The story told by the third teacher under siege at Robb Elementary, Arnulfo Reyes

The New Neo Posted on by

We hadn’t heard of his existence before, but now it emerges that there was a third teacher in one of the two rooms under siege at Robb Elementary, Arnulfo Reyes, and he survived although seriously wounded and still in the hospital. He told his story to ABC and it was featured today.

This man has been deeply deeply traumatized both physically and emotionally. The eleven children under his care were all killed and he alone survived to tell the tale. That’s already a heavy burden of survivor guilt for a man who really had no chance against a gunman. According to the newscasters at ABC, the interview was much longer than what they aired, but this is the segment they showed:

I’d be exceedingly curious to see the rest of the interview with Reyes, because as it’s edited it doesn’t answer a single question I would have wanted to ask this man. My own questions would have focused on what he actually perceived rather than his speculations about what the cops were doing outside the door, although he is understandably blaming them for delay without seeming to know anything more than we do about the details of why that happene. The aim of the ABC team is very very clear, and they have edited this suffering man’s interview to serve them well, and have asked leading question to elicit exactly what they want. For example, see minute 4:02 (interviewer: “Did you feel abandoned in that moment by police, by the people who were supposed to protect you?”).

That video piece is over nine minutes long, but a great deal of it isn’t the interview at all but is instead the rehashing of the “the police waited over an hour doing nothing” narrative, with no new facts at all. Reyes – and the interview we do see is heartbreaking because what this man went through was a nightmare – makes an impassioned plea at the end of his segment on the clip for more gun control, saying that no training would have helped. He doesn’t consider the possibility of firearms training for teachers, of course, but it seems to me that if he had had the opportunity for a firearm then he and his young students mightn’t have been such sitting ducks.

Although perhaps they still would have been, because no system is perfect. The gunman at Robb Elementary had the element of surprise – as Reyes tells the story, they had heard shots and they got down under a table and pretended “to be asleep,” but the gunman came into their room (111) through an adjoining door to 112 (as we already knew) and suddenly he was there. We don’t hear Reyes addressing the issue of whether he had locked his own door – I’m going to assume he did but it’s an odd omission in the interview – or whether he received the “Alert!” text calling for lockdown. Perhaps this was covered in the longer unedited interview, but it certainly isn’t covered in what we see. Nor does Reyes discuss the other teacher in the room – what she might have done, how she was killed. From his interview we still don’t know whether either of the other two teachers were in his room, or both in the other room, or one in each room.

The segment spends a lot of time blaming police, and Reyes does as well. The commenters at YouTube chime right in, too. Reyes’ feelings against the police are understandable, but his knowledge of what they in fact were doing out there during the wait may not be any better than ours. Just to take one example, he says at one point that they “went away,” but perhaps they just got quiet; how would he know they went away if he couldn’t see them? He also calls them “cowards” (ah, how the MSM must love that!) and addresses the officers this way: “You have a bulletproof vest. I had nothing.”

But did they have bulletproof vests? It certainly stands to reason they did – but did they? We know that the Border Patrol officers who finally entered had ballistic shields with which to protect themselves, and one was almost shot in the head nevertheless. We also know part of the wait had to do with getting the key from the janitor (and I’d like a ton more information about why that took so long). But the only thing I can find about bulletproof vests that day is this:

The [DOJ review of the Robb Elementary shooting] will also likely examine how well officers were prepared with gear like weapons and body armor. The shooter wore a tactical vest and was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a powerful weapon capable of piercing basic bulletproof vests.

In previous shootings reviewed by the Justice Department, non-specialized law enforcement units did not have the kind of body armor needed to fully protect themselves.

It seems we don’t know what they had regarding such vests. Plus, not every bulky vest worn by law enforcement is a so-called “bulletproof vest.” And what does a bulletproof vest do against an AR15? I’ve already quoted information that it does not protect, and here’s more about that:

Body armor is meant to absorb impact of the projectile. Depending on the vest’s rating it may have stronger absorption than other vests. This does not make it bulletproof. Most manufacturers avoid the term when naming vests, even when the vest is up to the highest standard…

Keep in mind that the slower the bullet is, the better off the wearer is going to be. Bullets that have a hard tip or fired at a high velocity will get through the fibers and right through the bullet proof vest…

The highest possible level of ballistic protection possible for soft body armour is Level IIIA. Higher levels of protection from rifle ammo is only possible with aid of additional ballistic plates.

