Uvalde, School Security, Good Shepherds and Sheepdogs

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On Tuesday, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos hopped a fence and walked through an unlocked door into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. He was armed with two modern sporting rifles. At some point, he entered a classroom, locked the door, and killed two teachers and 19 students in that classroom and an adjoining classroom before a US Border Patrol BORTAC team forced their way into the barricaded rooms and killed Rosas.

A lot of time will pass before we have a clear picture of what happened that day, but right now, we can see echoes of the Parkland, Florida, shooting. Only worse.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, three Broward County Sheriff’s Deputies were investigated for negligence because they stayed outside the building while the students were killed. In addition, at least one of the deputies faced criminal charges based on his conduct.

This is the timeline of events according to the Wall Street Journal:

Ramos shot his grandmother Tuesday morning and drove her truck to Robb Elementary School, crashing the vehicle into a nearby ditch at 11:28 a.m., according to the timeline laid out by Mr. Escalon. He 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 chain-link fence about 8 feet high 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.
A Border Patrol tactical team went into the school an hour later, around 12:40 p.m., and was able to get into the classroom and kill Ramos, Mr. Escalon said.

As anxious parents waited outside, they could hear shots inside the school.

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents waiting outside the school who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner. After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.

…
Ms. Gomez described the scene as frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

Videos circulated on social media Wednesday and Thursday of frantic family members trying to get access to Robb Elementary as the attack was unfolding, some of them yelling at police who blocked them from entering.

“Shoot him or something!” a woman’s voice can be heard yelling on a video, before a man is heard saying about the officers, “They’re all just [expletive] parked outside, dude. They need to go in there.”

…

After the confrontation at the school ended with Ramos dead, school buses began to arrive to transport students from the school, according to Ms. Gomez. She said she saw police use a Taser on a local father who approached the bus to collect his child.

As I said, there is a lot yet to learn about what happened at the scene. As the nation wrestles over gun control and mental health care and hardening schools so they aren’t soft targets and all manner of creeping fascism proposed by the anti-American left, I want to take a short while to focus on what seems to be a much larger issue—the actions of our police forces when confronted with these kinds of situations.

I don’t have any reason to doubt that the officers on the scene followed procedures. The question is whether that procedure is designed to save the lives of the people being killed or keep the police officers on the scene safe. To be clear, even if the latter is the policy, it is legal. In Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, the Supreme Court ruled that the police do not have a duty to protect citizens. That said, my personal belief is that if you are more concerned about proper procedure than saving lives, maybe you should find a career outside of law enforcement, emergency response, or the military.

The scene, at least as it seems now, in Uvalde, where there were, according to reports, three police officers in the building and a cordon established as they awaited the arrival of the BORTAC team, and nothing was done even as 21 people were executed calls to mind the Gospel of John.

“He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

It seems to me that the problem here, in addition to a poorly secured school and the godless society that created Ramos, is that there aren’t enough good shepherds. To borrow from LTC (ret.) Dave Grossman, we don’t even have sheepdogs.

Maybe the answer is one that has been discussed, particularly by the Trump Administration, is training and arming teachers. Unlike school resource officers or police officers, there is a chance that a teacher’s bond with the students in their school might encourage more aggressive action than we saw two days ago. Maybe we should look at establishing a corps of volunteer and armed parents who could man school entrances. The odds of a parent not defending their child and other children are fairly slim.

While I’m not willing to negotiate away any more of my rights or the rights of fellow citizens to the gun-grabbers, I do think that some commonsense hardening of schools (like one point of monitored and secured ingress) and armed persons who have a vested interest in defending kids on the scene would go a long way towards stopping further massacres like that in Uvalde.

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2 thoughts on “Uvalde, School Security, Good Shepherds and Sheepdogs”

  1. “I don’t have any reason to doubt that the officers on the scene followed procedures. The question is whether that procedure is designed to save the lives of the people being killed or keep the police officers on the scene safe. To be clear, even if the latter is the policy, it is legal.”

    Something fundamental has changed in our society over the last 50 years. Not that long ago few people would’ve imagined that any adult, let alone one that was in law enforcement, would’ve just stood by for an hour, an hour where children were being killed, waiting for an ‘expert team’ to finally made it on site and subdue the bad guy(s).

    I just shake my head and wonder if the norm now is really, as C.S. Lewis called it, Men Without Chests, and that we’ve lost connection with that most fundamental of life urges of protecting the young and vulnerable.

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