The Screams Of The Uvalde Children Will Not Be Televised
From the Austin Statesman and Presented without further comment:
Warning: The video footage and audio is disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.
Video from inside Robb Elementary and body camera footage from a responding officer show how Uvalde officers responded to the active shooter. Full story and video: https://t.co/Pscj2Ruvh5 pic.twitter.com/y1hd52Q4Rf
— Austin Statesman (@statesman) July 12, 2022
The gunman walks into Robb Elementary School unimpeded, moments after spraying bullets from his semi-automatic rifle outside the building and after desperate calls to 911 from inside and outside the Uvalde school.
He slows down to peek around a corner in the hallway and flips back his hair before proceeding toward classrooms 111 and 112.
Seconds later, a boy with neatly combed hair and glasses exits the bathroom to head back to his class. As he begins to turn the corner, he notices the gunman standing by the classroom door and then firing his first barrage.
The boy turns and runs back into the bathroom.
The gunman enters one of the classrooms. Children scream. The gunfire continues, stops, then starts again. Stops, then starts again. And again. And again.
It is almost three minutes before three officers arrive in the same hallway and rush toward the classrooms, crouching down. Then, a burst of gunfire. One officer grabs the back of his head. They quickly retreat to the end of the hallway, just below a school surveillance camera.
A 77-minute video recording captured from this vantage point, along with body camera footage from one of the responding officers, obtained by the American-Statesman and KVUE, shows in excruciating detail dozens of sworn officers, local, state and federal — heavily armed, clad in body armor, with helmets, some with protective shields — walking back and forth in the hallway, some leaving the camera frame and then reappearing, others training their weapons toward the classroom, talking, making cellphone calls, sending texts and looking at floor plans, but not entering or attempting to enter the classrooms.
The Statesman is publishing an edited version of the video to show how the law enforcement response unfolded.
Here is the full video from the Austin Statemen. While edited, some of the images are still disturbing and may be triggering to some:
Painful to watch even at 10x speed.Report
I’m surprised that there haven’t been mass resignations. Or one, even.
(I know that Pete Arredondo has resigned from the City Council, but I’m talking about police resignations from the police.)Report
HehReport
Doubling down is an American tradition and it often works.Report
I assume you are trolling again – they didn’t resign after George Floyd. They didn’t resign after Eric Garner. They didn’t resign after Breonna Taylor. And on and on. There is zero reason to believe this time would be any different.Report
I do not believe that there is zero reason to believe that this time is different.
For example, even the Reddit “Protect and Serve” mods agree that this looks bad.Report
Oh my good something looks bad! Well let’s all throw up our hands an rejoice because cops is this country are staring to figure out what looks bad.
You know what else looks bad? Killing a black boy in a park 1.2 seconds after you arrive where he is because you don’t bother to determine he has a TOY gun. It looks bad to repeatedly taz and then shoot a black man selling bootlegs CDs at a 7-11. It looks bad to pepper spray a compliant army officer – who is in uniform – during a traffic stop. It looks bad to kill a black man with a concealed carry permit who tells you he’s reaching for his permit after you ask to see it. It looks bad to fire blindly into an apartment while serving a search warrant for someone you know isn’t there, killing and EMT.
Do I need to go on?Report
I agree with all of those looking bad.
What I do not agree with is that there weren’t an overwhelming number of people who agreed with me that they looked bad but instead cleared their throats and explained how complicated the world was, how difficult it is to make split-second decisions, and so on.
Because there were.
This time? There doesn’t seem to be an audible number of throats cleared and people explaining how simple it is to MMQB.
That’s what makes this time different.Report
Yes.
And…
What is going to change?
Because if nothing changes… this time isn’t different.Report
Good question. I don’t know but it does seem like the local pushback continues. Pete Arredondo has resigned from the City Council, for example.Report
I agree that it FEELS different and MIGHT BE different but, for me, unless or until we see something that indicates change beyond individuals in Uvalde, I will not actually believe this WAS different.
A guy resigning from the Uvalde City Council doesn’t change anything anywhere other than for that guy and that City Council.Report
Understand: I’m not saying that this time it is different.
But I do think that there are indicators here that weren’t in other cases.
There’s still momentum, even this much later.Report
Are we going to restructure society because of Uvalde?
No.
1) My brother will still hunt.
2) These sorts of incidents will be an easy way to sell clicks.
3) Suicidal glory seekers will still take the easy way to fame by engaging in mass murder.
