Tim Miller/Bulwark:
In Uvalde, the Most Enraging Press Conference in American History
We cannot count on flawed cops and school resource officers to protect kids from teenagers with assault rifles.
What might very well be the most enraging press conference in American history just ended in Uvalde, Texas.
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. 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 keening parents begged them to act. He acknowledged the school resource officer was not on the scene.
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 want 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.
Dan Froomkin/Press Watch:
All police lie
Legendary rebel journalist I.F. Stone famously said that “All governments lie.”
He didn’t mean that all governments lie all the time. He meant they all lie some of the time.
And he reserved his greatest scorn not for lying officials, but for the credulous journalists who reported what those officials told them, instead of digging for the truth.
As a non-official narrative begins to gel about the police response to the mass murder of little boys and girls at an elementary school in rural Texas on Tuesday, all of us – journalists and the public alike – are hopefully seeing what a mistake it can be to think the police are telling us the truth.
Amanda Taub/NY Times:
In the U.S., Backlash to Civil Rights Era Made Guns a Political Third Rail
Other countries changed course after massacres. But American political protection for guns is unique, and has become inseparable from conservative credentials.
“The modern quest for gun control and the gun rights movement it triggered were born in the shadow of Brown,” Reva Siegel, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School, wrote in a 2008 article in the Harvard Law Review. She was referring to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1954. “Directly and indirectly, conflicts over civil rights have shaped modern understandings of the Second Amendment.”
Desegregation sparked a reactionary backlash among white voters, particularly in the south, who saw it as overreach by the Supreme Court and federal government. That backlash, with the help of conservative political strategists, coalesced into a multi-issue political movement. Promises to protect the traditional family from the perceived threat of feminism drew in white women. And influential conservative lawyers framed the Second Amendment as a source of individual “counterrights” that conservatives could seek protection for in the courts — a counterbalance to progressive groups’ litigation on segregation and other issues.
That turned gun control into a highly salient political issue for American conservatives in a way that sets the United States apart from other wealthy nations. The gun control laws in the United Kingdom, Australia and Norway were all passed by conservative governments. Although they faced some opposition to the new measures, particularly from hunters’ groups, it did not line up with a broader political movement the way gun rights did in the United States.
NBC News:
Texas shooting leaves Sandy Hook survivors with anger, grief and a personal sense of failure
“It’s a horrible burden to bear," said a teacher in Newtown, Connecticut, who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
The day before, as details out of Uvalde began to emerge, parents who live and work in Newtown were coaching sports practices, attending meetings and otherwise trying to live as normal of a life as they could since their worlds came crashing down in 2012.
They would all eventually hear the news that a young, male gunman had opened fire inside an elementary school in Texas after shooting his grandmother in the face.
“It was hauntingly similar to Sandy Hook,” said Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son Dylan was killed in the 2012 attack.
When she heard the news, Hockley was in a large meeting with other leaders of her nonprofit, Sandy Hook Promise, which works to prevent gun violence. Hockley said one team member burst into tears, while she and co-founder Mark Barden, who also lost a son at Sandy Hook, braced themselves for the trauma they knew would follow.
“It brought us back to 12/14 in a more direct way than any shooting has,” Hockley said. “And every shooting does re-traumatize us and make us relive that day, but this was really far too present.”
Hockley and Barden ended the meeting early.
Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman/Yahoo News:
Georgia investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn 2020 election ramps up
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is stepping up the pace of her investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, questioning a wide array of witnesses and preparing a rash of subpoenas to top Georgia state officials, state lawmakers and a prominent local journalist for testimony that will start next week.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who won a surprise victory against a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Republican primary, is slated to be one of Willis’s lead witnesses when he appears before the grand jury next Wednesday, sources confirmed to Yahoo News.
“Based on her pugnacity, it looks like it’s full steam ahead,” said one lawyer representing a client who has been contacted by Willis’s team of investigators and prosecutors. “She’s much more aggressive and determined than I expected.”
Norman Eisen and Dennis Aftergut/CNN:
Perdue's loss is good for democracy; Kemp's win is not
So yes, the rejection of a candidate whom Trump embraced is good news. Voters also
appear to have spurned another so-called "election denier," Jody Hice, whom Trump endorsed against Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's incumbent secretary of state. Raffensperger, who seems to have dodged a runoff with Hice by about two percentage points in a
52% to 33% victory, was the subject of Trump's January 2, 2021, demands to "
find 11,780 votes." That was one more than Biden got and so the exact amount Trump needed to win.