And even those plates don’t seem to work, according to this video demonstration.

I’m not blaming Reyes at all for what he said. As far as I’m concerned, he can say whatever he wants, and I have empathy and sympathy for his reactions to the horror he endured. My ire is for the news people who guide him, edit him, and shape his interview towards their own goals: to blame the police prematurely and to further the cause of gun control. They are happy to exploit someone’s enormous mental and physical anguish in that endeavor.

They are the ones who could have put out a simple sentence saying whether the police had “bulletproof vests” on and if so what kind, or whether we actually know (at 7:29 newscaster Robin Roberts repeats that the officers had bulletproof vests; I’d love to know whether she actually knows that or not). The news people are also the ones who could and should explain about such vests and what happens when they face an AR15. I’m no firearms expert, but it took me about 30 seconds to find the information I wanted on that. I bet they didn’t even try, because they’re not interested in telling a more complete or more objective story.

[NOTE: Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has called for “state leaders to move around $50 million in the state budget to buy bulletproof shields for school police officers.” That seems to be in line with previous reports that the police officers in Uvalde had to wait for Border Patrol to arrive in order to have access to protective ballistic shields.]

The California primary today is potentially very interesting

The New Neo Posted on by

Although it may end up with the same-old same-old.

First we have the governorship. The loathsome Newsom is the current officeholder, and he survived a recall election recently quite handily. Newsom would dearly love Republican Brian Dahle to win the primary among his opponents, because Newsom is aware that no Republican stands a realistic chance of winning against him in November.

However, one of the candidates is the considerably more unique Michael Shellengerger, who is non-aligned in regard to party but who used to be a Democrat. Prior to his California run in 2022, I knew of Shellenberger from this book that he wrote:

In June 2020, Shellenberger published Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, in which the author argues that climate change is not the existential threat it is portrayed to be in popular media and activism. Rather, he posits that technological innovation and capital accumulation, if allowed to continue and grow, will remedy environmental issues. According to Shellenberger, the book “explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.”

Shellenberger was originally a Democrat but is now running with no party designation, and if you go here you’ll see some of the charts he’s emphasizing in his sharp critique of Newsom’s policies in California.

To give one example of his approach, here’s what Shellenberger had to say about San Francisco mayor London Breed’s proposal to favor the trans homeless over other homeless when getting benefits:

It’s not only totally unethical to discriminate against who gets shelter or medical treatment since the vast majority of homeless people on the streets are either addicted to hard drugs or suffering mental illness, it may be illegal…

The underlying problem is that California is completely without leadership at every level of government…Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to shut down the homeless encampments, which are open drug scenes.

Sounds right to me, and not typical of the usual Democrat position.

More from Shellenberger:

“George Soros is the biggest donor of these radical left district attorneys and of Gavin Newsom. Their agenda is just to shut down the prisons, let the prisoners out without rehabilitating them first,” Shellenberger told “America Reports.”

“That’s why you see a crisis of chaos, the open-air drug markets, the fentanyl deaths. The people of California, we are very liberal people, but we do have our limits…we want to see law and order in the cities…the state.”

Interesting combination message: we’re liberals, but we have our limits.

And then there’s San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who is facing a recall. Here’s my very first post on Chesa, whom I called “the ultimate red diaper baby” when he was first elected as DA in 2019. It was a simple matter to predict that his tenure would be a disaster, and it certainly has been.

The real question is whether the vote today will be enough to get rid of him. If the polls are any indication he will be gone, but we all know that election results can surprise. I also have spoken over the last year to several people I know who live in San Francisco or its environs, and they are not at all happy with the crime increase. When I brought up Boudin, however, although they didn’t defend him they didn’t excoriate him either. So I don’t know.

[NOTE: I’d forgotten this article (I found the link in that Boudin post of mine from 2019), about the life and fate of a man who was wounded in Chesa’s parents’ crime. It’s quite a story.]

Report: the school police chief was not informed about the 911 calls from the children

The New Neo Posted on by

Earlier I suspected this might be the case, and now we have semi-official word that it is the case (of course, that can change after a more complete investigation as time goes on):

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, said during a press conference the Uvalde school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, wasn’t made aware of 911 calls that students inside Robb Elementary School made around 30 minutes after the gunman entered, including a student begging for police to take action. The shooter killed 19 students and two teachers during his siege on the school.

Instead, Gutierrez said 911 calls were relayed to the Uvalde Police Department, which operates separately from the school district’s police, and Arredondo — who was leading law enforcement’s response on the scene — was left in the dark.

On May 27 I had written this:

…[A]bout the multiple 911 calls…My question is: were the police at the scene informed of the content of the calls? I’m going to assume that they were – which makes their behavior even worse – but do we know they were informed? They certainly should have been, but I’d like to know for sure before I assume that they were privy to that information…

I have no trouble criticizing and even condemning their decisions as I learn more, if such condemnation is warranted.

To me, it seemed hard to believe that Arredondo wouldn’t have been informed of the calls and their significance while the siege was ongoing. But on the other hand it seemed that a failure to inform him was a possibility, and that could end up explaining at least some of his behavior and decision-making process that day.

So now we do know he didn’t receive word – at least, it seems that we know. But we don’t know why he wasn’t informed. Was it because he may not have had a police radio on him? I don’t think it was necessarily that, because we are told he had a cellphone and was in communication with the station that way, and I’ve also read that other police officers in the hall did have radios. Was it that the people who designed the protocol for a school shooting had never envisioned a situation in which 911 calls would be coming from victims at the same time police were in the school, and therefore they didn’t relay the messages and instead followed some basic and yet inappropriate protocol? That’s hard to believe, and yet it might have happened that way. Was there a protocol about 911 calls in a situation like that, and was it not followed properly at the station? Was it the 911 operators who made the error? Or was there simply no protocol about it?

Each point of knowledge that we gain in turn seems to generate its own host of as-yet-unanswered questions.

Furthermore, what would have been done differently had the police at the scene known that there were children still alive in those rooms, both wounded and unwounded? What would they and what could they have done differently? Could they have gotten the key and the shields and entered the rooms much sooner? If so, that would be a huge failure that might have cost the lives of some children and teachers who were already wounded. But was that the case, and if so, whose failure would it be? “The system” of communication, obviously, but there are people behind all the decisions made:

“There is blame enough to go around,” Gutierrez said during the news conference. “There was human error and there was system error.”…

“We need to know what law enforcement was doing, what radio procedures were followed or not followed, who were the 911 operators and such,” Gutierrez said, emphasizing he doesn’t blame just one individual or entity for the situation.

Agreed.

And then there’s this report about a phone call supposedly from a wounded teacher to her husband (both of the people speaking in this interview are journalists) [emphasis mine]:

KELLY: Hey. OK. Tell me more about this phone call. This is from a teacher inside the classroom after she had been shot.

FLORIDO: Right, from Eva Mireles. She was one of the in this classroom. And after she was shot, she called her husband, Ruben Ruiz, who is an officer for the Uvalde schools police department. At some point, he was outside the school, but he couldn’t get in. And we now know, of course, that neither his wife, Ms. Mireles, nor her co-teacher inside that classroom, Irma Garcia, survived the shooting.

KELLY: Yeah. Do we know what she said in this call?

FLORIDO: Well, I’ve been speaking with people close to these families, and they tell me that Eva Mireles called her husband and told him that her co-teacher, Irma Garcia, was dead and that she had been shot and badly injured and that she needed help immediately.

I find this report odd. Is it possible that Eva Mireles, gravely wounded, called her police officer for help and he didn’t risk his life to go in, or even tell the officer in charge what was happening?

Also, the school police department had six members (plus the chief, I believe). Ruiz would have been one of those six. I believe (can’t find a link now) that the first officers who entered the school building only a couple of minutes after the shooter (and who later received fire from him) was composed of members of that department, as well as some regular police officers. So if Ruiz was and is a member of the school police department, he might have been inside the school very early on. What does the phrase “couldn’t get in” mean? Does it actually mean that Ruiz “couldn’t get in” the school at all, despite being a member of the school police? Or does it mean he “couldn’t get in” the classroom rather than the school? That would make a lot more sense.

Then there’s the phrase “people close to the families.” We seem to have second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand information, and that has a good chance of being unreliable. Who are the “people close to these families”? This not only is not Ruiz himself speaking, but it’s not even family members speaking, or anyone close to Ruiz – it’s people close to some members of his family (how close? which members of his family?). That matters, but we are not told.

