Uvalde

[phkrause]

Gunman kills 19 children, 2 adults in Texas school rampage

An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two adults as he went from classroom to classroom at a Texas elementary school, officials said, adding to a gruesome, yearslong series of mass killings at churches, schools and stores.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-may-24-584466945120

[phkrause]

Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-44a7cfb990feaa6ffe482483df6e4683?

[phkrause]

I Left Israel to Give My Kids the American Dream. Is This It?

On the day when the shooting happens, I finally unlock what some say is the most vital part of the American dream. My husband and I have a house in the suburbs now, big trees towering above — no picket fence, but a wide expanse of green and room for the pattering of tiny feet. As we sign the paperwork, we each take turns rocking our baby on our legs.

https://www.kveller.com/i-left-israel-to-give-my-kids-the-american-dream-is-this-it/?

[phkrause]

Gunman’s final 90 minutes fuel questions about police delays

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — It was 11:28 a.m. when the Ford pickup slammed into a ditch behind the low-slung Texas school and the driver jumped out carrying an AR-15-style rifle.

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

[phkrause]

'You're All Gonna Die': 10-Year-Old Survivor of Uvalde Attack Recounts Horror Inside Classroom

A survivor of Tuesday's mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is sharing horrific details about the attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

https://people.com/crime/texas-school-shooting-survivor-recounts-horror-inside-classroom/?

[phkrause]

'We Felt Like Cowards': A Police Officer Talks About the Decision to Delay Officer Response to Uvalde Shooting

A police officer at the scene tells PEOPLE about the decision to wait for an hour before charging the school

https://people.com/crime/police-officer-talks-about-decision-to-delay-officer-response-to-uvalde-shooting/?

[phkrause]

Official: Girl told 911 ‘send the police now’ as cops waited

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Students trapped inside a classroom with a gunman repeatedly called 911 during this week’s attack on a Texas elementary school, including one who pleaded, “Please send the police now,” as officers waited more than an hour to breach the classroom after following the gunman into the building, authorities said Friday.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-430b975bbaacce445451e4026cedc171?

[phkrause]

Uvalde school police chief faulted in shooting response

The police official blamed for not sending officers in more quickly to stop the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting is the chief of the school system’s small police force, a unit dedicated ordinarily to building relationships with students and responding to the occasional fight.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-politics-shootings-texas-575b123bb2e29b740a4cfb905394147b?

[phkrause]

Seeing America, Again, in the Uvalde Elementary-School Shooting

Nineteen children and two adults were murdered in Texas. This is the country that gun-rights advocates have chosen.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/seeing-america-again-in-the-texas-elementary-school-shooting

[bonnie]

Something About School Shootings - American Thinker

 

The Texas DPS says the police did go in and engage Ramos immediately but then retreated and stood outside in the hallway until 12:50.) Ramos entered the building at an exit door one teacher, not identified, had propped open when the shooting began outside the school and failed to secure it. Presumably this is the same person who first called 911 and if so, it is easy for investigators to determine the teacher’s identity. This seems to have been the first serious mistake., the second being the police failure to stay in and engage Ramos immediately. 

Mass shootings -- unlike the never-ending daily carnage on the streets of our major cities -- receive outsize coverage from people who have their pet theories as to why such tragedies occur. I think we are dealing with a combination of the killers’ psychiatric issues and clueless behavior by their family members. The family usually expresses disbelief that one of their members could do this. Less blinkeredobservers report that Ramos abused animals, bullied people, engaged in self cutting, threatened girls with rape, and announced on social media that he’d be shooting up the school before he made good on that threat. 

Parents were prevented in the interim between Ramos’ entry into the school and the tardy police response from entering to save their kids. One woman was handcuffed for trying. When she was released from the police cuffs by a friend, she climbed the fence, entered the school and removed her two children to safety. The Border Patrol arrived at the school shortly after noon to assist. As they did with the parents, the local law enforcement team on site refused to allow them to enter. 

