Texas report on Uvalde school shooting

I read it so you don't have to

The most remarkable thing about the special “Interim Report 2022” on the Uvalde school shooting is how ordinary it is.  Filed by the Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary School Shooting, the report was produced at the direction of the Texas House of Representatives.  The flat, matter of fact language throughout the report could have been written about any school shooting in any state in the nation.  An early section that discusses “School Security & Facilities Overview” seems to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the problem when it states that there are 5,371,586 students in 1204 independent school systems in the state of Texas.  That’s a lot of kids, in a lot of schools.  They don’t come right out and admit it, but the state government of Texas seems to be saying that they had to issue the report because the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde ran out of luck.  What happened in Uvalde could have happened anywhere.   

“Uvalde CISD [Central Independent School District] constructed many of those older buildings during times when the potential threats to students were much different than those faced today,” the report notes.  That description could probably be applied to several thousand schools in the state, and to tens of thousands more around the country.  They criticize Robb Elementary for not having an adequate “culture” of security around the school.  The fence was too low.  Doors to the outside frequently didn’t close and lock completely.  Classroom doors didn’t lock properly and were not repaired in a timely fashion.

That’s probably true of most schools in America, all of it.  The state of Texas won’t come right out and say it, but it’s not the job of school teachers and administrators and custodians to defend against a heavily armed, determined attacker who has decided he is going to enter a school building and kill people.  That’s not their job any more than it’s the job of the managers and workers at a Walmart or a Tops Supermarket or a suburban shopping mall to defend against such an attacker.  The section of the report on the “failures” of the security system at Robb Elementary School could have described the way nearly every retail business in this country works on a daily basis.  Have you ever encountered a locked door on your local supermarket or McDonalds or TJ Maxx or Hobby Lobby?  They don’t lock their doors because they’re open for business. 

So was every school in this country before Jonesboro and Columbine. 

According to the report, there are “as many as 80,000 buildings in the State of Texas that house children at various times during the school year.”  And get this:  the special investigative committee of Texas states that “While no school could ever be built to prevent every conceivable threat, they can be built and operated in ways to better mitigate risk and impede potential threats from outside attackers.”

And then they go right into describing how well prepared the Uvalde school system’s police department was.  They have been through “active shooter” drills.  The chief of police had received training from something called the “ALERRT Center, which the FBI recognized as the ‘national standard in Active Shooter Response Training.’”  So the whole school shooting thing has gotten to the point where there is a special “center” where cops can go through special “Active Shooter Response Training.”  The Capital Letters, incidentally, are verbatim from the report, certainly because all this stuff is so official and approved and certified and excellent, you understand.

The ALERRT Center then recommends that as soon as a first responder establishes that there is an adequate number of police officers on the scene of an active shooting, he or she should “take out their Active Shooter Response Card, assume Initial Incident Command, and begin completing tasks listed on the card.”

They actually have an official “Active Shooter Response Card.”  Here it is:

“Successful teamwork” is necessary, according to the almighty ALLERT Center.  “Radio protocols” should be established.  An on and on and on, all this allegedly “expert” crap. 

But what good is all that training up against the incredibly bad person the report describes “the attacker” to have been.  Broken family.  Drug use by parents.  Did not complete school.  Bullied in the fourth grade in the same classroom in the same school he shot up.  Lonely and depressed.  Fired from several recent jobs.  Girlfriend broke up with him.  He “pretended a greater level of maturity than he had.” I mean, what chance did those ALLERT Center trained cops against such a person?

Hmmm, let’s just spitball here…that’s a description that could fit thousands of 18 year old males in the United States of America.

The report then goes into detail describing how easy it was for the killer to obtain not one but two AR-15 style rifles and that “1,740 rounds of 5.56mm 75-grain boat tail hollow point [were shipped] to his doorstep, at a cost of $1,761.50.”

“Prior to the shooting, the attacker had no criminal history and had never been arrested.”

The next approximately 40 pages are devoted to the pathetic police response to the shooting that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers, about which I have written previously.  Seventy-seven minutes of inaction.  A total of 376 police officers from 23 separate Texas law enforcement agencies responded during the incident. In an obvious attempt to let the cops off the hook, the report goes into some detail estimating that the killer shot his weapon more than 100 times in two and a half minutes before an officer was in the building and states that most of the children were probably killed during that time.  Forty more shots were fired after the officers were in the building, of course, and the report is critical of their inaction during that time and in the many minutes thereafter when the killer fired no more shots at dozens of officers in the building.

But how could they not be?  They publish stills from the surveillance cameras and excerpts from interviews with police chief Arredondo and transcriptions of radio calls to the Uvalde Police Department.  They provide a list of stuff Arredondo called for, like snipers and a master key and breaching tools.  They describe all the other stuff he did, like “making certain all other classrooms in the building were cleared of teachers and students.  In the context of this evacuation, Chief Arredondo commented that ‘people are going to ask why we’re taking so long,’ and, in an apparent reference to the ongoing evacuations, that they were trying to take care of ‘the rest of the lives first.’”

Oh, hell, why even describe and quote from the rest of the report?  It’s a master class in police cowardice, incompetence, and idiocy – all of it occurring after the report cited so much training and expertise by the “ALERRT Center,” whatever the hell that really is.  The report does not provide a list of all the police equipment, guns, vehicles, bullet-proof vests, high-tech “breaching” gear and all the other military-style stuff the police deployed during and after the attack, so it’s not possible to put a dollar value on it.  But when you consider all of the official “ALERRT Center” stuff, and the additional “active shooter” training that went on, and the bloody “Active Shooter Response Card” they even produced, it’s evident there are tens if not hundreds of millions of public tax dollars being spent all over the country on this stuff, and those dollars are going into someone’s pockets, and if you read this report, it’s absolutely evident that a lot of that money is being totally wasted.  The whole “active shooter” thing has turned into a sub rosa law enforcement profit center, and the proof of what it’s producing is right there in black and white on 81 pages of the Texas House of Representatives report on the Uvalde shooting.

The truth that the Texas House committee report dares not utter is that there is no security system or police response that would prevent a shooter from killing anyone in any public building in America chiefly because there are no laws preventing anyone from walking into a gun store that is open to the public and purchasing the kind of military-grade weapon of mass destruction that has been used by every killer in every recent shooting.

In that sense, the report itself is a total waste.  What’s the point of talking about “cultures of security” in schools when the American gun culture is wide open and completely legal and backed by one of our two major political parties and the state legislatures in nearly every state in the nation? 

An AR-15 style rifle was used by the Uvalde school shooter.  An AR-15 style rifle was used by the Buffalo supermarket shooter.  An AR-15 style rifle was used by the El Paso Walmart shooter.  An AR-15 style rifle was used by the Greenwood, Indiana shopping mall shooter just yesterday.  All those guns were purchased by the killers in entirely legal transactions at gun stores that happen every day all over this country. All those weapons fire exceedingly deadly ammunition at a high rate of speed.  It is legal to sell ammunition that is designed to be even more deadly than regular bullets, like the “hollow point” ammunition bought and used by the Uvalde killer. 

Hollow point bullets explode on impact with the human body and violently tear into flesh and organs and blood vessels and the nervous system causing death and utterly destructive wounding.  One of the teachers shot and wounded in Uvalde will never walk normally again because a single bullet tore up one of his legs. 

But they’re legal, all those deadly bullets and those deadly rifles.  It will be a waste of time and money to write more reports like this one after the next school shooting and the next and the one after that. 

Here’s the report they should have written in its entirety:  The state of Texas gives up.  We may say we care, but we don’t.  We would rather have our guns than our children.