🧵 just finished the uvalde report. Here are the most important 3 screenshots to me
— Tracy Walder (@tracy_walder) July 17, 2022
2) uvalde officers had undergone ALERRT training. They knew what to do if keys were not available and what to do did not include hanging out in the hallway for 70+min pic.twitter.com/x0DOpAzwkI
— Tracy Walder (@tracy_walder) July 17, 2022
ALERRT training is Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training and provides many police departments with active shooter training across the US. Uvalde PD had undergone their training
— Tracy Walder (@tracy_walder) July 17, 2022
I dunno; this seems like a pretty big takeaway to me.
In total, 376 law enforcement officers — a force larger than the garrison that defended the Alamo — descended upon the school in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted for more than an hour. The group was devoid of clear leadership, basic communications and sufficient urgency to take down the gunman, the report says.
Notably, the investigation is the first so far to criticize the inaction of state and federal law enforcement, while other reports and public accounts by officials have placed the blame squarely on Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police Chief Pete Arredondo for his role as incident commander and other local police who were among the first to arrive.To bring it back to Paul Simon: “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” A bit remarkable to read 77 pages and come to the same conclusion many had come to before this report was released. To me nearly 400 officers standing around with their heads up their asses seems a bit more significant at this point. Nothing said in that thread is the least remarkable: those two paragraphs open up the entire story to new questions and interpretations.
It’s all a matter of what you look at; what you look at is what you decide is important.
It's about the gun. There are a lot of trees, and the gun lobby wants us to focus on the trees. There was an assailant with a military grade weapon and likely body armor. The police recognized that racing toward someone with an assault rifle and body armor can be near suicidal. In other words, even the police are afraid of assault weapons. Do we really expect police that are ready to engage in a suicidal frontal attack? Do we really expect teachers to be armed, and certainly more lightly armed and without body armor, and to also engage in a suicidal frontal attack against a better armed aggressor? The only people we expect to act that way are soldiers, and that only occurs in a very small, highly motivated and tightly controlled group. Even then, with all the constant training a reasonable number of soldiers fall short. Are we really planning to essentially court martial police and teachers for not risking their lives for their students? Who the hell would take these jobs? And are the people that would going to be any good at nurturing our children, or managing a domestic dispute? Because that is the kind of society we are looking at if we don't take a realistic look at Uvalde.
ReplyDeleteWe have a choice, either completely warp our society and make assault weapons our national fetish and god, or take control of them and have what is closer to a functional society. It's not about the cops, or the teachers, or training or anything else. It's about the damn guns.