Flopping Aces, echoes my thoughts on this.  Reviewing several other cases -- Jared Loughner, Nikolas Cruz, Peyton Gendron -- along with this one, the  author shows that those closest to the shooter just were not paying even minimal attention to the teens’ psychiatric issues:

Just hours before the killings took place, Ramos had messaged an acquaintance on Instagram telling her he had a ‘lil secret’ he wanted to share, after earlier tagging her in a photo of two guns he bought himself on his 18th birthday. His TikTok account also featured a short user bio that read: ‘Kids Be Scared.’

He mutilated himself

Neighbors and classmates say his behavior spiraled into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: ‘He had scars on his face and someone asked him, ‘Are you ok?’ and he just said with a smile ‘I did it myself, I liked how it looked.’

He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed.

Ramos sent Facebook messages:

‘Ima do something to her rn [right now]’ wrote Ramos in a message at 11.10am Texas time. He added a few minutes later: ‘She’s on the phone with AT&T abojt [sic] my phone… It’s annoying’.

At 11.21am he wrote ‘I just shot my grandma in her head’ and added in his final message: ‘Ima go shoot up a elementary school.’

None of these young people should have been able to buy a gun. Families always profess shock and surprise but never seem to pay attention to the trails of crumbs being left along the way.

Without fail, such events encourage those who’d like to wipe the Second Amendment off the books and deprive lawful citizens from the means to defend themselves. Does the fact that the cops stood outside the school for an hour during the slaughter give you comfort? It doesn’t ease my friend Betsy Gorisch: “Among all the other things we need to keep in mind about the Uvalde school shooting there is this: In what is arguably the only true test of whether or not we should rely on the police to protect us, the courts have ruled that they cannot be sued for failure to do so.” That’s another way of saying law enforcement has no legal duty to protect you.

Professor Ann Althouse also finds that the police response diminishes the anti-gun crowd’s arguments:  "If the police don’t arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.”

Just as reason will not stop the anti-gun crowd from using this wretched example of inept and useless law enforcement to argue we that should depend solely on them and cede our rights to personal defense, these events only fuel the efforts of demagogues to use them for other sleazy political purposes. Right on cue Democrats again try to inject race into the mix, led off by Barack Obama “crowbar[ring]” the death of the far from innocent George Floyd into this tragic slaughter of the Uvalde innocents. 

Well, at least, unlike the Washington Post which seems to be editorless, he didn’t claim the cops shot Floyd. 

[phkrause]

No Parent Should Have to Live Like This

I spent last week mourning those murdered in Buffalo. I will spend this week mourning children murdered at school.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/school-gun-violence-robb-elementary-uvalde/638422/?

[bonnie]

13 minutes ago, phkrause said:

No Parent Should Have to Live Like This

I spent last week mourning those murdered in Buffalo. I will spend this week mourning children murdered at school.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/school-gun-violence-robb-elementary-uvalde/638422/?

How much time was spent mourning the 797 lives lost in Chicago in 2021.

death toll in chicago 2021 - Search (bing.com)

Watching those parents I can't imagine being in their shoes, neither can I imagine those parents in Chicago that lost children while playing in their yards or home.  Those children never received the recognition, that happens only when it can be made a political issue .All you hear is "it should be a law". Pile one law on another and everyone thinks Now that will take care of it. If availability of guns causes school shootings where were the school shootings prior to the last couple of decades? Guns were available everywhere, Sears/Roebuck, Hardware stores. . Walk in and buy. Boys brought their guns to school in the back of their pickups to go hunting after school. No one shot anyone.

Something else has gone  horribly wrong in this country. Instead of yelling there needs to be a law, maybe the powers that be start looking in other areas to prevent this carnage

[bonnie]

Just now, bonnie said:

How much time was spent mourning the 797 lives lost in Chicago in 2021.

death toll in chicago 2021 - Search (bing.com)

Watching those parents I can't imagine being in their shoes, neither can I imagine those parents in Chicago that lost children while playing in their yards or home.  Those children never received the recognition, that happens only when it can be made a political issue .All you hear is "it should be a law". Pile one law on another and everyone thinks Now that will take care of it. If availability of guns causes school shootings where were the school shootings prior to the last couple of decades? Guns were available everywhere, Sears/Roebuck, Hardware stores. . Walk in and buy. Boys brought their guns to school in the back of their pickups to go hunting after school. No one shot anyone.