Another detail that puzzles me about this story is that it has been my strong impression, both from interviews with the surviving children and from official spokespeople, that although the two rooms involved (111 and 112) were connected by an inner door, they are actually separate rooms and one teacher was in each room at the time of the shooting. It seems to have been what used to be called a team teaching approach, in which they work separately for some things and come together for others. So if that’s true, and the teachers were not in the same room, how could Eva Mireles know that Irma Garcia was dead?

It’s certainly possible that all this happened as described in the interview – and if so, it’s another awful fact that points to grave errors in communication and leadership. But the interview doesn’t make sense to me from what I know so far, and the sources are potentially suspect as far as I’m concerned. We are not hearing it from the people involved, and we don’t actually know from whom we’re hearing it except it seems they are several times removed from the source.

This timeline and description indicates (as I said) that the classrooms involved were connected, and that the perp entered one of the rooms from the outside and shot people in both. It also indicates that he was in room 111 when he was killed. I’m pretty sure for most of the time the police were in the hall he was in 111, because most of the 911 calls came from 112 and a girl who made some of them (and survived) said the perp never came back into her room (112) after the initial minutes of shooting. But we don’t know which teacher was in which room, so we don’t know where Eva Mireles was.

In trying to make sense of all this, I wonder whether it might be that Eva Mireles may have actually called her husband Ruiz to say that the shooter was outside the building shooting in through the windows and that they were going into lockdown, and that they needed help. But I really have no idea. I just know that many stories conflict and very few are being told by the people actually involved, except for some of the surviving children who’ve been traumatized and whose stories are sometimes contradictory and changing (I plan to write a post on that in a while).

The type of reporting we’ve seen so far generally reminds me a great deal of the reporting on the shooting of Michael Brown and of Trayvon Martin, and also the death of Officer Sicknick after the January 6th incursion. We hear from unnamed sources who seem far from the actual sources and often get the all-important details wrong, details that then are very hard to correct in people’s minds even when more is later learned that contradicts them.

I repeat: I’m not saying this story is untrue. But I think before we accept it we need to know a lot more, including (but not limited to) who told it, what their actual words were, and we need to hear from Ruiz himself or from an official who debriefed him. It’s a terrible and heartbreaking story, and if true it just adds fuel to the idea that there was a huge breakdown in the official response to this awful and brutal event.

Boris Johnson: well, it may not be confidence exactly…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it’s not no confidence:

…58.6% of Conservative MPs backed him — a worse result than former Prime Minister Theresa May, who had the support of 63% of her lawmakers (200, in a much smaller parliamentary party) when she faced a confidence vote in 2018.

May survived just six months further in the job, before ultimately being forced to resign.

A quick survey of the articles on this indicates that they say something similar: Johnson won narrowly, and it means he lacks political clout going forward.

I consider the parliamentary system somewhat difficult to fully understand. But it seems to me that 58% from his own party, although low, isn’t so very terrible and isn’t going to inevitably be fatal to his ability to hold on. That said, Johnson has been a big disappointment to me as PM. His fairly strict policies on COVID lockdown for the general public, as well as his relative lenience on the Floyd-type riots and their destructive nature in the UK, were two things I hadn’t expected of him.

At any rate, he lives to fight another day. He’s also continues to face a scandal that could help to sink him in the not-too-distant future. Here’s the story on that; it’s known as “partygate.”

Trans athletes, and the documentary “What Is a Woman?”

The New Neo Posted on by

This got some coverage yesterday:

In an attempt to devise an ‘inclusive’ event, the ThunderCrit organisers created two new non-binary [cycling] races called ‘thunder’ and ‘lightning’.

Its website said: ‘Thunder category is for cis men, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns most with cis-men, trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-men.

‘Lightning category is for cis-women, non-binary people whose physical performance aligns with cis-women and trans men and women whose physical performance aligns most closely with cis-women.’

Nice try – let’s not call them men and women, let’s call them thunder and lightening.

More:

The event on Friday finished with two transgender women in first and second places, with a young mother in third.

Gold in the ThunderCrit race at Herne Hill velodrome in South-East London went to Emily Bridges, a trans cyclist who was barred from a woman’s race in March and who had competed in men’s events only the month before.

There’s a photo at the link of the winners. If you didn’t know what it was about, you might call it “Two men, a woman, and a baby” (the baby was held by the third place winner, a woman, and it was her baby).

