Tuesday, May 31, 2022

There is apparently nothing that will change their minds...

This is a political post. 

Angeli Rose Gomez is a mom in Uvalde, TX. During the shooting she drove to the school to get her kids. And the cops put her in handcuffs. So, she then got out of the handcuffs, jumped the fence and went into the school and got her kids. While the city police stood outside waiting for backup for nearly an hour.

The same city police who bragged on social media about how every officer had Level 4 body armor. The same city police who in a town of 16,000 maintained it's own SWAT team. The same city police whose budget ate up over 40% of the jurisdiction's budget.  The same police who, after couple of officers were grazed after being fired upon, stood outside an active shooter situation at a still occupied public school for more than FORTY MINUTES. I'm going to be honest, the response of Uvalde police department is beyond the pale. The law enforcement who did finally enter were Federal Agents whom the police onsite actually instructed to wait because... well, something.

Ironically, the state's commission on law enforcement's 2020 training manual states clearly "a first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field."

The fact that we're still having to discuss mass shootings is horrifying. The fact that we haven't had the time and are still processing the previous week when someone walked into a public space and opened fire is even more horrifying. And now we're hearing the kids 911 calls and finding out that some of the children may have "bled out" from their wounds and  could have been saved had there been earlier intervention. We should all be outraged by children now relating stories of covering themselves with blood as camouflage and crawling out of windows to escape while law enforcement stood by. Hell, the Canadians are so outraged by what happened to US that they're changing their gun laws. But we aren't.

Or we should. Because the NRA convention (which by the way was a gun free event due to safety concerns) was held down the road not five days later. And the same folks who swore this was a terrible tragedy spoke at the event about the importance of being able to own a gun. Because the only thing that beats a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. This is the part where you should be really upset. Because the argument that a "good guy" with a gun could have stopped this tragedy is upended by the reality that at least 19 "good guys" stood idly by trying to formulate an attack plan/waiting for backup while children died. Some argue that if the teacher had been armed maybe it wouldn't have been so bad. I guess in a way, making clear that teachers are much braver than police officers.    

Isn't it weird how the story officials are telling us keeps changing? And how if this were someone explaining to the officials, like maybe the police, that they'd immediately get suspicious in regards to what actually happened. But we're not.  

Even as I write this the fallout gets worse and worse. The day after the Governor sat on a stage and lauded the heroism of the brave police officers. Various officials couldn't sing their praises loud enough. But social media is the devil, and video from the scene and those 911 calls rose from the ether and made them out to be fools. Now they're all backtracking, pointing fingers and whatnot. Abbott has revised his story to the ol' tried and true 'say it was a mental health issue', conveniently forgetting HE just cut the state's mental health budget. Officials in that Uvalde city police department are now ducking calls from the state.Because whatever caused this, easy access to guns and ammo did NOT add to the problem. Or so they say.
Seriously, WTF?
This is the America we live in. The conservatives want to Make America Great Again. Like in the 50's. And considering this rampant gun culture and the Supreme Courts latest rulings, I guess they meant the 1850s. 

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