Something else has gone  horribly wrong in this country. Instead of yelling there needs to be a law, maybe the powers that be start looking in other areas to prevent this carnage

Do those that were children among the 797 deserve as much recognition and grief and concern as the 19. 

The parents in Chicago are as heartbroken as the parents of the 19. For some reason the calls for laws and blaming/ doing something isn't heard.

 

 

797 homicides

• According to 3 sources

 

 

 

 

The Associated Press CHICAGO -- The year of 2021 ended as one of the most violent on record in Chicago, as a rise in the number of shootings left more people dead than in any single year in a quarter century, according to statistics released by the police department on Saturday. According to the department, 2021 ended with 797 homicides.

2021 ends as Chicago's deadliest year in a quarter c…

abcnews.go.com

The year of 2021 ended as one of the most violent on record in Chicago, as a rise in the number of shootings left more people dead than in any single year in a quarter century, according to statistics released by the police department on Saturday. According to the department, 2021 ended with 797 homicides.

[phkrause]

Texas police: School door shut but didn’t lock before attack

An exterior door at Robb Elementary School did not lock when it was closed by a teacher shortly before a gunman used it to get inside and kill 19 students and two teachers, leaving investigators searching to determine why, state police said Tuesday.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-texas-a55b3ccc5a32dce916e7d0a10d7c546e?

[phkrause]

Narratives, and blame, shift again as dysfunction engulfs shooting probe

The Texas Department of Public Safety said a local police chief had stopped cooperating. It also walked back a statement that a teacher had propped open a door used by the shooter to enter the school.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/31/uvalde-school-police-chief-investigation/

[bonnie]

une 1, 2022

Uvalde: The new face of policing

By J.R. Dunn

 

 

Anyone shocked by the behavior of the Uvalde P.D. during last week's mass shooting — in which dozens of officers milled around doing nothing (if not worse) while helpless victims were murdered — has to come to terms with the simple fact that this is the face of the new policing in the 21st century.

The story grows worse with each new detail.  Cops took nearly twenty minutes to get to the school in a ten-minute-wide town.  Once there, they entered the school, took some fire resulting in minor injuries, and fled — no Fallujah vets here.  Outside, they harassed, attacked, and arrested fearful parents begging them to do their jobs.  At some point, a number of off-duty Border Patrolmen arrived but were denied permission to engage.  As many as eighteen locals finally entered the school, but their tac chief decided it had transformed into a "barricade situation," which, according to the book, evidently means that no action is necessary, so instead, they moped about in the hallway.  At last, after an hour and a quarter — not forty-five minutes, not an hour — the Border cops took matters into their own hands (one of them armed with a shotgun he borrowed from his barber), burst into the room, and finished the shooter off.

During that entire tract of time, the gunman was executing children, which we know from the phone records of calls from within the classroom.

The DoJ has pledged to look into it — yes, that DoJ, which means we're unlikely to get any useful answers.  But the answer to the major question — why? — is perfectly evident: it happened now because it happened before.

Some of us recall the summer of 2020, when Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and several other cities were ravaged by anarchists and related trash while the cops, under orders from the various city halls, stood by and watched.  It can't be said that they were defending nothing, because all the time they were defending something very important: their pensions.

d School shooting in Florida, when a misfit shot up a school while school resource officer Scot Peterson cowered under an outside stairwell and refused to go in.  Chief Scott Israel spent the next several weeks blustering, accusing everybody under the sun except Peterson and himself.  It didn't save his job — or, presumably his pension.

But it goes back even farther than that, and beyond school shootings.  In Cheshire, Connecticut on July 23, 2007, two felons decided to take down a well-to-do family under the impression that they were hiding riches galore in their home (an old story that goes back to the Clutters of In Cold Blood fame).  After beating William Petit half to death, the goons, finding no money in the home, forced Jennifer Hawke-Petit to accompany one of them to the bank, where she withdrew $15,000.  At the same time, she succeeded in alerting the teller.