More:

Bridges and Chant competed in the lightning race, despite Bridges being barred by British Cycling from racing against five-times Olympic gold medallist Dame Laura Kenny in March after international sporting bodies claimed she was ineligible.

British Cycling is now reviewing its transgender policy.

Question: If a heavyweight boxer decides he identifies as a featherweight, can he compete in that category?

Which brings us to the movie “What Is a Woman?”, by Matt Walsh (not to be confused with Michael Walsh). It looks good. Walsh interviewed proponents of the idea that a transgender woman is a woman, period, and thinking makes it so. In talking to these advocates – some of them MDs, many of whom are fully behind treating children with drugs like puberty blockers – all Walsh really has to do is ask them simple questions and they show the impoverishment of their arguments and reasoning.

Here’s Walsh talking about the film, as well as a portion of one of the interviews:

Commenter “Cornflour” links to this essay by evolutionary biologist Heather Heying. Here’s an excerpt:

Women are adult human females.

Adults are individuals who have attained the average age of first reproduction for their species. They have reached the age of maturity. The term adult applies across many species, and is used to distinguish them from juveniles, who are not yet capable of reproduction.

Humans are members of the genus Homo. Our relatives in the genus Australopithecus, now extinct, are sometimes categorized as human as well. Every individual Homo sapiens is a human.

Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such people from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen).

I would add that these things are obvious, and “man” and “woman” are categories that are easily defined biologically. However, there are two main reasons that the left can make what seems to the rest of us to be a preposterous claim that being a woman is whatever the person thinks it is. The first reason is that although these categories are clearly defined, there is a tiny number of people who are biologically intersex and/or hermaphroditic (the latter being only one of the conditions that can cause sexual ambiguity in the biological sense). I had to study that in graduate school, and it’s way too complex to go into here, but suffice to say that there is a very very small percentage of people who really are “assigned” sex at birth and in some instances it must be changed later on, and this is based on biological markers that are ambiguous and/or mixed.

But this has nothing to do with the categories man and woman themselves, which definitely exist and are far from arbitrary. However, I’ve heard the phenomenon of intersex people cited again and again by trans activists (don’t know if Walsh’s film interviewees get into it, however) to justify the fluid and completely subjective nature of the categories. There’s no logic to it, but some people find it persuasive or at least use it to try to persuade.

The second reason people are able to argue that being a woman is an entirely subjective thing is post-modernism. If all truth is relative and there is no objective truth, then perception is everything and anyone can claim to be anything on the basis of self-definition. There would be no need to answer the question “what is a woman?” in any way but the subjective one that Walsh keeps hearing: a woman is what the person believes it to be.

This answer seems absurd and circular to those who believe that there is objective truth, particularly in science. But it seems perfectly reasonable to those who don’t believe in such things.

[NOTE: It’s my recollection that it used to be that trans activists were quite content with the phrase “trans woman” or “trans man,” phrases which distinguished trans people from those biologically defined as being members of those sexes. It was enough to be called a man or woman even if “trans,” and I don’t recall that there was an insistence that trans people were men and women exactly and precisely as the others were, and that what’s more trans people always had been the sex they decided they were and never had been the sex they’d been “assigned” at birth.

It’s this later development, this insistence on “realness” and equivalence, that leads activists into the knotted and bizarre arguments and positions that Walsh documents in his film. Another flashpoint is that now children are treated medically for this, whereas in previous times (such as, for example, back when I went to graduate school in the 1990s) that was virtually unheard of and the very idea was frowned on in the therapy profession. There’s been an official 180 on that, although there are still holdouts in the profession adhering to the older position.]

Queen Elizabeth II: 70 years of reign and counting

The New Neo Posted on by

I distinctly remember watching a moment or two of her coronation on TV when I was very small. What I recall is her back as she walked down the aisle, and the incredibly long train:

Young, pretty, happy:

The Queen shows a light, deft touch with her lines in a video she made with Paddington Bear for the 70th. Then again, she’s been acting in front of the public her entire life. I couldn’t find a way to embed the whole thing, but it’s on Twitter. I don’t quite “get” Paddington Bear, but the bit with the teapot seems to be gently mocking the Brits’ preoccupation with protocol and manners. Elizabeth II still adheres to those principles, but she’s somewhat a relic of a former time. The rest of the Western world doesn’t seem to care much anymore about manners and custom, but most people still like the Queen.