4) Team Blue will still use these incidents to try to push policies that mostly can’t work because they want to fire up the troops.
5) And there will be much pearl clutching and hysteria over the next time it happens. The same emotional nonsensical arguments will be tossed out.Report
All of the cops involved with Floyd were fired the day after the incident. Seems like that should be held up as a success, not a failure.Report
Reddit’s “Protect and Serve” thread on this footage.
Here’s how bad it is: the stickied post at the top says
“Yes, we’re all aware that the actions taken by nearly all of the LE in the released video is… nothing to be proud of.”Report
Lotta “just try to hold me back” energy there.Report
Now that the Texas House Committee report is out one hopes they have upped their assessment.Report
It keeps getting worse and the response from the Uvalde Police and city government seems to be Trumping it out with a triple down.Report
Maybe they think that by Biden their time, they can make it through all of the Harrisment and if they can deal with all of the Yellen without Blinken, at the end of all of this, they’ll get a Garland.Report
Can’t watch it now… maybe not ever. Can you tell if the firing from the shooter continued throughout?Report
Far as I can tell it didn’t.
I watch it at 10x with the sound off. There are boxes with commentary that show up. One of the big ones is that they (the editors) have removed the sound of screaming children. The screaming stops right before the cops show up and then it doesn’t restart.
So… I think the cops were never waiting while the shooter was shooting people.
Having said that, one assumes some of the shot people could have benefited from being treated inside the golden hour rather than afterwards.Report
I think this is key. While 5.56 rounds would be devastating to small children, they are not necessarily instantly fatal. Had the police just taken the risk and entered the room, some of those kids may have been saved.Report
Yes but that still seems like the least worst case scenario.
I don’t want to make any sort of excuses for the cops. But you have to hope upon hope that no one was shot after they fully on scene and in the inexplicable holding pattern.
Failing to get aid to injured people because of the cowardice and self-preservation and whatever else the fish was going on is truly, truly awful. But additional victims being shot feels worse.Report
Those cops have high powered rifles and allegedly extensive training plus ballistics vests all at tax payer expense. Even without a legal duty to protect they would all have come out just fine had they used their resources. Everyone in those rooms who could be shot was shot or was lying in their classmates bliss pretending to be dead.Report
Not my point.
Kids laying dying while the cops stand around is the worst.
Kids being shot while the cops stand around is even worse than the worst.
If we’re at worst rather than worse-than-worst, that’s, well, not the worst-worst.Report
Further proof that highly trained “good guys with a gun” were and remain a myth.
They should all go now willingly, or be taken away in irons.Report
“Further proof that highly trained “good guys with a gun” were and remain a myth.”
eat ass
the “good guys with guns” were told that they didn’t need their guns because the trained, cool-headed. brave police officers would rush into danger to help if there were a situation where guns were useful or necessary
the “good guys with guns” stopped carrying their guns
the “good guys with guns” weren’t allowed to have guns
and people like you said that was okay
people like you thought that was the best answer
the situation in Uvalde was what people like you wanted
and whenever someone said “that’s actually not a good idea, that will just make it easier for armed killers to get away with it”, you got all excited and told us how it was just our Death Fetish coming out, that it was our personal drama-fantasy that we’d one day act as armed revolutionaries, that we were really just racists who wanted to be able to kill us a darkie if the opportunity presented itselfReport
No True Good Guy would have behaved like that.Report
Good guys with guns can open carry, and now concealed carry in Texas without a permit.They did, frequently. They even shot up a church shooter a few years back. So far as has been reported every civilian who tried to enter that school was arrested by cops working with the well trained police who were already inside the building.
Cowering in fear.
While children died.
And what I want is for that young man to have never had access to the gun he used to do that.Report
There is an additional piece of irony. There is a screenshot of the footage out there that shows one of the cops checking out his phone and the phone has American Flag/Punisher wallpaper.
The police officer was pretty resoundingly mocked for having Punisher wall paper despite Denny O’Neill’s admonition against cops seeing the Punisher as a role-model and mocking him for having the Punisher as a role-model and then cowering while children were being shot.
The irony, what little there is, is that the cop in question was Ruben Ruiz. That’s the guy whose wife was in the classroom dying, who was detained by his co-workers, and was escorted from the building.Report
Honestly, that sounds like a Punisher-eque origin story, except it would turn out the cops have been bribed to do that, instead of just being incompetent cowards.Report
We can’t even perfectly control the police.
Getting the law disobeying to follow the law will be harder still.Report
We can certainly control large corporations operating gun-manufacturing plants easier than one person.Report
Because clearly no one will change their actions if we change ours, and we don’t have large sub-sections of society that will never go along with your desired collective action.Report
It doesn’t matter if they ‘go along’ with it or not…manufacturing your own guns is not only incredibly difficult, manufacturing your own _high-end_ guns is nearly impossible.
I mean, we just saw this. Shinzo Abe was killed with a homemade shotgun made by the shooter…in fact, it appears he built multiple weapons, but only took one, probably because the other weapons did not actually work consistently enough!
And he killed one person. An assassination, not a mass shooting. It manage to fire two shots, out of two barrels, so maybe he could have killed two people, but that’s it. A _shotgun_, so requires extremely close range.
You understand other countries that have gun laws that make it extremely hard to get guns, in the actual world that we currently live in? This isn’t some hypothetical where we have to debate if this could be done, we can simply look at those countries and say ‘It seems to work currently’.
And those countries exist in a world where gun can just be _smuggled_ from the US thanks to incredibly lax laws allowing them to vanish overseas! If we barred them, we wouldn’t have to deal with, uh, _us_.
I can’t promise that they won’t set up somewhere else, but that would mean literally all guns would have to be smuggled in, and that works fairly well for keeping them out of the hands of people.Report
If I wanted to engage in mass murder, firearms wouldn’t be the method.
You’re attacking a symptom.
That’s in addition to assuming that prohibition will magically work this time in spite of large segments of society that openly won’t obey it.Report
Openly flouting the law seems to work for other people, so why not firearms owners?Report
We have drug dealers and criminals in general who are forbidden to have guns but somehow do. We have a stupid number of people who have guns legally (or just not illegally).
We have organized political groups who vote on this issue to the point where it’s (close to) impossible implement full disarmament.
We have the 2nd AM.
If the political stars align and Team Blue manages to get a super majority and does a political death march to implement full gun disarmament, my expectation is we’ll find out it was a bad idea.
The idea that we could just implement it is a fantasy. You might as well insist that God will step in.
As long as you’re making unrealistic plans on what to do, you might as well just outlaw mass murder and assume that the shooters will obey the law.Report
I don’t espouse total disarmament, mostly because it’s virtually impossible. But, just like I’m not allowed to drive an Indy car on the highway, I do believe their ought to be limits on what kinds of arms that are available to the general public.Report
Virtually everyone does, including all but the most fanatical supporters of expansive gun rights.
Very few people are willing to support unfettered access to any and all “arms” such as fully automatic rifles or grenade launchers.
The line in the Constitution between a semiautomatic and full automatic doesn’t exist of course, but is just a commonly accepted limit like, say, the second trimester.
But people treat it like it is some iron law of nature, just axiomatic and self evident.Report
You’ve already gotten most or maybe even all of the low hanging fruit. The number of spree killers is close to zero when measured against lots of other problems.
And we still have vapid claims we’re doing nothing… to disguise what they really want is everything.Report
If we’re trying to get rid of all the pearl clutching, then I don’t see how anything less than full disarmament would be satisfactory.
There are things we can do better, but stopping the occasional killer (or even reducing his body count) does nothing if we’re going to make the successful ones famous.Report
good guys with guns: let us go do something!
the police: no.
Phil H: truly this demonstrates how there’s no such thing as “good guys with guns”.Report
Well trained “good guys with guns” refers to the cops dude.
Reading comprehension.Report
No. Perhaps that’s how you’ve imagined the term to be used, of course… but I have seen others use the term to refer to what 2A enthusiasts call “the militia”.Report
I have always understood it to mean Joe Bob with his CCW permit and glock. I’ve never bought it as a realistic answer to violent crime or mass shootings but have (ironically?) found it slightly more plausible since Uvalde than I did before.Report
Good guy with a gun story: https://apnews.com/article/de8a2aebc6d95b9131a08975a5d881f9Report
It’s only national news if it has a large body count. This guy prevented that from happening.
Ergo it’s not news.Report
Oh I’ve heard of the stories (including that one specifically) and have no problem in principle with certified, well-trained people able to carry. Maryland’s state police website has been taken out with traffic since the SCOTUS decision on NYC’s standard rendered the subjective portion of our own unconstitutional, and I’m not losing any sleep over it. I’m more just skeptical of it as a major policy solution as opposed to something that is serendipitous when it happens.
