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“Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but ‘egregiously poor decision-making’ resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released Sunday… The report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy amounted to the fullest account to date of one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.” AP News
“Three people were fatally shot and two were injured Sunday evening at an Indiana mall after a man with a rifle opened fire in a food court and an armed civilian shot and killed him.” AP News
Both sides strongly criticize the Uvalde police response and urge transparency:
“[The video is] not awful because it’s graphic. It isn’t. Even the children’s screams have been removed from the audio, the viewer is gently reassured at one point. It’s awful because it brings home the extent of the cops’ paralysis in a way nothing else can. Even at just four minutes in length, with cops visible in the hallway for only about half that time, the extent of the delay is maddening. You’ll want to crawl through the screen after 60 seconds or so and head down towards the shooter yourself.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“The mayor’s response [to the leaked video], in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since…
“I am willing to believe that by making the video public, the Statesman and KVUE may indeed have temporarily increased the pain that the victims’ families are feeling right now. Indeed, some have said as much… But reporting decisions cannot be guided exclusively by concerns over the emotional welfare of the people who may be affected by a given story… The world deserves to know exactly what went wrong with the police response… People who held a public trust already flinched once from confronting the awfulness of the Uvalde shooting. The media must not flinch in holding them accountable.”
Justin Peters, Slate
“In a fitting coda to this whole sorry episode, members of the Uvalde city council reacted to the school footage not with the disgust at police inaction that any normal person would feel, but by praising their courage and berating the Austin American-Statesman for releasing the video, calling it ‘chickenshit.’ There’s definitely plenty of chickenshit in this story, but anyone with eyes and [a] working brain knows it’s not among the reporters.”
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Magazine
“The kind of American heroism epitomized by the firefighters and first responders who entered the World Trade Center and climbed those stairs, knowing they might never survive, feels so distant now. We may as well be talking about the Greatest Generation. The police in Robb Elementary’s hallway bear no relation to valor, sacrifice, bravery, or the notion of policing as a calling rather than a career. A shooter hides down the hall as they pat each other on the back, pace up and down, all passivity and reactivity, children and teachers bleeding out, the gunman blasting music…
“Uvalde’s mayor, attorney general and the City of Uvalde itself are complicit; as of June 18, 148 public records requests regarding the shooting and response were denied. The city retained a private law firm for that purpose, arguing that such records could be ‘highly embarrassing.’ Of course they could. That’s the point. Full transparency — all the bodycams, 911 calls, video surveillance, texts and communications between police and Border Patrol and any other agencies and officials involved, during and after the fact — is the only way forward.”
Maureen Callahan, New York Post
Other opinions below.
Regarding the shooting in Indiana, “In contrast [to the police officers in Uvalde], Dicken didn’t run from the shooter nor express fears that he ‘could’ve been shot.’ He pushed his girlfriend, 19-year-old Shay Goldman, to safety and told her to stay down while he engaged the shooter, according to Goldman’s grandmother. As a private citizen who put himself in danger to save others, Dicken did more to protect the lives of strangers than the Uvalde police did to protect the citizens they are sworn to defend…
“Dicken’s actions remind us that, even when law enforcement does everything right (unlike what happened in Uvalde), your first line of defense should be yourself. The distance from your hand to a holster on your hip will always be shorter than the distance police have to travel to the scene. And when officers of the state show regrettable cowardice, as they did in Uvalde, the only courage you have to rely upon is your own.”
Elle Reynolds, The Federalist
“The media is treating the [Indiana] incident as something of a novel occurrence, but the CDC estimates defensive gun use to tally between 500,000 and three million cases each year… an average of eighteen national surveys found there are at least two million cases of citizens using firearms legally to defend themselves each year…
“Mass shooters know how effective armed citizens are in diffusing incidents, which is why 98 percent of the time, they carry out their crimes in so-called ‘gun free’ zones.”
Teresa Mull, Spectator World
“It’s long past time to rethink so-called ‘gun-free zones.’ Simon Property Group is hardly alone in posting such signs in response to progressive pushback on carry permit laws, but they have little effect — except to leave their customers more vulnerable to such attacks. Those signs certainly didn’t prevent the mass shooter from picking it as a target. In fact, the expectation that law-abiding citizens would honor that restriction may have been one of the reasons that the mass shooter chose that target in the first place.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“That there were so many cops to begin with is a testament to the widespread belief that, in the name of public safety, we must spend handsomely on police forces, granting them enormous budgets that far outstrip spending on many other social services. Uvalde may be a sleepy small town, but by god, they were going to be flush with law enforcement, drowning in uniformed police who are armed to the teeth and equipped with expensive military-grade armor and other fancy goodies to keep the public safe…
“But, as the events of May 24 demonstrated, whatever else we may be paying cops to do, ‘saving people from violent criminals’ is more optional than required…
“In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that police are not actually required to stop criminals who intend to harm people… Cops simply do not have a legal duty to do things like stop an active shooter… If more people understood this reality, it could help dramatically change the contours of the public debate over police reform… People aren't wrong to want a government-funded, easily accessed service that has a duty to protect ordinary people from crime. The problem is that we don't actually have such a thing.”
Amanda Marcotte, Salon
Regarding the shooting in Indiana, “Even with a ‘good guy’ present, the Indiana mall shooter was still able to kill three people, injure two and traumatize many others…
“Compare this Indiana mall shooting to a recent shooting at a mall in Copenhagen. In the Copenhagen shooting, three people were also killed. But in Denmark, a nation that hadn't seen a mass shooting since 2015, a mall shooting that killed three was a horrific and aberrant event. In America, it's being touted by gun proponents as a victory for the armed… If ‘good guys with guns’ were the solution to gun violence, then America would be the safest country on Earth. After all, we have more guns than people in the US -- and yet more Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 have been killed in all of America's wars combined.”
Jill Filipovic, CNN