Listen to the Bee Gees and improve your brain power

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to write the next installment of my eye story. But after disgorging this enormous post just now, I don’t have it in me at the moment and will postpone it to some future but not-too-distant date.

I’d rather do something more fun, like listen to the Bee Gees while walking outside. And commenter “Ruth” has provided us all with this link if we require justification:

Scientists have discovered that listening to ‘groovy’ music, from artists like the Bee Gees or ABBA, can actually boost brain performance.

The results of a study by the University of Tsukuba in Japan found that songs with a groove rhythm enhanced the ‘executive function’ of the listener.

Executive function is a set of mental skills that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember and multitask.

However, these results were only seen on participants who were familiar with groove music, or had good rhythm.

‘The results were surprising,’ said lead author Professor Hideaki Soya.

‘We found that groove rhythm enhanced executive function and activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex only in participants who reported that the music elicited a strong groove sensation and the sensation of being clear-headed.’

Makes perfect sense to me. Some people hate the Bee Gees, but the people who like them tend to love them and be at least somewhat addicted to listening to their music. That would be me, and millions of others.

I find that certain Bee Gees songs accomplish it more than others (and I’m not much of an ABBA fan at all). But the Bee Gees songs I prefer aren’t limited to ones that demonstrate “grooviness” (I assume they mean disco? I associate the word “groovy” with an earlier era, the 60s, but I don’t think that’s what they’re talking about, when the Bee Gees’ output feature more ballads).

I haven’t quite figured out the commonality in my favorite Bee Gees songs. But the Bee Gees could sing almost anything – almost – and I’d like it, because I find their voices, particularly their non-falsetto voices, both beautiful and strangely hypnotic. Many of their fans say the same thing, and often use the words “calming” and “relaxing” as well.

For those who dislike the Bee Gees sound, that is the opposite of how they feel.

I’ve also mentioned that the Bee Gees wrote so many songs that they have enormous numbers that they never released during their time together. Quite a few of these songs are only in demo form, and many are now available either on later compilations or just on YouTube. I’ve listened to quite a few, and I find that many of them are incredibly good. There are also songs they released that never got much airplay and are known only to extreme aficionados, and many of those are excellent too.

Here’s one of that latter group that was written for the 1983 movie “Staying Alive,” the sequel to the blockbuster film “Saturday Night Fever.” It was on the 1983 movie album but that film didn’t do well and the songs for it sort of got lost in the shuffle. 1983 was also the era of the backlash to the Bee Gees, but the movie itself apparently wasn’t very good either.

This is the demo version of the song, which I somewhat prefer to the version on the record (although that one’s pretty good, too).

So here’s to enhancing your executive function this weekend:

And here’s the more polished version that was on the album:

The lyrics can be found here. I don’t think they’re exactly correct (one line says “I’ll never be the same again” but I hear it instead as “I’ll never love the same again”), but they’re close enough.

Reporting on Uvalde: “Hands down; don’t shoot!”

The New Neo Posted on by

The Uvalde school shooting has been a terrible thing. The murder of children and teachers by a teenaged gunman who only gained access through a fluke of a door that didn’t lock when it should have, and the carnage and heartache, are terrible. It’s a normal human response to blame someone in addition to the perpetrator – in particular, those charged with protecting us and protecting that school. How did they fail? What can we learn from that in order to protect better in the future?

Very early on the story emerged that the police weren’t doing much of anything – that they were standing around while kids got shot and parents screamed outside to be allowed to rescue their own children if police wouldn’t do it. This story was pushed by the press and pundits on left and right. Although of course the left has also used the event to push for more and more gun control, the idea that the police are lazy and self-protective and even racist has been something the left has heavily invested in for quite some time now (and by “quite some time” I mean at least since the 1960s and probably earlier). As for the right, I think there is tremendous frustration and the feeling that something more could and should have been done by those who profess to wield guns for good rather than evil.

My reaction to these events tends to be to wait and to gather information. So that’s what I’ve been doing – reading and listening and thinking about it and refusing to draw conclusions before I believe I have enough information to do so.

