Shootings

[Blackhawk]

It is pointless getting mad and yelling (yet again) because the guns aren't under control. So much like the argument we had about COVID, our current system is such that the best solution isn't possible. We're not going to control the guns with the system we have. It's not gonna happen. Pounding away at an unworkable solution isn't going to result in progress - just frustration.

So, how do we move to change the system now to make it viable to approach to the issue later?

[malchior]

That's are the badasses that took an hour to breach classroom with one guy killing kids?

No. Those are the badasses who spent an hour at the station getting their gear together and their war faces on or whatever. The cops outside the school were afraid to enter until SWAT arrived. They spent the hour yelling at parents and threatening them with Tasers.

The kids inside, of course, were busy with other things.

The cops who breached weren't even these guys. They were from Border Patrol.

[LawBeefaroni]

I just got an email that the mayor wants to meet re: our neighborhood safety initiatives. Short story, we went for alternative solutions while other neighborhoods are going for armed security. I think she is under pressure due to articles like this. Anyway, while I'm far from her biggest fan, I would welcome the chance to talk and I'll give her the same talk I gave the state rep: that there is progress to be made on guns for anyone politically brave enough to try.

[Little Raven]

So, how do we move to change the system now to make it viable to approach to the issue later?

A take on exactly this question.

The most important thing you need to know about yesterday’s tragic school shooting in Texas is that absolutely no laws are going to change as a result of it.

...

So we should all stop saying that something is going to change. Nothing is going to change. Democratic lawmakers—for whom overpromising and underdelivering is an incurable habit—propose measures after these shootings that they know will never pass through a highly divided Congress, or be sustained by federal judges hand-selected to stymie progressive legislation for the next three or four decades.

We all need to adjust to the idea that unfathomable levels of gun violence, including school shootings, are going to get worse, not better, in the decades to come. In the past month alone, my two sons had a baseball game canceled because of a shooting at the park where they were meant to play and, two weeks later, soccer practice cut short because a nearby gunman had opened fire on a school down the road. In that latter incident, no innocent lives were lost thanks only to the gunman’s inability to effectively use any of the three assault rifles—I’m sorry, “modern sporting rifles”—he had stockpiled in his apartment overlooking the school.

This is America, folks. This is who we are.

So what should we do?

First, we need to make firearms education a national priority. Once upon a time, when I was a young boy, a friendly organization called the National Rifle Association did great work teaching Americans about the safe use of firearms in hunting and other shooting sports. They still do some of that, but it’s a smaller and smaller portion of what that now extremely troubled organization is about.

The government, then, should step up. If we’re going to allow everyone in America to own as many firearms as they want, our children need to understand what to do if they see a firearm, which they inevitably will. Don’t touch it. Go find an adult. Older children, meanwhile, should also understand how to unload a firearm and render it safe. Families might not have any interest in firearms, but firearms are going to be ever-present in the lives of their children.

...

Because the second and much harder thing we need to do is to shift the gun culture in America. I have written before about how the gun culture I have observed develop since the September 11 attacks—the emphasis on tactical weaponry, the marketing of ceramic plate carriers and Kevlar helmets to civilians—is so very different than the gun culture I grew up with in East Tennessee in the 1980s, when the seemingly ever-present firearms were mostly shotguns for hunting and bolt-action rifles.

Basically, lean in. Only once we do that can we change the culture, and only once we change the culture can we change the laws.

[Blackhawk]

I'm not sure I agree with his solutions, and it's a far different direction than I was suggesting (I am thinking more about how we could focus on repairing the system that makes it impossible to legislate guns), but at least it's an attempt at something other than venting frustration that the immovable object hasn't shifted.

[Smoove_B]

Only once we do that can we change the culture, and only once we change the culture can we change the laws.

So we should also then expect to see the GOP pushing laws modeled after their current batch of CRT and sexual health education that will instead be focused on prohibiting education and awareness training for guns?

[coopasonic]

I am thinking more about how we could focus on repairing the system that makes it impossible to legislate guns

Campaign finance reform... the problem obviously is this isn't going to change for basically the same reason nothing else is going to change for the better unless another ~10% of America wakes up and starts paying attention. As long as compromise with the current GOP is required to get anything done, we're screwed. Even if we did get past that, the judiciary is going to be a problem for decades.

[malchior]

I am thinking more about how we could focus on repairing the system that makes it impossible to legislate guns

Campaign finance reform

If this is step one, the plan is dead in the water. The Roberts court has already spoken on this. Campaign finance reform of any flavor is practically impossible. The FEC itself is non-functional now and isn't even enforcing the rules we have already. The only hope here is we have to find 'citizen's band' ways to dilute the influence from foreigner and billionaire influence on elections. It's no small task.

[coopasonic]

I guess the other option is for Democrats to get better at PR.

[malchior]

This story is wild. The more the story comes out the more this sounded like the cops were absolutely not in control of themselves, the scene, or the situation.

[Holman]

Give Ms. Gomez a badge.

The rest of those uniformed cowards are unworthy of it.

[malchior]

Meanwhile in Canada. Curious if it was a copycat.

[Holman]

I've seen tweets today declaring that reports of police inactivity will "further demoralize Law Enforcement Officers."

Just in case you wondering who the real victims were.

[Holman]

There is NO WAY the Uvalde police would have let me storm an elementary school and teach the 1619 Project for an hour

[Enough]

Give Ms. Gomez a badge.

The rest of those uniformed cowards are unworthy of it.

Good lord, the more info we get the more of a total train wreck this turned out to be. I mean they had pretty close to the gun nut gold standard for school safety-- dedicated police force for the schools, armed resource officer, SWAT training on site in full gear previously (probably scaring the crap out all the kids) and I think even metal detectors and it all did diddly squat. It's about the guns and if we don't address them all the safety measures in the world can have cascading failures just like this incident.

[Blackhawk]

Ok, so now we have:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5. Campaign finance reform
6.
7.
8.
9.
10. The gun problem (and climate change, and public health, and about a dozen other things.)

What's #1? When we can figure out what #1 is, we know what we should be yelling about every time this happens in the future, we know what we should be pointing our donations toward, we know what we should be drawing attention to. We keep yelling about #10, which isn't particularly effective.

We need to stop worrying about taking the cake out of the oven when we haven't even bought the flour yet.

[malchior]

I've seen tweets today declaring that reports of police inactivity will "further demoralize Law Enforcement Officers."

Just in case you wondering who the real victims were.

Glad we didn't defund them or they would have shifted the blame from their incompetence. Instead it'll just be ignored/buried.

[Blackhawk]

For the sake of discussion, aside from the police response, this stands out (from the linked WSJ article earlier.)

18-year-old Salvador Ramos, lingered outside Robb Elementary for 12 minutes firing shots before walking into the school and barricading himself in a classroom where he killed 19 children and two teachers.

The gunman then began shooting at people at a funeral home across the street, prompting a 911 call reporting a gunman at the school at 11:30. Ramos climbed a fence onto school grounds and began firing before walking inside, unimpeded, at 11:40. The first police arrived on the scene at 11:44 and exchanged gunfire with Ramos, who locked himself in a fourth-grade classroom. There, he killed the students and teachers.

The report of a gunman at the school was ten minutes before he entered the school and locked himself inside a classroom full of students.

I'm not going back to 'turn the schools into a bunker', but I've spent 14 years with kids in school and know what the active shooter response is. How was he able to enter a classroom in the first place? Once the alert is given, it takes about 30 second for every classroom to be locked and inaccessible. I'm not wanting to shift the attention to blaming the victim, but it seems like there were a lot of failures in play here.

[Unagi]

#1 - a belief in the importance of Education

[Dramatist]

I’m not sure how to write this but this shooting has really wrecked me. I’ve taken my family to a cabin in the Texas hill country almost every year for 15 years. We pack our clothes and cabin and river gear but would always unload that stuff and then drive into Uvalde to get groceries for our trip. We’ve even had to go there for an afternoon to get internet service when my daughter was in college and had homework to do. It’s just a nice small town that I have a small connection to.

I can’t even comprehend the hurt that whole town is going through.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[LawBeefaroni]

Give Ms. Gomez a badge.

The rest of those uniformed cowards are unworthy of it.

Good lord, the more info we get the more of a total train wreck this turned out to be. I mean they had pretty close to the gun nut gold standard for school safety-- dedicated police force for the schools, armed resource officer, SWAT training on site in full gear previously (probably scaring the crap out all the kids) and I think even metal detectors and it all did diddly squat. It's about the guns and if we don't address them all the safety measures in the world can have cascading failures just like this incident.

Conflicting reports continue to come out from the police. It's an absolute clusterfuck and I have given up trying to sort it all out. I'll wait until there's some kind of federal report. The local department seems to have no idea what actually happened, or no interest in telling us what actually happened.

[Zarathud]

#1 Push for accountability.

[hepcat]

There is NO WAY the Uvalde police would have let me storm an elementary school and teach the 1619 Project for an hour

To be honest, that seems a bit tasteless.

[malchior]

Is this a test of the public's credulity? First the officer saw him crash and chased him in and exchanged fire, then there was no armed officer nearby, and now this dipshit was shooting for 12 minutes before entering? Cops be lying.

[Smoove_B]

Yes, there seems to be lots of online "chatter" about how timelines aren't adding up and when the truth comes to light about what really happened it's going to make this entire story so much worse.

[malchior]

Cops often flat out lie. We have tons of evidence of this but it's rare that it's so obvious that the media has to report on the lying. So it definitely seems atypically bad.

Edit: Honestly this is seeming like shades of Parkland. Except it probably wasn't just one officer that was a coward.

[dbt1949]

Everyone seems to forget that it was an unhappy teenager from Serbia that started World War 1.
And Serbia had tougher gun laws. Take that Europe!

[malchior]

Welp.

[Kurth]

Yes, there seems to be lots of online "chatter" about how timelines aren't adding up and when the truth comes to light about what really happened it's going to make this entire story so much worse.

Timelines aren't adding up? Who really gives a shit? How does that make this worse? You can't really make this worse, except for the truism (which I live by) that things can always be worse. But the cops doing a shitty job? That doesn't really do much here as far as I can tell, except maybe provide a lame excuse for the NRA and the Ted Cruz's of the world to shift blame to yet another target.

I don't know if these cops performed well under the circumstances. It's starting to sound doubtful they did, but as Smoove points out, much of this is from online chatter, and it's probably best to let the dust settle and read through the report that will eventually come out.

But in the end, what does it matter? You cannot convince me that there is any level of police performance that is going to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and again in this country. There are 400,000,000 guns on the streets. The police can't do shit to stop gun violence, let along mass shootings.

[Formix]

#1 - a belief in the importance of Education

Make no mistake that this is a part of it. The republicunts don't want public schools. Anything that pushes folks away from public schools is good. They will also NEVER go for gun control as long as they get $$ from it, and every time there's a shooting, every company involved with firearms gets a big sales boost. Also 2A folks are a motivated voter base, so they will never move from those folks as long as they want to get re-elected (which is their real job after all). Nothing changes until we vote in other people, which, after folks like MTG winning their primaries, I have less and less hope for. Welcome to the idiocracy folks, don't forget to buy Brawndo.

[Trent Steel]

Yes, there seems to be lots of online "chatter" about how timelines aren't adding up and when the truth comes to light about what really happened it's going to make this entire story so much worse.

Timelines aren't adding up? Who really gives a shit? How does that make this worse?

Because there's a difference between...

1. Following protocols, even though that may have allowed more children to die (which is what the local PD wants you to believe).

and

2. Having no real plan to handle the situation, going into CYA mode and lying about what really went on, in the midst of children being massacred.

With #2 being the likely case, law enforcement officials need to be held accountable somehow. My anger is palpable.

