By Rod DREHER
I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.
— David Polansky (@polanskydj) May 27, 2022
I can’t improve on this.
Here is more of the horror from Uvalde. I cannot comprehend the mentality that led to this. The killer was evil and perhaps deranged. But how do you explain these damn cops?! From the NYT:
In Uvalde, Texas, some of the worst fears about the police response to the school shooting rampage were confirmed on Friday when state law enforcement officials acknowledged that more than an hour lapsed after the shooting began, as the police waited to enter the classroom where students were trapped inside.
In an emotional and at times tense news conference, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, gave the most detailed accounting of the shooting yet, diverging in substantial points from the original timeline given by officials.
Most of the time the gunman was at the school, Mr. McCraw explained, he was inside the classrooms where nearly all of the killing took place, while as many as 19 police officers waited outside in the school hallway. Multiple people in the classrooms, including at least two students, called 911 over that horrifying stretch, begging for police. But apparently believing that the suspect had barricaded himself in the classroom and that “there were no kids at risk,” the police did not enter the classroom until 12:50 p.m., 78 minutes after the shooter walked inside.
No words.
More:
By 12:15 p.m., agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrived with tactical shields, he said, far earlier than previously known. But local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman who had opened fire on students inside the school.
In a news conference in Uvalde several hours after Mr. McCraw spoke, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said he had been “misled” early on about what happened during the shooting before his comments praising the response earlier in the week. “As everybody has learned, the information that I was given turned out in part to be inaccurate and I am absolutely livid about that,” he said, adding that he expected law enforcement leaders investigating the sequence of events “to get to the bottom of every fact with absolute certainty.”
Again: why? I cannot understand it. How can you stand there, armed, in a hallway, as a law enforcement officer, and … stand there? Children were on the phone begging to be rescued. But those men stood there.
Who did this? Who gave that order? Why did those cops obey it?