It’s worth noting that the guy who did this is a trained firearm instructor who exercised really great poise and judgment in how he responded. I’m not as sanguine about it with every tacticool Tommy I see at the range, less because I’m scared of them, more because I think a lot of them are kinda dumb and more likely to freak out the squares than do anything useful.Report
The guy in the story was exactly the good guy with a gun you’d want on the scene. Since unfettered access to guns seems to be the wave of the future I’m guessing the guy you see at the range is going to be more the example, and God help anyone in his line of fire.Report
“good guys with guns” [phrase originally used to describe] a concealed-carry permit holder who shoots a would-be attacker before they can accomplish real harmReport
Remember everyone, the problem is apparently that none of these school teachers were armed(?), Or that random armed civilians weren’t walking around the school just in case they needed to shoot shooters (?!?!?)
And whatever the problem is, it’s certainly not the fact that the shooter had a gun or even that the police stopped people who were armed from entering the building.
In reality, the fact the shooter had a gun points towards gun control.
And the fact that the police actively stopped anyone else from making the situatuon better points to the police being utter shit and unable to do basically the one thing that is the trump card for keeping the police around, “stopping armed crimes in progress”. (Because, reminder, police do not actually solve crimes that have already happened, and actually really bad in interacting with people, so that almost was the only thing left!)
Pretty sure I know which side the left is on both of those.
Seriously, I would actually like DensityDuck to explain exactly what he thinks should have happened at this school: Armed teachers? Armed civilians wandering the halls of the school at all times so there might have been one to stop the shooter already there? Or the police allowing armed civilians in?
Which of those things, oh mighty DensityDuck, are the liberals stopping?Report
“I would actually like DensityDuck to explain exactly what he thinks should have happened at this school: Armed teachers? ”
Yes?
You’re looking for something else here?
“you seriously think all teachers should always have guns all the time?”
If that’s what it takes, yes.
You seem to think that’s an absolutely insane how-are-you-even-a-person notion, but if the police are going to run away from gunfire then obviously self-help is all we’ve got left.
“well yeah but we could just MAKE GUNS ILLEGAL”
We could also enforce the already-existing laws that say “crazy people aren’t allowed to have guns”, laws that the kid’s father acted to circumvent, laws that the gun-store owner figured were satisfied with a paper trail.
Or (really, and) we accept that there are going to be armed crazy people trying to get into schools and kill the children, and we address that in some way. One of those ways is “not everybody at the school is incapable of projecting violent force beyond their immediate reach”. If you want to call that “teachers with guns”, well, those words are not wrong.Report
Hey, quick question: Have you asked _any_ teacher if they’d be comfortable carrying a gun? Literally any teacher?
Teachers interact with students, which range from ‘curious kids who will grab anything’ to ‘moronic teenagers who will do anything on a dare’.
A fourth-grade teacher will, in a normal workweek, end up _carrying_ at least one child. They will bend next to kids, sit next to them.
You want this to happen with a holstered gun.
Around kids not old enough to use the big-boy scissors yet.
Hey, while you’re asking teachers, ask a fourth-grade teacher if a kid has ever grabbed their hair painfully?
Cops don’t even have the situational awareness to stop people from taking their weapons, how the hell are _teachers_?
It’s not liberals who stopped teachers from having guns. Teachers _never_ had guns, because teachers are not lunatics and don’t want the responsibility of carrying guns near kids.
We actually have the other solution of not having gunfire because we don’t allow people to purchase guns at all.
Or we could NOT HAVE GUN STORE OWNERS who can sell them those guns. At all.Report
I assume most wouldn’t do it. Just like most of the people in that church weren’t armed. All it takes is a small minority who are willing to do so and the world changes.
You have the collective action problem. All it takes is a small minority to not go along with your plan and it fails.
Given that it’s so unpopular that you can’t even get it passed when Blue owns all three seats, I’m guessing we’re way pass “small minority”.Report
Polling shows that only about 18% of teachers are even hypothetically willing to carry guns at school, and in reality a lot less of them appear willing.
Because, you see, there’s actually a really funny story here: Texas ALREADY ALLOWS teachers to carry guns. The school files some paperwork, and the teacher complete a training program:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/07/texas-school-marshal-program/
It’s wildly unpopular. Like the article says, in 84 school districts have ever had school marshal in the nine years it has operated.
Now, maybe you’re thinking it’s school districts refusing, and teachers would do it if allowed by their district. No, only 341 teachers have _ever_ become marshals, and only 239 are currently.
