In Uvalde, the Most Enraging Press Conference in American History

[David Morris]

*We cannot count on flawed cops and school resource officers to protect
kids from teenagers with assault rifles.*

https://www.thebulwark.com/in-uvalde-the-most-enraging-press-conference-in-american-history/

In Uvalde, the Most Enraging Press Conference in American History
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw revealed that there
were 19 officers in the school hallway for about an hour as small children
used their deceased teacher’s phone to dial 911 and beg for their lives
<https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1530238057454047232>. He described
local police officials preventing border patrol and other federal law
enforcement who had arrived on the scene from entering the school and
helping these terrorized kids, while their parents begged them to act.

And after admitting this staggering level of incompetence in the face of
unimaginable evil—a failure so immense that it will reverberate for
generations—McCraw said dismissively, “If I thought it would help, I’d
apologize.”

I wanted to throw my computer through a wall just transcribing these words.

McCraw followed that remark by making a rather revealing point. In defense
of the officers on scene he said that there was “​​a barrage—hundreds of
rounds were pumped in four minutes into those classrooms.”

*Hundreds of rounds. Four minutes. When you cut away all the bullshit, and
excuse making, and failure this is the crux of the matter.*
In the coming days there will be a desire to obsess only over the
unfathomable failures of those who were charged with keeping these kids
safe. […]  But the main thing to take away from all of that is not that
their failure can be reversed. It’s that in a nation with 130,000
schools *there
will **always** be some kind of human error when responding to an active
shooter.* God willing those errors won’t be as catastrophic as they were in
Uvalde. But there will always be errors.

*THE* important takeaway from Uvalde shouldn’t be that next time we just
need perfect cops, and unimpeachable protocols, and more competent “good
guys with guns.” Time after time we’ve seen that this isn’t possible in the
real world. The military understands that plans rarely survive
first-contact with the enemy. The fetishists insisting that “guns don’t
kill people, doors do,” do not.

*The only way to actually protect these kids is to make it harder for their
peers to get these deadly weapons *that have allowed so many shooters to
evade so many cops and so many safety procedures.