was especially thick that day.

78. When you have an Emergency Response plan, there is an obligation to update it frequently, especially when something in the plan changes. There is also an obligation to inspect and check the function of safety-critical equipment and systems on a regular basis, and usually to keep a record of those checks, as well as any repair logs. Finally , there is an obligation to conduct drills on a regular basis, to ensure skill sets are kept in acceptable condition, and also to ensure that the plan participants are continually reminded of Roles & Responsibilities. This is Emergency Management 101. And yet many red flags have become apparent throughout the course of this short investigation. It should result in a nationwide program of audit and training and drills to ensure that future incidents resolve in a much more organized and effective way, and hopefully will result in uncovering existing flaws that can be quickly remedied so that at least a few of these incidents can be pre-empted altogether.

    On Offshore installations, these things are regulated by law. There are regular fire simulations and drills, rescue drills, and weekly abandon ship (lifeboat) drills. The times are measured from Muster Alarm to all-hands-accounted for Headcount. They are repeated with higher frequency when crews start not taking them seriously enough.

    It’s a shame, but it’s hard not to conclude that a system of regular audit and drills could have prevented this tragedy. Door locks could have been fixed, external door vigilance could have been corrected, and police response could have been optimal. This is properly the area for corrective action, but who will take notice with all the political grandstanding? I’ve yet to hear one politician say something constructive and practical.

79. Richard Aubrey: Did not mean to mischaracterize your position. I am guessing wildly about the tactical problem. So many unknowns that we, the Monday Morning QB’s, have not considered. How many assailants? Armed with what? Out of ammo or not? With what if any plan or strategy? Located where? Trying to survive/negotiate? Or just die in a “blaze of glory”?

80. Owen thinks that 20 fatalities in Uvalde may be an indication that the responce protocols were inadequate. Gee, that never occurred to me, that having a pschotic mass murderer inside their school was a bad thing, was not expected, nor was on their calendar (sarc, Owen).

    Having armed, competent, and mentally prepared,
    teachers and staff on campus is another obvious good idea. Is that going to be allowed, encouraged, or manditory? Those details are where the devil be. Like gun free zones, expect psycho murderers to notice and plan.

81. Aggie:

    Actually, a great deal of the Texas hearing focused on just that: the changes that are needed in preparedness and training going forward. It’s hard to get that from sound bites in the media, but it was discussed at length with some good suggestions.

    Lack of money in certain localities is sometimes a problem. And people are people. You can have locks but people can override them. For example, there was testimony that the two unlocked outer doors at Robb Elementary (we learned there were TWO and not one, although the shooter only entered through one) were often left unlocked, but we don’t know who unlocked them. I would guess it was probably people doing it for convenience, and forgetting to lock them again.

82. Been said elsewhere, sometimes by me, that a lot of these evil nutjobs put a fair amount of thought and planning into their Big Day. They accumulate guns and ammo, in some cases body armor. They get a choice location–Paddock in LV–or figure out how to get through security–Lanza at Sandy Hook.
    They may rig a bomb–Columbine and the Colorado theater shooting–and that the bombs did not work does not negate the fact that time and effort were deployed.
    So whatever hot idea we have is a Thing for them to think their way around.
    Maybe the Darrell Brooks maneuver will replace the AR as the tool of choice. Make the AR completely useless by whatever means one can imagine and…the prospective evil nutjob does not take up stamp collecting to ease his demons.

    Wherever there is a perimeter, figuratively or literally, there is an outside-the-perimeter where the evil nutjob can move freely. And the innocent have to line up in the Outside to get Inside.

    Okay. Metaphor alert. Point is not to presume these shooters are AR automatons who can be stopped by shields. They’re evil nutjobs with a wide choice of tools and can choose depending on what we haven’t thought to cover.

83. Breaching the door with a Halligan is a two-person job. I think the Halligan showed up without an axe or sledge and thus could not be used on this door until the sledge showed up. A commenter some weeks ago called them a “a set of irons”. This is an axe or sledge and Halligan attached to each other so they can be carried in one hand. All the fire department training videos I watched would lead me to believe it would take at least three or four hits on the Halligan with the axe (or sledge) while repositioning the Halligan after each blow to be able to pry the door open.

    https://www.leatherheadtools.com/breacher-irons/

84. Richard Aubrey:

    Somewhat like mutating viruses.