That’s across 84 school districts, which I remind everyone generally have _at least_ three schools in them, often more. (I don’t know anything about Texas school districts, but I think we should assume they have, at minimum, an elementary, middle, and high school in each district.) So even the districts that want marshals literally can’t find enough of teachers (and other staff!) willing to do that to cover every school, managing to average 2.8 across school districts that even want armed teachers! Which is 8% of all Texas school districts.
—
School districts have also opted for a different program where they just sorta point at random adults and let them wear a gun on campus…which also is fairly unpopular.
And the problem there, of course, is that having a bunch of random-ass adults descend on campus during a school shooting is not only crazy and a good way to have them shoot each other, but as we have literally learned from this, they won’t be allowed in by the police!
Like, the entire justification here was that is teachers who are already on campus before the cops, and who presumably all know each other. Instead having some random deputized people show up later is gibberish for the problem we’re trying to solve.Report
It’s also worth reminding people that all this is dumb hypothetical stuff based on the fact the police wouldn’t let people in…and in reality all indications are that everyone was shot _immediately_ anyway.
A response wouldn’t have actually mattered much at all.
Maybe a few people could have gotten medical attention and lived, but in some universe where there were armed teachers one hall over, who responded perfectly and immediately killed the shooter once they became aware of it (And left their classroom undefended, I guess, because we’ve forgotten that teachers actually have students they are responsible for.), we’d be talking about 17 victims or whatever instead of 21.
Like, that’s the universe that DensityDuck thinks liberal stopped: Slightly less kids dying under near-perfect circumstances where the good guy with a gun shows up two minutes after a classroom of kids is shot and killed, instead of an hour.Report
We can’t get pot legalization passed either, and that’s polling at like 70% of the entire population, much less across Democrats.
Don’t assume that elected officials accurately reflect what the voters want.Report
“Have you asked _any_ teacher if they’d be comfortable carrying a gun?”
I’ll ask that right after you ask any teacher if they think the cops will come save them when some nutcase breaks into the school and starts shooting people.
“You want this to happen with a holstered gun.
Around kids not old enough to use the big-boy scissors yet.”
If your picture of weapon-handling involves guns literally falling out of holsters then it’s hardly surprising that you approach the conversation as you do.
“Or we could NOT HAVE GUN STORE OWNERS who can sell them those guns. ”
I forgot you were the dude who thinks that 100% confiscation of every firearm in the country is possible.Report
No, I’m the person who thinks that if corporations are no longer allowed to manufacture and sell guns to private owners, and people are not allowed to transfer of existing guns, and the government implement buyback program for guns and doesn’t return any seized weapons, etc…
…we will eventually have basically no guns in the hands of _new_ private owners.
The ones that do have them will not be willing to sell them illegally and risk getting caught, and will happily sit there with their gun collection in their gun safe. Which I don’t care about.
Meanwhile, the people who need them to shoot up a school, (or to start a career of crime which is the real issue we should actually concern ourselves with), will find it much harder to track guns down…it will take a few years before the illegal market dries up, but it will.
Ceasing the legal _manufacture_ and _sale_ of guns to civilians, just by itself, would result in massive reduction in guns in the hands of the public a decade later. There’s no possible way to argue against that.
The ‘You cannot seize 100% of guns’ is a nonsensical strawman. No, but we can trivially make guns much much much harder to get simply by not making more of them(1) and not letting people sell them, which, um, would pretty much stop all mass shooters and their use in street crime.
As Japan shows, we would still have the occasional person desperate enough to duct tape two pipes together…but no solution is perfect, and that’s hell of a lot better than what we have now.
1) Please note this is extremely over-simplified. I would be perfectly fine with extremely limited runs of civilian weapons for specific purposes, like supplying hunting clubs.Report
This is rural TX we’re talking about. I truly doubt that anyone there has ceased carrying their weapons.Report
I mean, it’s possible that a lot of the parents there didn’t have guns, because that was a very minority-heavy school district, and as we have learned, police feel free to shoot minorities who have guns, even legally.
I’m sure this is somehow the fault of liberals.
Incidentally, I have a comment stuck in moderation.Report
Ya’ know, f you.
In every other civilized country in the world, those kids would be alive. Because terrible tragedies like this happen once a decade or fewer.
Those kids are dead because of people like you care more about your supposed inherent right to own a gun than anything else. Every kid dead in a shooting that’s higher than the rest of the First World’s average is blood on your hands, period.Report
“In every other civilized country in the world, those kids would be alive. ”
You know, you’re right! In every other civilized country in the world, kids who threaten to kill their entire family get locked up; we don’t have a bunch of poor sadboys online telling us how it’s just a perfectly valid expression of valid childhood trauma related to global warming and wealth inequity and the Terrible Legacy Of Racism.
