The Columbine High School shooting, in 1999, was a landmark mass shooting event that fundamentally changed not only people's perception about school shootings in the United States but, most importantly, the fundamental tactics used by law enforcement officials in such situations.
You see, at Columbine the police approached the situation as if it were a hostage situation, like they had been trained to: They surrounded the building, secured the perimeter, and prepared for and started what they expected to be a long negotiation process with the hostage takers.
Problem was, this wasn't a hostage situation. This was a couple of deranged students who went to the school with the explicit intent to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. They ended up killing 12 students and one teacher, and wounding 21 others. Much of this was possible because of the passivity of the police outside the school.
In face of this police tactics were changed drastically: Instead of considering a school shooting to be a "hostage situation" it is now considered an "active shooter situation", and the proper reaction from the police should be that of a rapid response: A small team of officers (usually four) in full body armor should breach the building as soon as possible, and advance quickly towards the sounds of gunfire (ignoring everything else) and take down the shooter or shooters as quickly as possible. The goal is to take down or incapacitate the active shooters as quickly as possible, to minimize casualties. Nothing else matters.
Optimally it would take something like five to ten minutes, at most, between the police arriving and them having taken down the shooters.
Apparently the police of Uvalde, Texas didn't get that memo. The sheer amount of incompetence, stupidity and cowardice exhibited by them is just mind-boggling and astonishing.
On May of 2022 a school shooting event happened at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
It took the police over 70 minutes after they arrived on the scene before they took down the shooter. That's right well over an hour.
The video footage that has been released about the activity of the police there is just astonishing to watch. The amount of incompetence and outright cowardice displayed in the footage is mind-boggling.
Instead of deploying a small team of body-armored officers to enter the building as soon as possible and find the active shooter as quickly as possible and take him down, instead over a dozen body-armored heavily-armed police officers entered the building... and proceeded to just hang out on the main hall of the school for over an hour, doing nothing to the shooter even though gunshots were being heard.
Some police officers are seen checking their cellphones. One of them uses a hand sanitizer that's on the wall of the hallway. On several occasions a group of them starts advancing towards a classroom and when gunshots are heard they quickly retreat. Most astonishingly, one of the police officers, who it turns out had a daughter in one of the classrooms, is being physically restrained by other officers and stopped from going there.
The event became even more infamous by the fact that a mother of two of the students at one point entered the school via another door and was able to guide an entire classroom of children out of the school, all by herself. Something that over a dozen heavily-armored heavily-armed police officers were completely incapable of doing because they were just twiddling their thumbs on the main hallway for over an hour, doing nothing.
Most egregiously, later the Uvalde police tried to cover up their incompetence. They tried to stop the video footage from being released, and they threatened the mother with arrest.
The Uvalde police officers are nothing but fucking cowards. When someone is shooting children, you go there and you take him down. So what if you are putting yourself at risk of getting shot yourself? That's what heroes do: They put their own lives on the line in order to protect and save those who can't protect themselves. And that's what the heavy body armor is for: To minimize the possibility of getting injured by a shot. You are wearing it for a reason.
When a small woman with zero training is more courageous and more effective at saving innocent children than you are, you should be so ashamed of yourself that you should resign and go voluntarily to castrate yourself because you have rescinded your right to call yourself a man. Fucking cowards.
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