Local cops arrived in good time, only to be ordered to blockade the neighborhood and remain in place.  There they sat for 45 minutes while their chief carefully assured that everything was being done exactly according to the book.  (There's that number again — 45 minutes.  Is that in the handbook, too, I wonder?)

During that period, Jennifer Hawke-Petit was raped and strangled.  This proved a mercy, since it meant that she didn't have to witness her two young daughters being soaked in gasoline and burned alive.

The cops can't even be said to have captured the perps, who slammed into a patrol car while fleeing.os

That was it.  Nothing was done.  Nobody was disciplined.  No investigation was ever carried out.  It just became, very quietly, the standard for current police operations, as we have seen in Seattle, Parkland, and Uvalde.  No doubt the same has occurred elsewhere and has been slipped into the memory hole so that we peasants don't become confused and ask questions.

But the United States is not Europe.  We don't sit and whimper when the elites let us down.  Traditionally, the response to a collapse in public order has been Committees of Vigilance, long disparaged as "vigilantes."  It's a curious fact that several of the most notable vigilance committees — in San Francisco, 1857; Bannock, Montana, 1863; and Athens, Tennessee, 1946 — targeted corrupt law enforcement.  

It's too much to say, as an acquaintance did, that "we've got the Second Amendment to shoot cops who refuse to rescue kids."  But Uvalde marks an inflection point.  The next time will not be the same.  Things will be very different — and God help the cop who fails to get out of the way.

[phkrause]

Senator: Chief had no radio during Uvalde school shooting

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The state agency investigating the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde has determined that the commander facing criticism for the slow police response was not carrying a radio as the massacre unfolded, a Texas state senator said Friday.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-politics-texas-shootings-6900bca21a95c38bff9183cf1ea103f0?

[phkrause]

The Uvalde shooting ‘stirred something’ in him. So he gave up his gun.

UVALDE, Tex. — For years, even as mass shootings swept the country, Richard Small bristled at any talk of tighter gun restrictions, viewing it as nothing more than politically driven finger-pointing that would do little to stop the violence while infringing on his rights as a gun owner.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/30/uvalde-shooting-guns/

[phkrause]

Uvalde school police chief defends Texas shooting response

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas school police chief criticized for his actions during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history said in his first extensive comments, published Thursday, that he did not consider himself the person in charge as the massacre unfolded and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-texas-education-shootings-33789221930cff7331f4279ec8625ba3?

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‘Enough is enough’: Thousands demand new gun safety laws

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of people rallied on the National Mall and across the United States on Saturday in a renewed push for gun control measures after recent deadly mass shootings from Uvalde, Texas, to Buffalo, New York, that activists say should compel Congress to act.

https://apnews.com/article/congress-parkland-florida-school-shooting-gun-violence-shootings-public-opinion-06cd760edf8977716dba0c2b157a1a91?

[phkrause]

Uvalde school where shooting happened has deep roots in city

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — As the small Texas city of Uvalde struggles to heal after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school, thoughts have also turned to ensuring its legacy as the centerpiece of the fight for equal education for Mexican Americans over half a century ago lives on.

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-politics-texas-education-shootings-8c5fd96f19d3dde8dc80b540f1f343c5?

[phkrause]

Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.

In the wake of the killing in Uvalde, here’s what America can learn from Australia’s response to tragedy.

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

[phkrause]

“If there’s kids in there, we need to go in”: Officers in Uvalde were ready with guns, shields and tools — but not clear orders

The Texas Tribune has reviewed law enforcement transcripts and footage that federal and state investigators are examining after the May 24 tragedy.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/20/uvalde-police-shooting-response-records/

[phkrause]

Uvalde school police chief on leave after mass shooting

DALLAS (AP) — The Uvalde school district’s police chief was put on leave Wednesday following allegations that he erred in his response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead.

https://apnews.com/article/politics-police-shootings-texas-9aa0ddb541ab37dd7b6526fc2cdb0bec?

[phkrause]

Uvalde schools’ police chief resigns from City Council

The Uvalde school district’s police chief has stepped down from his position in the City Council just weeks after being sworn in following allegations that he erred in his response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead.

https://apnews.com/article/police-shootings-texas-education-government-and-politics-61ce193de8e0b4a87211cdb9343224a2?