Oh wait, that’s not what you meant? Okay, well, in every other civilized country in the world, the cops don’t think “if I go hard on this dude I’ll have people camped out on my front lawn screaming that I’m a bigot, might as well hang back because they can’t get me for following the rules“.
Er, wait, you meant something else? I’m not sure how taking guns away would solve this problem. Crazy people killing schoolchildren is not a uniquely American situation.Report
Mandatory hospitalization of mentally ill people is a perfectly good idea, as are red flag laws which allow early intervention.
Of course, it is a wildly expensive solution requiring higher taxes and a large government health care bureaucracy.Report
The reason it’s “wildly expensive” is for every one shooter we have thousands (or maybe even millions) of mentally ill.
Worse, why do we think he was mentally ill?
The pattern is he’s a loser, pissed at the world, and wants fame (or to go out with a bang/success).Report
“Mr. Johnson, your son is drawing pictures of himself slaughtering his schoolmates and brags about having an assault rifle.
Is he receiving mental treatment?”
“No, he’s just an angry loser.”
“Oh, thank heavens. Never mind.”Report
Keep in mind how this played out at Virginia Tech, where the shooter really was mentally ill, and came to the attention of the authorities as dangerous + mentally ill.
10% or more of the nation is mentally ill.
MUCH worse, if you’re going to insist that victory conditions is every single one of these incidents be prevented, then there is no workable solution and we’d better get used to living with this.Report
Urm this “Mandatory hospitalization of mentally ill people is a perfectly good idea” is a terrible idea. It could be narrowed down about 99.9% to be useful. DV is a much much bigger concern and predictor then mental health. Not that pro 2A are doing anything much there but DV should be focus for prevention.Report
We need to ensure that DV victims have a 5-day waiting period before purchasing a handgun.Report
First , though, we need to limit how people with any sort of RO can get a weapon and how do we get weapons away from people with long term RO’s. My guess and experience is the DV victims would probably prefer their perps not be armed but since an arms race is a crappy solution.
And to be completely fair and open about it. Taking guns based on RO’s is actually a tricky idea with some serious issues.Report
What is “RO”?Report
Restraining order.
Sorry say it that at work all the time and didnt’ think about writing it out.Report
We are running at critically dangerous high levels of whataboutery here.Report
Government is the word for things we do together.Report
And yet it’s also the enemy we point at when things do t go the way we want.Report
Lets put some perspective on this.
Since 1970 we’ve had 1,924 school shootings, 637 people have died. That’s about 12 a year.
Every year, we’ve had about 3500-4000 people drown a year. That’s about 10 a day. 87% are children younger than 5.
So drowning is a problem about 300x larger than school shootings, even if we want to only talk about children.
What would it take to totally restructure society so the number of drownings was zero?
The concept that we’re not doing anything about drownings is silly. We are. However we don’t get all spun up about one incident and proclaim that society needs to be totally restructured to prevent it. Nor do we point to one incident and ask what policy would have stopped it. Nor do we proclaim that the other side doesn’t care about the dead people because they’re not willing to totally restructure society to prevent this.
We are doing a lot. No one is in favor of it. Lots of things have to go wrong for it to happen even once. It’s going to happen again.
https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/k-12-school-shooting-statistics-everyone-should-know/Report
The comparison to pools is an interesting one. In most areas, there are specific laws as regards to securing privately owned pools to avoid drownings… such as fence/gate requirements. And most home insurance companies charge more for homes with pools because of the increased risk/liability that comes with owning one. This also adds a financial cost that makes folks really consider if it is worth it to own a pool… they bear the costs alone.
So… we have rules and regulations for pool owners, barriers to entry that are specific to the risks of pool ownership itself, and ways of holding pool owners accountable.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had the same for guns?Report
So you think we don’t have “rules and regulations” for gun owners? We don’t have “barriers to entry”? We don’t have “accountability”?
Are you seriously trying to claim these things don’t exist?
Pointing a gun at someone, much less shooting them, is a serious crime.Report
What rules and regulations was the Uvalde shooter subject to?
What barriers to gun ownership did he have to clear?
Is anyone involved in his ownership of the gun facing accountability?