85. Timeline of video and 911 calls, according to NY Post dated May 27
    11:33 Shooter enters school through open exterior door and fires over 100
    rounds
    11:35 Three Uvalde police enter school; 4 more cops enter shortly
    11:37 Sixteen shots are fired by shooter (inside classroom)
    12:03 As many as 19 officers in hallway; student A calls 911 and says she’s
    in room 112
    12:10 Student A calls again and says multiple people are dead
    12:13 Student A calls again
    12:15 Bortac arrives
    12:16 Student A call again says 8 or nine are still alive
    12:19 Student B calls but hangs up
    12:21 More shots are fired
    12:36 Student A calls again
    12:43-12:47 Student A begs 911 to send police
    12:46 Student A says she can hear police next door
    12:50 Shooter is killed

    This is an early timeline (May 27) and may have been superseded by other information, but according to this there were multiple (19) officers in the hallway by 12:03
    At 12:21 more shots were fired– were additional children shot? How many of the children were still alive after the initial shooting around 11:40?
    By Noon there were enough officers, armament and rifles (though a pistol might have been as effective as this was very close range; Border patrol used a shotgun, which I’m sure local police had at their disposal)

    Killing him later on saved probably no lives.
    Whether they should have killed him sooner is another issue.
    Charging in a la Columbine’s lesson would have availed nothing, -Richard Aubrey

    Sooner or later they had to “charge in”, since he was behind a steel door. There was no way to sneak in.
    Had they acted sooner, would lives have been saved? Probably yes.

    https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/a-timeline-of-911-calls-during-the-texas-school-shooting/

    I noticed that some of these time fluxuate with other accounts– though the 911 calls should be timestamped.

86. Brian E:

    You write: “At 12:21 more shots were fired– were additional children shot? How many of the children were still alive after the initial shooting around 11:40?”

    Unfortunately, McCraw did not answer the first question and no one asked either. This seems odd to me. He didn’t even address it, and many people assume they know the answer when they do not.

    It’s another of those unknown unknowns.

    The second question was asked but he says they don’t know how many were alive then but died and might have been alive if rescued earlier. He said that there is someone studying that and making a report, supposedly. He indicated it is difficult to know and they really don’t know.

    However, in one room there was one girl uninjured (she made most of the 911 calls) and I believe 9 injured. In the other room there was one injured teacher who survived; that’s Reyes.

    The medical person or people making the report will almost certainly note that many of the injuries were instantly or nearly instantly fatal. How many were survivable with scenarios of different time frames of rescue is really hard to say, and I think it will be hard to say even for those medical people, unless all of the victims had wounds that were obviously fatal. I doubt that they all were, since apparently one of the teachers (Mireles) managed to call her husband. But we don’t know when that call occurred; McCraw did not say and I’ve not read a single thing that tells us. If it happened very early it’s possible she would not have survived no matter what. If it happened significantly later it’s possible she would have survived with an earlier rescue. We simply don’t know at this point.

87. Do n’t forget to save some of this hate for the school….the district administration and the school staff there that date. Earlier reports said that this school had experienced multiple lock downs of late, maybe as many as 60, due to events such as mass border jumps and events nearby. Two options come to mind: First, had the staff become complacent and looked at this alert as a “here we go again” and responded in lackluster manner, at least until the lead began to fly. Or, second, they did it well only to learn that failures in earlier events had not been corrected, such as multiple “master keys”, damaged or malfunctioning door latches, etc fixed. Did anyone even do an after-action report and evaluation following any of those?

    The timeline above has Ramos entering and starting to shoot (100 rds?) at 1133. Entering the building or the classroom…. Did any of those halls shown in the video stills show indicia that 100 rd of .223 were recently fired there? When did the first call to the police go out? When the shooting started? So how did the first cops get there at the time stated? I see no reason to rely on that timeline, as shown.

    And remember, a lot of effort has gone on in recent years to screen out those with “toxic masculinity” from police applicants, and to “defuse” those with it who are already on the job. Wyatt Earp doesn’t work here any more.

88. Neo,
    Thank you for your reply. It will be important, to the extent the medical community can determine the timeline of the deaths of the children and adults.