It’s very clear to me that neither I nor the rest of the pundits have enough information, but that doesn’t stop most people from drawing conclusions and often firm ones. And yet even many of the simplest and most basic questions haven’t yet been answered and don’t even seem to asked by the press (or by many other writers) – such as, just to take a few examples – when did the hunt for the all-important key begin? Who looked for it? What did they try? How long did it take, and why? If they got it from the janitor – and all reports are that they did – where was he until that point? Did they have to look for him? Was he hard to find? If so, why? What is the prescribed protocol in such a situation, and was it followed, or did something break down in the process that day? Were the officers waiting till they had shields? Were they waiting for the school police chief to allow them to go in? Were they waiting at all? And if so, exactly why? What was the danger to them of shooting into that room without shields? Were any children being shot by the perp except in the first few minutes of the incident, and before police even got there? Did the police know about the 911 calls from the two rooms with the victims, and if not then why not? Is there any way the police could have gotten into that room prior to obtaining the key, without running the risk of being massacred themselves as they worked on the door (I wrote a lengthy post about that latter issue)?

I’ll stop there with the sort of questions I mean, but I could go on and on and on. Such questions aren’t hard to generate. They’re very simple, really, and I believe it is very obvious that they need to be asked and answered. But I don’t see many people even asking them much less answering them, and that includes reporters who supposedly have access to informed sources.

Why so little curiosity? I don’t read everything that’s written by everyone, so I might be missing something, but I just haven’t seen people wondering about things I think everyone should be wondering about. I see people making judgments, and the judgments are quite uniform that the police were “just standing there” and were cowards or fools or both.

Let’s call it the “Hands down, don’t shoot!” meme.

Now, it may be the case that it’s true. I’m not a police apologist and I have no trouble imagining that the worst might be true. But that would be what I’d be doing: imagining. I don’t base my judgments of people’s actions in such a terrible situation – judgments that if true would be accusations of grave wrongdoing – on what I imagine when I fill in way too many blanks.

But I can hardly read a single piece about the shooting without encountering some form of this imaginative judgment that leaves so much out. I find it very frustrating. In the past I’ve seen too many errors made too many times in making a quick judgment, and too much damage done as a result.

Some writers on Uvalde are more extreme in that regard than others, and for an example I’ll just mention one whose essay has gotten a lot of favorable coverage, Michael Walsh. This article of his is fairly typical of the genre both in his intensity and his contempt [emphasis mine]:

The sight of the lard-bottomed Uvalde cops standing around while a punk with reasons was murdering the town’s children is one we won’t soon forget. Not a real man among them, and that goes for the women on the force too. Hey—a guy could get killed charging an “active shooter.” (The only adult who showed any gumption was the woman who acted on her maternal instincts and rescued her own children.) But if the first consideration of your local cops is for their own safety, get new cops pronto.

Walsh ties everything together there: his thesis that the cops weren’t real men, and the familiar claim that they stood around and did nothing while kids were murdered, and he also throws in a gratuitous slap at them for being fat, and then also ties in a quote from the shooter’s mother (about the shooter having “reasons”) as though that had anything to do with what the cops were thinking and doing or not doing and why. The “lard-bottomed” accusation is juvenile and petty, but colorful. The part about the woman rescuing her own children ignores the facts that cops and other officers called in from miles away as well were busy rescuing children in other classrooms. So while the whole thing was going on, the rest of the school was basically being evacuated.

As for the details of the story about that mother who rescued her kids, here’s a link. It apparently was US marshals, not Uvalde cops, who handcuffed her. It was Uvalde cops (whom she know personally as well) who convinced the marshals to let her go. She says no officers were going into the school to rescue the kids, but we know that’s wrong; there are plenty of stories about it as well as photos and timelines. And the US marshals say she was never cuffed, so we don’t yet know who’s telling the truth on this and who’s not (no pictures have surfaced as yet of her in cuffs). There was an ongoing and successful effort to rescue all the kids in the other rooms, an effort in which police officers were participating. That some parents were part of the effort as well doesn’t mean the effort wasn’t being made by officials – and some of those officials were also parents of the some of the kids in the school.

Even more relevant to what Walsh wrote, this woman certainly did not go to the classrooms where the shooter was holed up, nor were her children in that classroom. So to compare her bravery favorably with the supposed lack of bravery of the “lard-bottomed” cops is to compare two extremely different situations. It seems possible or even likely that the officers who supposedly restrained her initially were trying to keep her from impeding a rescue effort already underway to rescue kids in the other rooms, and to protect her from possibly going by mistake into the part of the school that involved a shooter, barricaded and/or active.