If I own a pool and meet all the fencing and safety requirements by law — which are enforced by inspectors who will fine me daily if I am not in compliance — I could still be sued if some teen hops the fence and drowns.Report
The usual. Background check showing he wasn’t a criminal (he wasn’t), maybe showing he didn’t have mental issues (he didn’t), and old enough to make sound choices (he was an adult).
Faict this was his first criminal action and he planned it for 8+ months, maybe longer.
I have seen no evidence he was mentally ill in the traditional sense.
Why should there be? Do you have any evidence, or even the hint of evidence, that anyone else knew about this and helped him? Did the person who sold him the gun know? Did he have any accomplices?
Take whatever you want to happen and apply it to pools. Or even (considering how easy it is to kill with them) cars.
Do we hold someone who sells someone else a pool “accountable” for them committing criminal actions with that? How about cars?Report
https://libertyhomeconcealment.com/blogs/articles/how-long-does-a-gun-background-check-take#wait-time-for-background-check-results
“However, if there is a NICS delay and it doesn’t respond within three days of the background check, the FFL can choose to complete the transaction unless prohibited by state law or hold the firearm.”
That last clause is kind of astounding.Report
If they’re not using computers yet, they should.Report
This is where federalism bites the whole system in the ass, because nothing is standardized with regards to arrest/indictment/conviction, so even the computer systems have a hard time talking to each other.
This is one of my criticisms of expanding background checks, it doesn’t do much if there’s no money or requirements to the systems to operate on some kind of standard.Report
Proof of liability insurance coverage would be a good start.Report
I’ve never been clear on what problem insurance is trying to solve. Even if you required it no carrier will insure criminal acts of an individual and there are pretty good public policy reasons I can think of for not allowing it even if one wanted to. Maybe there are some situations with negligence where it might come into play but that seems pretty far removed from Uvalde or violent crime involving guns. I’m open to being proven wrong here but I’m skeptical it is a real issue, or at least not anymore than it might for any other destitute tortfeasor.
And look maybe we should have it anyway as some nominal endorsement on your homeowners or renters insurance or something. I’m just saying there’s never going to be a situation where an insurance policy pays out victims or other people with standing related to policyholders murders or other gun crimes, including arising from stolen weapons.Report
It’s more a question of, can you get insurance for non-criminal liability.
Let the actuaries put a price on things.
In reality, it won’t prevent such events, because guns can be stolen (re: Sandy Hook) or bought black market (re: Columbine), but it may force younger shooters to avoid legal means.Report
Suicide and all things criminal are excluded. 60 seconds of research suggests we have 430 unintentional firearm fatalities in the United States per year.
That right there makes the problem one ninth as large as dying from pools/hot tubs… and one ninth is probably a stupid lowball we only have about 7.3 million hot tubs (and 10.4 home pools) and we have a heck of a lot more guns.
So less than a tenth, of the cost to insure a pool.
These killers do their thing to become famous. We have this bias towards thinking these killers are more common than they are because we hear about them. Instead the opposite is true. Drown in your pool and you won’t make national news because it’s common.Report
Why couldn’t we make a law that said it wasn’t excluded?
That gun ownership required insurance coverage of $50M towards criminal acts. Sure, the premium would be high AF. Maybe that’s a good thing.
We could even say that for every year that a criminal act with a gun doesn’t happen, the premium drops. Or, hell, the premium is returned to you! Take certain training and safety courses and you can further cut your premium.
Responsible gun owners would ultimately be unaffected. Victims of crimes would have a means to seek accountability. Criminals who plan to do wrong will face a huge barrier to entry OR will have to seek illegal means, which itself is a deterrent.Report
“Criminals who plan to do wrong will face a huge barrier to entry OR will have to seek illegal means, which itself is a deterrent.”
Really? You think criminal prosecution will DETER criminals from getting an illegal gun? Gun charges like possession of illegal gun, etc., are the FIRST charge that gets tossed away because a DA will go after bigger charges like drug possession, intent to distro, etc. All this is currently illegal now and people are still shooting up neighborhoods over drugs. You this this requirement would help? Come on.Report
If they try to buy a gun and the seller says, “Where is your proof of insurance?” and the guy doesn’t have any… he walks away without a gun.Report
Dude, criminals have no problem buying guns illegally: pistols, rifles, shotties, ARs, etc. They don’t care about the law.Report
Criminals are not legally able to buy guns at all right now. You’re just making it more illegal.
The Uvalde shooter can pay anywhere between close to nothing (my estimated cost of ins) to more than his life savings and not care.Report
Who would this law be aimed at, and what is it designed to do?
