The ongoing terror and ongoing shame in our nation regarding the plague of mass shootings and widespread sorrow of gun violence just keeps getting worse.
Back in late May, the community of Uvalde Texas suffered the unimaginable loss of 19 children and 2 teachers killed by a gun-wielding angry guy. Ever since then, there had been questions about how the school security and later how the local police mishandled the situation. For months, stories kept dribbling out about how the police waited for minutes during the most critical moments; how the police detained mothers who heard the screams and wanted to rush in to save their babies; how the local police chief failed to understand the severity of the situation to the point of criminal negligence; and even how one of the cops at the scene had to be restrained because he was getting text messages from his dying wife who was one of the teachers killed.
Well, this past week, a video recording from security cameras inside the school leaked out. And while the mayor began screaming about going after the leaker(s), everyone else was horrified by the visual evidence that police did nothing (via Justin Peters at Slate (paywall)):
Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there...
The one thing every viewer and pundit focused on when the video got out: The inhuman line "The sound of children screaming has been removed." Stephen King could never write a line more horrifying than that.
On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter...
It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not...
And when the video leaked, what was the official response from Uvalde officials like the city mayor?
On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it...
The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then...
More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire..
The video proves that Abbott's praise is absolute bullshit. Even when the cops had body armor, helmets, even those bulletproof shields clearly visible on camera, they waited like chickens for the gunman to finish his bloody agenda.
Every goddamned Uvalde and Texas law officer who failed to act on that day, and every goddamned Uvalde and Texas elected official all the way up to the goddamned Governor who tried to cover up this shame, should have the phrase "The sound of children screaming" tattooed to their foreheads for the rest of their gutless miserable lives.
This is, by the by, absolute proof that the Far Right wingnut fantasy of "Good guys with guns" is a goddamned lie. We had a platoon, nay an entire police force of "good guys with guns" and even they were too terrified to go after a lone gun nut who just happened to carry assault weapons with enough firepower to scare them.
The widespread availability of military-grade assault rifles - thanks to the blind and inhuman misreading of the goddamned Second Amendment by conservative wingnut justices and politicians - is a serious problem for law enforcement across the United States. You wanna know the excuse for why every police department is stocked with riot gear and firepower that even our own military thinks is excessive? The excuse is that the cops want to be "prepared" to face off against any large-scale riot where the rioters may have these AR-15s and similar semi-auto (and illegally converted full auto) firearms.
But even that excuse is a lie. Watch how the cops behaved at Uvalde - when there was just one gunman - and how they cowered behind their shields for a full hour. Then watch how these cops behaved at Black Lives Matters protests: Where most of the protestors were waving signs and carrying water bottles, and where the cops responded with rubber (and real) bullets, smashing in heads with batons and the butt of their own rifles because the cops fucking knew they held all the firepower on those streets.
If our nation's law enforcement were truly honestly serious about protecting themselves in dangerous situations, if they truly wanted to live with the belief that they should "go home to their families at the end of every shift," you'd think every sheriff's department and police union out there would be fighting tooth-and-nail to pass assault weapon bans to make their lives easier.
Part of cop rationale is that they want that excuse of mad gunmen running around so they can play soldier with overpowered gear of their own. Part of it is that the cops are on the same page with the National Rifle Body Count Association when it comes to ensuring the goddamned White Nationalist Christianist "Rapture Is Coming" Gun-Worshipping wingnuts are locked and loaded for the Second Civil War vs. bleeding heart liberals.
The anxiety cops have with every traffic stop could easily go away when the open-carry prevalence of guns go away. But no: they would rather live with the fear, all because it lets them impose their fear and firepower on the ethnic minorities they deem to punish and harass.
In the meantime, the shameless cowards in Texas will keep bleating the same excuses and the same lies until they are held accountable. Until each and every cop who failed in their duty, each and every official who failed to be honest and upfront, each and every demagoguing politician who blustered and lied are either in jail or out of office.
The sound of children screaming should haunt them forever.
Update 7/18: Am waking up this morning to reports that there were 376 officers that eventually showed up at Uvalde. All those cops, and they STILL could not work up the nerve to apprehend a single gunman. All because the gunman had AR-15 murdersticks with him. /rage
IT'S THE GUNS
IT'S THE GUNS
IT'S THE GODDAMNED GUNS.
Get rid of the assault rifles and maybe just maybe the cops will stop being cowards and bullies.
2 comments:
My first mind in this situation is practical: those small town cops never, ever should have had to face a goddamn terrorist murdering children with an assault rifle.
My second mind knows that this is what you sign up for when you become a cop in America in the twenty first century.
The gun sellers have made certain that there is no "safe" place in this country.
This is the situation they so desperately want, where any disaffected young man can buy a ticket to glory for just a bit more than one thousand American dollars.
The underlying cultural programming for this dystopian nightmare has been in place for decades, and is one of the many things that will have to be addressed if we ever want to live in a country where this kind of thing is less frequent.
I wouldn't have wanted to go into that classroom that day, but there are lots of things that I have done in the course of my employment that I didn't want to do, or didn't feel safe doing.
Bottom line: the cops don't have to save you when you are in danger, and that should be more common knowledge than it is. Too much of what we "know" about the police we learned from movies and TV shows. My mother worked for criminal defense attorneys for twenty years, so I was always aware of the difference between how cops are portrayed and how they actually behave.
That creep could have killed all of those kids and their teachers with a handgun, but had he not been using an assault rifle, those cops would have been much more likely to go in and stop him. For that, the smallest reading of the of the benefits of a ban, assault rifles should be banned. Full stop. Anything else is insanity.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Unfortunately banning assault, magazine bolt, single shot bolt weapon, pistol, or revolver, or single shot shot gun, over under/side by side, pump or semi auto shotgun will not keep a cop from being coward, there is no "cure" for being a coward, its something that was put into them when they were created. You just cannot get the stink out, no matter how much tomato juice you use.
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