By the way, as with many but not all of those calling the Uvalde cops cowards, Walsh himself seems to have a background only in writing. I know that they say the pen is mightier than the sword, but those who wield the pen (nowadays the computer) ordinarily aren’t braver than those who wield the sword.

I agree with Walsh’s contention that there is a war on men and masculinity, and that for the most part it has been disastrous. But we don’t know how the actions of the Uvalde police figure into that war, except that they’ve been designated – way prematurely in my opinion – as an example of a lack of masculinity.

I spent hours last night writing a post tearing apart a recent NY Times article full of error after error, distortion after distortion, and extremely important omissions. I find myself too weary of this at the moment to proofread it and publish it; maybe I’ll do it tomorrow or the next day, or maybe I’ll skip it. Thing is, I could do that every day with almost every article I read on the topic of Uvalde, both in the newspapers and on blogs – and the problem is not at all limited to the left. It’s rampant on the right.

It it turns out – as it may – that the Uvalde police were cowards and are guilty of everything of which they’re accused and worse, I’ll certainly say it. It wouldn’t surprise me, exactly. But – and I know I’m repeating myself, but I can’t emphasize this enough – it is way too early to come to that conclusion at this point, and it’s unfair as well.

[NOTE: Another thing I read just about everywhere is the assertion that mass school shooters tend to be fatherless. That’s a supposed truism that got started a few years ago and spread like wildfire on the right side of the internet, but it was based on erroneous research. It would almost be nice if it were true because then at least we’d have more understanding of what causes this phenomenon, but unfortunately it isn’t and we don’t. Fatherlessness is bad and seems to be operating in the generation of many societal problems, but not this particular one for the most part. I’ve already written two lengthy pieces on that issue; you can find them here and here.]

[ADDENDUM: I’ve said before that British newspapers almost always have better coverage of these events than our own MSM, even (or perhaps especially?) for events that have occurred in the US. This Daily Mail interview with Robb Elementary fourth-grade teacher Ogburn is excellent. The teacher describes how quiet the children managed to be under duress [emphasis mine]:

They weren’t screaming. I did hear some whimpering. But they did exactly what we always told them to do in a situation like this.

The kids were frightened. As a child who is nine or ten years old having to endure that traumatic situation…I can’t even imagine. They were brave. I’m proud of them.

So those lockdown rehearsals may actually do some good in letting the children know where to go and that they must be quiet.

This teacher was a hero herself, and I also admire her for the following statement she made to the paper:

“The shooter is the person who came in the school and killed my two friends and 19 students. He is the sole blame for this situation. Right now, I’m not going to place the blame on others.

“There are always going to be mistakes made, we are all human. But ultimately the gunman is responsible. Those people didn’t deserve to die.”

She says she is going to wait for an investigation to be completed before any judgements are to be made.

“We don’t have the full story. In order for our country, my community and this world to heal from this we need to come together instead of pulling each other apart.”

Preach it, sister!]

Oz wins the GOP nomination

The New Neo Posted on by

McCormick concedes and Dr. Oz will be the GOP nominee in the Senate race in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Oz’s Democratic opponent Fetterman has been the subject of a lot of rumors that he’s had more health problems than previously disclosed. Now Fetterman admits that is the case:

Fetterman provided a timeline of his health issues – and lapses in caring for them – in his statement. “Back in 2017, I had swollen feet and went to the hospital to get checked out,” Fetterman said. “That’s when I learned I had a heart condition. Then, I didn’t follow up.”

“I thought losing weight and exercising would be enough,” Fetterman continued. “Of course it wasn’t.”

“I want to emphasize that this was completely preventable. My cardiologist said that if I had continued taking the blood thinners, I never would have had a stroke. I didn’t do what the doctor told me,” Fetterman also said.

Fetterman said he wouldn’t make the same mistake again and is following his physicians’ advice to rest and focus on recovery.

I don’t think the main problem is Fetterman’s health; apparently he should be okay now. The problem is that he didn’t disclose the information and it was basically forced out of him because some of the details he did release didn’t quite make sense and people began to question whether he was withholding something.

And then I began to wonder what sort of doctor Mehmet Oz, Fetterman’s opponent, was before he retired and became a TV personality and now a politician. He was a cardiothoracic surgeon. I wonder whether he will address Fetterman’s health issues during the campaign.