The uvalde shooter wouldn’t care about a high insurance payment on his credit card because he’s not going to pay it.
Which means this is designed to prevent gun ownership in general, which brings us back to your only real idea being full disarmament.
There are other problems. First, the ins industry has sometimes (accidently?) done things similar to what you suggest and we’ve found out that paying for heinous people to commit heinous crimes is a bad idea.
He knows the money is coming and he’s not planning on living. There’s a way to monetize this.
2nd, why should the rates be “high AF”? It’s a negative lottery. The odds are very low, the event is very rare, the exposure if you get it is very high, it has a very large number of people.
My back of the napkin suggests it’s a tiny problem from an insurance point of view. It’s possible to insure a pool and pools kill 100x as many people with something like 1/10 as much exposure.Report
I don’t remember any “firearm” exclusions on my insurance policies.
If he rented and had renters insurance then he was probably covered.
The problem with expecting this to help is deliberate misuse of guns is covered under criminal law.
Ergo it’s highly likely that any insurance premium would be very small because the problem it’s supposed to address is very small.Report
Depends on how it’s put together. Would insurance want to cover a male under 25 without some kind of lower risk person co-signing the policy?Report
The question is cover him for what?
Negligent discharge? Ok, maybe. Using it to commit mass murder? No way.Report
Mine are under a special endorsement, similar to my wife’s engagement ring. But that’s insuring the property, of course, not liability.Report
I carry a liability balloon policy, adds about $50 /yr.Report
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/blistering-report-finds-systemic-failures-authorities-wake-uvalde-scho-rcna38617
The “chief”, who in theory was in charge, was there early but viewed himself as a front line guy. To be fair he’s the “chief” of a micro department of 6 people. 376 responding cops all think someone else is organizing things when no one was.
Oh, and the door to the important classroom was unlocked so they could have just walked in. Presumably they all thought someone else had checked the door.Report
According to wiki… while he did tell someone he was going to go shoot up a school, it was a 15-year-old online acquaintance in Germany and he did this 14 minutes before he started shooting.
With the benefit of hindsight there are a lot of red flags, but that’s putting a microscope on his life and giving everyone all information. The good news is the major media sources are doing a much better job at not making him famous. Wiki does less of a good job with that (fair warning).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb_Elementary_School_shooting#Account_by_Pedro_ArredondoReport
This is a constant issue with police, that they have no clear chain of command. The paramilitary structure suggests that they should, but in practice it’s all vapor. Commanders have no legal authority, and individual officers have no obligation to respect whoever is in charge.Report
People are really really bad at switching between autonomous and actual chains of commands without very clearly defined and well-understood switchovers.
I’m reminded of something that often happens in disorganized theatre rehearsals:
The lighting guy calls a hold. Because it’s in a hold, the director starts working on some blocking, and two actors start working on a scene. And they all sorta finish, over time, but…the other people aren’t finished, as far as they can tell, so they’re not really saying they’re officially finished, and maybe there are some other things to do. I’ve see this take 30 minutes, just time burning away, of basically everyone is just poking around waiting for everyone else to finish, and because everyone else is doing things so they might as well be doing things too. And the hold just sorta sputters along until someone asks ‘Wait, who exactly are we hold for?’ ‘Aren’t we waiting on you?’ ‘No, I’m done, but, you were doing that thing…’ ‘No, I’m done too…this isn’t even important…’
It’s easy to to assume that the person nominally in charge of the rehearsal (Which can be the director or stage manager, depending) is somehow managing things, but they’re trying to deal with some problem too, they can’t be keeping track of what everyone else is doing. And no one thinks ‘I need to make sure everyone understands I’m done and we’re now waiting on that person’.
There has to be ‘I am the person in charge of thing we are doing right now, everyone should report to me what they need, and take orders from me’ person. (And that probably needs to be all that person is doing.)
This is easy to do in systems with continual chains of command, it is inherent. It’s a good deal harder to get people to _switchover_ in real time from a system where everyone was mostly able to do what they want. Everyone always thinks it’s fine until they realize they’ve been milling around for quite some time doing nothing because everyone was waiting on everyone else.Report
Yep.
Police should have a clear chain of command when multiple departments cooperate, but they almost never do.
So time and effort and often lives are wastedReport
In the news:
Indiana Greenwood Park Mall shooting: Police say ‘good Samaritan’ shot, killed shooter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMtZw79LyGYReport
This is the world Republicans want.Report