[LordMortis]

2. Having no real plan to handle the situation, going into CYA mode and lying about what really went on, in the midst of children being massacred.

With #2 being the likely case, law enforcement officials need to be held accountable somehow. My anger is palpable.

I don't know that I'd blame anyone for not having a plan in place, only they pay a SWAT team and have publicly stated they have plans in place for such things. If I were in that community my grief would be channeled into anger at the police at the very least until there was transparency. After that, it would depend on what happened. I don't know how I'd respond if I felt/believed/thought/knew police were CYA as children were being murdered.

[malchior]

Especially in the case if scenario #2, we have to consider that the cops soak up 40% of the budget, advertised how well armed and prepared they were, and also told the public they had a plan. If that isn't true, if they protected themselves, then we need to have a lot more conversations. Exercises like this are basically disaster cosplay for the police. It may very well be useless for preparing them while terrorizing the kids. What's the goddamn point of all this madness?

[malchior]

Edit: One more thought piece from the Atlantic. I could have written it - worse - but it echoes what I see. We are seeing a civilization whose culture is death and sadness. Deaths of children due to gun violence and drug overdoses are surging. They are being murdered and turning to drugs to try to escape this bleak future we have created for them. We - the adults - are collectively monsters killing their future. In very real ways. And we choose to do nothing over and over? What does that say about us?

[hepcat]

Yes, there seems to be lots of online "chatter" about how timelines aren't adding up and when the truth comes to light about what really happened it's going to make this entire story so much worse.

Timelines aren't adding up? Who really gives a shit? How does that make this worse?

Because there's a difference between...

1. Following protocols, even though that may have allowed more children to die (which is what the local PD wants you to believe).

and

2. Having no real plan to handle the situation, going into CYA mode and lying about what really went on, in the midst of children being massacred.

With #2 being the likely case, law enforcement officials need to be held accountable somehow. My anger is palpable.

+1

It matters. It matters a great deal. We need to look at what happened here to see if there were a series of failures that possibly lead to this gunman going unchallenged essentially for a long stretch of time, and figure out how we can prevent/lessen that in the future.

We also need to hold accountable anyone who was responsible for the protection of these children that may have failed them, and make sure they are removed from those positions.

[malchior]

Sorry one more post because I'm in a real mood today. Here is where my consulting brain goes on to ask constructive questions. One strategic thought I have is if this was an airplane crash or a series of auto accidents, there would be a Federal agency that has the authority to roll in and investigate. Why isn't there any analog for this for gun violence/mass shootings/school shootings? If we are indeed to "live with it" then why isn't something in place to actually try to learn with it. It'd be a whole lot more useful than yelling 'do something'. We could you know ... collect information and make an informed decision.

So here is what is driving some of my confusion. I just heard another account that varies significantly from the original police narrative. As I've suggested I don't think we can't trust them. We need someone with authority to blow past the lying and learn from these incidents. The account offered this morning suggested the possibility to me that the reason that more kids aren't dead is because the gunman *stopped on his own*. Perhaps he got his fill of it.

A CNN segment was on where a CNN producer recounts a conversation she had with one of the chidlren who survived. This little girl says the teacher was notified about a shooter via email (really - email!?). She got up to lock or check the door and he shot through the door window and backed her into the classroom, shot the teacher, shot the other teacher. He then opened up on the room, after some time he then went to the adjoining class room and shot it up. Then he put on 'sad' music. And the girl at that point worrying he'd return painted herself with her dead (or dying) friend's blood. Horrifying and illuminating at the same time.

So questions I'd love to have answered. We have indications that the lockdown protocols didn't work. In the account above, despite the kid shooting outside for ~12 minutes the teachers were notified by email. Is that account accurate? Was this the procedure? Is it well-designed? Was there no other way to notify people of an urgent life threatening situation?

