Editor's note: This piece contains graphic descriptions of the horrific Uvalde massacre.
In one of the most harrowing personal accounts of the Uvalde tragedy yet, an 11-year-old described to a CNN reporter that she had survived the mass shooting by smearing blood on herself and playing dead.
"She had a friend next to her that she was pretty sure was already dead and was laying on the ground bleeding out," explained CNN reporter Nora Neus, who had interviewed the fourth grader. "And she put her hands in her friend's blood, and then smeared it she said all over her body. She wanted to look like she was dead. She was scared that the gunmen was going to come back, through that adjoining door, back into the classroom and she wanted to be able to play dead."
I do not relay this account lightly. It is simply too gutting for words. But it is critical to hear the terror these children endured as the "good guys with guns" waited outside the classroom.
I will not assign blame for the Uvalde response in this piece, but rather leave that for another day. For now, my purpose is to make it perfectly clear that all the "good guys with guns" in the world didn't help those two teachers and their classrooms filled with defenseless children.
If the new timeline provided by Texas Department of Public Safety officials holds up (a moving target, at best), agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived sometime between 12 PM and 12:10 PM. Local police were there even earlier:
The authorities now say that local officers first entered the school at 11:35, two minutes after the gunman, and that there were 19 officers in the hallway by 12:03 PM, but that they did not breach the door and kill the gunman until 12:50, even as they continued to hear him firing.
That means the federal tactical team that finally neutralized the gunman was on the scene for at least a half-hour while kids from within the classroom dialed 911 and begged for help. The local police were positioned even longer.
“Please send the police now,” said one little girl, who had already called several times during the shooting. She survived the attack.
Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the National Rifle Association—which is currently holding its annual fundraiser several hundred miles from Uvalde in Houston—rolled out the lie that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
That did not work in Uvalde, nor did it work weeks ago in Buffalo, where an armed, off-duty security guard and former police officer was unable to stop the racist slaughter of nine Black grocery store shoppers. The guard was also killed.
Yet, so far, we have yet to hear even one Republican lawmaker admit that it's time to put to rest the failed 'good guys with guns' myth that has been perpetrated on the American people. It's the very least Republicans can do to honor the 21 innocents who were left to fend for themselves inside those two classrooms while 19 armed officers waited outside.
“It was the wrong decision. Period,” Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), admitted during a press conference on Friday morning.
But asked if the grieving parents who lost their precious children in the tragedy were owed an apology, McCraw offered, “If I thought it would help, I'd apologize.”
Honest to god, those kids and two teachers are gone—an entire community shattered—why not apologize, even if it's too little too late?
At least some of the Texas politicians who helped perpetuate the "good guys" myth as they blocked gun safety laws and slashed restrictions decided to bail on the NRA event after being scheduled to attend.
Gov. Greg Abbott canceled but tried to have his cake and eat it too by pre-recording a video for the event. Among other Texas lawmakers who ran into sudden scheduling conflicts were Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and Sen. John Cornyn, who was reportedly taking part in bipartisan talks with Senate colleagues around potential compromise legislation on gun safety.
Naturally, Sen. Ted Cruz, who still thinks he's a presidential contender, emerged as the most loathsome of them all.
"I’m going to be there, because what Democrats and the press try to do in the wake of every mass shooting is they try to demonize law-abiding gun owners, try to demonize the NRA,” Cruz said ahead of a speech he planned to deliver Friday afternoon.
Did we mention that Donald Trump is also speaking but “firearms, firearm accessories, knives, and other items WILL NOT BE PERMITTED in the General Assembly Hall," according to Secret Service. Far too dangerous.
Look, the "good guys with guns" is patently false—exposed over and over again as a pure fallacy. But the idiots, the liars, and perverse opportunists are still selling it.
"We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus," Cruz told reporters Wednesday.
False. Cruz's persistent lying didn't prove out in Uvalde (which had a resource officer, though official reports have varied on whether they engaged the shooter), it didn't prove true at a Santa Fe school shooting in 2018 (where there were two resource officers), and it didn't prove true at the massacre at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that same year (when the resource officer took cover as the shooting unfolded).
The truth is, law enforcement seems very very afraid of the firepower now pulsing through America—turns out AR-15s are uniquely scary killing machines. It's not just the resource officers.
DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez explained to CNN Wednesday that local officers hesitated to do their jobs because they were being shot at.
“Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on-site?” Wolf Blitzer asked Olivarez.
"The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that—of course, the American people need to understand—that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is," Olivarez responded. "They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.
They could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.
So sicko Cruz and the NRA are entitled to their lies, but they're still lying—they're just doing it at expense of the hundreds of murdered children who are already dead and will continue to die due to their craven lies.
Guns are now the leading cause of death among kids in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, firearm-related deaths surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the No. 1 killer of kids and teens, though statistics for 2021 and 2022 aren't available yet.
When President Barack Obama delivered a somber speech in Newtown following the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, he reflected as a parent on the responsibility we all share in raising the country's children.
It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself. That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation. And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.
This is our first task—caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.
We are desperately failing America's children. And Ted Cruz may not care about the carnage. The NRA may not care about the carnage. The Republican Party clearly doesn't care about the carnage. But for god's sake, no one who pushes the "good guy with a gun" myth should be taken as making a good-faith effort to protect America's kids.
They used the deaths of 20 children and six adults to elevate that lie after Sandy Hook and, 10 years later, they are using it again following what was obviously a botched law enforcement response by every possible measure.
Not this time. Guns didn't save those precious kids, but they sure as hell killed them.
The 11-year old girl, trapped in that classroom, concluded that the cavalry waiting outside the door with guns wasn't going to save her, but rather her best chance was unimaginable: she would have to play dead. And she was right.
CNN reporter Nora Neus relayed the graphic story here:
At Friday’s NRA event: