In the days after 19 children and two teachers were killed inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, every newly revealed detail manages to make both the political reaction and the law enforcement response look worse. Very little of the account first given by Texas law enforcement officials remains intact, and yet another claim was proven false when surveillance video proved that no, the mass shooter did not enter the school through a supposedly unsecured, "propped open" door. A door that had been propped open so that a teacher could carry in food was in fact closed by that same teacher, even as she called 911 to report the approaching shooter.
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Why the door did not automatically lock behind her when she pulled it closed is now yet another question for investigators, but prior claims that it had been left ajar are now provably false. It was another claim from police that appeared to cast blame on the victims of the shooting while deflecting blame from the police departments that stood by while children inside called 911 to plead for help; it's not likely that revised information will do anything to dissuade pro-gun Republicans from insisting that it is our door technologies that are the problem, not new Texas laws that lowered the minimum age for purchasing an assault–style rifle to 18 and did away with any training or permit requirements. No, say malevolent and craven hacks who bragged loudly about each new law making AR-15 ownership easier, it must be the fault of the teachers, the schools, and the doors.
Speaking of malevolent and craven hacks: Ted Cruz. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been getting an earful from Texans in the wake of his state's latest mass murder, or rather his staff has been getting an earful while he remains in wherever the hell he has run off to. Texas teachers yesterday descended on his Austin office to shout "shame on you" in protest of Cruz's vigorously asinine and, quote, "abominable" theories about installing better doors while still sucking up to the pro-sedition, pro-mass-violence militia crowd. Mind you, Cruz doesn't care and never will, but the man managed to speedily dive into a mass tragedy only to pipe up with a take so sociopathically out-of-touch that it managed to stand out even in a Republican Party that burps up sociopathically bad takes on a daily basis. That requires a dedication to awfulness that few can muster.
From Uvalde itself, none of the developments since the shooting have been anything but terrible, and Uvalde law enforcement at this point could not possibly look worse. There's assuredly a major federal investigation coming their way, and if at the end of it it turns out that a great deal of what the small town thought it was spending money on turned out to be a Putinesque fiction saddled with graft and vanity projects ... it would be hard at this point to act surprised.
Earlier we noted that Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Chief of Police Peter Arredondo was to have had his ceremonial swearing-in as new member of the city's City Council, after getting 126 votes to win his election to the post in early May, but the ceremony was being put off so that the mayor and other town leaders could better deal with the aftermath of the mass murder. Arredondo was the incident commander who is now reported to have ordered town and federal officers to stand by rather than engage the shooter, even though 911 calls were coming in that signaled surviving children were still hiding in those rooms.
Almost immediately after reports of the canceled ceremony went out, reporters also learned that Uvalde law enforcement was no longer cooperating with the Texas state investigation of the mass murder.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, however, soon clarified that it was Arredondo who was no longer responding to their inquiries, even as other officers continued that cooperation:
Today Arredondo's apparent efforts to hide from reporters took another turn, with police officials threatening arrest of reporters on the "private property" of ... the public school district's offices?
None of this is instilling confidence in the town's law enforcement operations, and there was little to no confidence there to begin with.
Taking a cursory glance toward the awful, terrible, absolutely useless United States Senate, it appears that Republican efforts to kill any and all attempts at actually getting America's favorite weapons of terrorism off the streets—or even slightly curtailed—are going just as expected.
So they're going to do the "doors" thing, but then pull back their support the moment the time comes to actually approve the money the schools would need to actually implement the make-work solution, and they're going to underscore "mental illness" while blocking all federal efforts to expand mental health coverage and boosting state Republican budgets that slash that coverage at every opportunity. Sen. Mitch McConnell is already sounding quite confident that he can slow-walk the Senate debate until the public no longer cares about the latest schoolroom deaths, and he has history on his side in thinking so. We wouldn't be talking about this today if McConnell and Senate Republicans had not buried gun safety reforms after the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders.
They did. Here we are. And they're going to do it again. It'll be up to voters to vote them out—if Republican statehouses even allow voters that outcome. But there will be more murders, because gun "activists" and their allied lawmakers have made it very, very clear that an ongoing flood of child deaths by gunfire isn't even remotely enough for them to consider doing anything different.
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