Now to the cops, despite extensive police planning, they likely didn't act as trained. They actually managed to contain the shooter inside the school where he might have been able to kill more kids. They also didn't contemplate how to deal with the parents. They perhaps didn't communicate well. And if he stopped on his own, did the police exaggerate their role on how they barricaded him in or how he barricaded himself in? Was there a safe way to check on children who were injured that was overlooked?

[Blackhawk]

Was this the procedure? Is it well-designed? Was there no other way to notify people of an urgent life threatening situation?

I posted a similar question earlier. But knowing that they used email instead of an announcement has me wondering: what was the school told? Were they told that there was an armed person in the building? Or were they just told there had been a shooting in the area? Is it possible that they were told something that shouldn't have resulted in a full lock down?

And I hope other schools will learn how to improve their own responses. While it didn't happen because of the school, I can see several ways to improve school response when it does happen based on this. There are two clear weak points in any response right now: the delay between the first shot and everyone being alerted, and the classroom door itself.

[malchior]

Was this the procedure? Is it well-designed? Was there no other way to notify people of an urgent life threatening situation?

I posted a similar question earlier. But knowing that they used email instead of an announcement has me wondering: what was the school told? Were they told that there was an armed person in the building? Or were they just told there had been a shooting in the area? Is it possible that they were told something that shouldn't have resulted in a full lock down?

And I hope other schools will learn how to improve their own responses. While it didn't happen because of the school, I can see several ways to improve school response when it does happen based on this. There are two clear weak points in any response right now: the delay between the first shot and everyone being alerted, and the classroom door itself.

I also hesitate to go there because it leads to the problem that Smoove_B talks to that we keep funneling resources into an endless chase to pour precious resources on a fool's errand. What I talk about is data to not make incremental change like that that saps our resources. More I want the data to make cohesive policy arguments. It's easy to bat away background checks when there is no evidence it'll work mostly especially where we intentionally don't collect it.

[YellowKing]

It's easy to bat away background checks when there is no evidence it'll work mostly especially where we intentionally don't collect it.

And precisely the reason the right doesn't want any studies or tracking of this information. They know the data will show that the legislation they're so vehemently against will prove them wrong.

[Blackhawk]

Was this the procedure? Is it well-designed? Was there no other way to notify people of an urgent life threatening situation?

I posted a similar question earlier. But knowing that they used email instead of an announcement has me wondering: what was the school told? Were they told that there was an armed person in the building? Or were they just told there had been a shooting in the area? Is it possible that they were told something that shouldn't have resulted in a full lock down?

And I hope other schools will learn how to improve their own responses. While it didn't happen because of the school, I can see several ways to improve school response when it does happen based on this. There are two clear weak points in any response right now: the delay between the first shot and everyone being alerted, and the classroom door itself.

I also hesitate to go there because it leads to the problem that Smoove_B talks to that we keep funneling resources into an endless chase to pour precious resources on a fool's errand. What I talk about is data to not make incremental change like that that saps our resources. More I want the data to make cohesive policy arguments. It's easy to bat away background checks when there is no evidence it'll work mostly especially where we intentionally don't collect it.

Collecting the data is good - but I think that pursuing policy is the fools' errand (for the reasons I talked about before - our system prevents it from happening.) If it isn't going to happen, then not one child will be saved by it. On the other hand, while we're fixing the system to allow us to actually solve the problem in the future, and while the Rs are so desperate to blame anything but guns, why not take advantage of it to get something passed to pay for every public school to get solid core classroom doors with lexan windows, plus a 'panic button' for each staff member and/or classroom? Why not suggest an 'alert' system that's between 'normal' and 'full lockdown' for when something's reported in the area, but not at the school? Something that would send every student to their classroom, and close every door, but not go full 'lights out/get behind the desk' levels?

No, it's not the real solution to the real problem, but we can't solve the real problem right now. This will happen again. Why not at least make sure we're ready? Besides, a few zero-kill shooters that get stuck wandering empty hallways until the police arrive (eventually) might lessen the appeal for the next copycat.

And in the meantime, we collect data on the real solution, and we work on fixing the system that has us stuck in this endless 'suffer-wish-suffer-wish' loop.