    Would an earlier response made a difference? Let’s hope so, as damning as that might be to the officers that were there that day. If this watch and wait response becomes the default, it may cause more deaths in future mass shootings.

    Would some of the wounds that became fatal, been survivable if they had received medical care earlier.

    We know that the rapid response in the most recent wars resulted in many more soldiers surviving with injuries that those in previous wars never survived.

89. Another Mike. Interesting point. At what point did anybody alert the cops? Does a crashed truck generate a SWAT response? Or was it shortly thereafter when Ramos shot at some people in the area? What time, a minute?
    Point is, the cops, given the timeline we have, were on his tail faster than can be explained. Three minutes? That’s not fast enough, but it’s a heck of a lot faster than most of us would expect.
    The idea that the cops did nothing seems to be nonsense, given the timeline. Some were in the school almost immediately after Ramos, to the point that one might ask how come so fast.
    Those outside were outside. Those inside were inside and the fact that there were some outside doesn’t make those inside disappear. Juvenile phrasing, of course, but necessary given some of the complaints.

    How much faster would the cops have had to be there to catch Ramos in the hall where he could be shot? Anybody want to call that for a realistic standard?

    Once he’s in the room…everything slows down. Whether the cops dithered at the door or were honestly repulsed is one question. But the fact is they were there, the existence of cops on the outside notwithstanding.

    Hypothetical but, should some of the kids have still been alive when the door breaching, even a failed attempt, began, would Ramos have thought to finish them off before firing at the door?

    Neo. “muating virus” Exactly. Good illustration.

90. We know that having combat infantrymen trained to deliver immediate first aid to levels unheard of in prior conflicts, having blood clotting powders and sponges, torniquets, and the emphasis on rapid evacuation have made an enormous difference. But not always.

91. Another Mike:

    That’s an old timeline from May 27 with incomplete information.

    The shooter entered the school and fired perhaps 27 or somewhat fewer rounds in the hallway, then entered a classroom and then an adjoining one and shot 100+ rounds while inside both. It was the 100+ rounds that almost certainly killed his victims. Some of the bullets went through walls into another classroom that he never entered, wounding a teacher in the stomach and also wounding a child (or those two were wounded from his shooting in the halls earlier; it wasn’t made clear which it was).

    The number of hallway rounds are determined by casings and that sort of thing as well as audio, and the rounds in the two classrooms were counted by audio.

    In response to your theory of complacency, and your questions about how the cops got there so quickly – I don’t think there was complacency at all and I’ll tell you why. First of all, this was a complex situation in which the police got three rapid-fire calls from three venues. First there was a 911 call from the grandmother’s neighbor reporting the grandma had been shot (I don’t know if the stolen truck was even noticed or reported at the time). I think that call came at around 11:28. At 11:31 he crashed the truck and shot at the funeral home people and that was reported at 11:31. Were the police aware it was the same perp at that time? I don’t know. Then less than a minute later the perp was at the school and a 911 call went out from the school saying he was shooting at the school windows (again, I don’t know whether or not police or the callers were aware it was all one perpetrator). The lockdown alert went out at that time, and since he was already shooting and breaking windows with an AR15 and people in the school could hear it, I don’t think there was any complacency about the lockdown. They knew an active shooter was there although they didn’t know he would be able to get into the school.

    And if the exterior door hadn’t been open, he wouldn’t have been able to get into the school. He entered the school through the exterior door at 11:33, though, and just had to walk a short while to enter the classrooms where he started killing children and teachers. The police arrived very fast – I think they entered the building at around 11:35 and got to the hallway around then or at 11:36. But by then he was finishing up his 100 rounds inside the classrooms and started firing a bit at the cops in the hallway from inside the classroom.

92. om. We were pretty good fifty plus years ago in first aid. I happened to have to use one technique at a motorcycle accident maybe 25 years ago. Worked.
    But since, came the “combat lifesaver” training to save life until the actual line medic shows up.
    Great idea.

93. neo. If the exterior door hadn’t been open, the shooter would have used another one, possibly slowing down his movement to temporary invulnerability in a classroom. But if he’d entered by another way, maybe another set of classrooms.
    Would have offered more opportunities to the cops–presuming they were in that part of the school–but not turn the situation into something else completely.
    But the longer he was walking around the school looking for a way in, the more time for a criminal–a legal carrier in a gun-free zone–to shoot him.

94. Richard Aubrey:

    Actually, he would almost certainly have gotten in anyway, and it probably wouldn’t have taken long. The outer door had windows in it and next to it – smallish ones, but big enough to make it possible to shoot them out, reach in, and open the door by pushing on a bar. That’s pretty much the way the Sandy Hook shooter got in.

95. We talked up thread about the windows next to the unlocked exterior door and that the door when locked wasn’t much of an obstacle. Once the initial shooting ended I think the cops went into “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” mode and tried to get the other children out of the building without anymore of them getting hit by gunfire rather than starting a firefight surrounded by classrooms.

96. Chases Eagles:

    What? That decisions made or not made would have had serious consequences for the other children and staff?

    Another very good point. Again, Well said.

97. om
    As you say, Chases Eagles has a very good point. Question is why it has to be made.
    I’ll take the step of “pshrinking” it. Start with displacement Not worth the effor to be hating on ramos. But somebody has to take the hit. So…cops. Can’t afford to give that up.
    Various factors such as rescuing the rest of the students are waved away because they interfere with the really good mad. Which is psychically necessary.
    I’ve mentioned this before. The response in the Sandy Hook case was fifteen minutes and….nobody cares. No howls of anger. Is it because this is Texas and all right thinking people seized a reason to crap on Texas, which is not a Thing when it comes to the Right Sort of People in Connecticut?
    There were a number of things wrt the Sandy Hook situation which were or were going to be sealed. I’ve no idea if any have come out since. Not heard, one way or another. But any interest in the response time…zilch.
    considerably longer than in Uvalde.

    From what I can see of the timeline, the cops were on Ramos’ tail almost miraculously fast compared to other situations. I can’t figure it out. Three minutes? How’d that happen?
    But he beat them into the classroom and….everything changed. Now it’s about the door?
    Plenty of room to argue about the door, given what we know or don’t know about all the issues from keys to shields. But that does not apply unless the cops are already there.
    Displacement will not be denied.

98. Richard Aubrey:

    Police got to the school around 11:35 and inside the hall by 11:36-7, but the first 911 call was apparently from the grandmother’s neighbor shortly after the grandmother was shot. We don’t know the exact time of that first 911 call, but I think it was probably some time between 11:25 and 11:30. But it put the police on alert earlier that there was some sort of shooter, and some of them went to the grandmother’s house, which was about two miles from the school.

    The car crash was at 11:28 and the 911 call from the men at the funeral home came at 11:31. The first teacher also called 911 at 11:31 and the school went on lockdown then. So all of this happened in a small area, and Uvalde isn’t a huge town to begin with. The school resource officer got to the school before the shooter even got into the school and was on the grounds having shot at windows. Very very unfortunately, the resource officer didn’t see him because he was hiding behind a car.

    Some people say that the school should have gone on lockdown when the call about the grandmother came in. I guess it probably wouldn’t have mattered much, because of the vulnerability of the doors with windows.

99. Neo. That’s a good explanation of how and why the cops were there so fast. But what about the slow-cops argument? If that goes away, what’s left?
    It looks like the cops were all over this; maybe half a minute behind Ramos’ getting set up in the classroom. Even if it were two minutes, that’s a pretty fast response compared to other events not getting this kind of publicity.
    And that presumes the cops got in by the same or a nearby entrance to Ramos’ entry. and not the other end of the school.
    It’s going to be all about the door.

100. https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/22/dem-sen-murphy-senate-gun-bill-getting-gop-support-paves-the-way-for-even-more/

101. om on June 22, 2022 at 9:22 pm said:
     We know that having combat infantrymen trained to deliver immediate first aid to levels unheard of in prior conflicts, having blood clotting powders and sponges, torniquets, and the emphasis on rapid evacuation have made an enormous difference. But not always.

     Took this course a year or two ago, and it’s invaluable. I think everyone should learn it, would save a bunch of lives. Even more so, every teacher and school employee should learn this.

     https://www.stopthebleed.org/

     People keep calling fire and policemen “First Responders” when they are usually not the first people responding to a scene. Most of the time, they are responding because others have called.

     You are your own first responder in all situations. The more you know, the better your chances of prevailing.

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