"Cowards in stetsons!"
It is too easy to pile on. It would be fun. I would join the crowd. It would be easy to write. Readers would like what I wrote.
But wait a moment.
I acknowledge that the Uvalde police response looks terrible. Police made a "wrong decision." The incident commander said, "If I thought it would help, I would apologize." He should apologize.
Some call them cowards. Some say they were derelict in duty. Some say they were selfish. Some say they didn't follow their own procedures.
All true enough.
However, in defense of the police officers, they were under command of an incident commander. Presumably he was getting information from dispatchers and he was the point of organization and command. He was calling the play, and he wasn't saying, "Go in." He was saying "Hold back." The subordinate offers were on a team and whatever their personal instincts and desires might be, their job was to follow the instructions of the team leader who presumably understood the big picture. That is doing one's duty, not dereliction of it.
There was a default instinct at work here by the police: Be careful here; don't get officers killed. In this situation, in hindsight, that looks wrong and its consequences were horrific. However, it is not an unwelcome instinct to see in a commander or boss. Yesterday's post described a "chickenshit son of a bitch" colonel who was selfishly unconcerned about my father freezing to death. We expect commanders to respect the subordinates who are entrusting themselves to the commanders' decisions. The incident commander knew the shooter was using a high powered semi-automatic rifle. He might have body armor. He might have huge amounts of ammunition. He might be shooting from cover. The situation was dangerous. Prudence and caution make sense.
Military-grade rifle power in the hands of civilians has its defenders. They observe, accurately, that gun deaths come primarily from suicide. Most of the rest are from gang-related handguns, not AR-15s. Mass shooting murders with high powered rifles are exceedingly rare. They ask why punish the many law-abiding people who own the 20 million AR-15s, just to try to stop something statistically inconsequential.
We regulate the possession and use of TNT and other explosives. There are rules for who can make it, possess it, how it is stored, transported, used, and then disposed of. There are licenses and permits. There are blanket agreements for inspections and seizures. Americans do not live in fear that angry, mentally ill or sociopathic people blow up cars, buildings, freeways. Explosives in mines and cannons have been used in warfare for nearly a thousand years. People entrusted to acquire explosives have licenses to protect and liability exposure to minimize. We treat TNT as a matter with huge consequences and risks to the public. There are occasional incidents of criminal misuse of explosives, but they are very rare.
The lesson in the hesitation of the Ulvalde police department is not that they were cowards. It is that they understood that a civilian with an AR-15 had the power to hold off a group of 19 armed and trained police officers. The government did not have a monopoly on the use of force. It was a standoff.
It is too late to outlaw AR-15s. The genie is out of the bottle. But at least they might be regulated the way we regulate explosives.
12 comments:
A few corrections:
An AR-15 is not a military-style rifle. An AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle, which mean that you get one shot for one trigger-pull. It shoots .223 caliber bullets, which are on the smaller side of bullets. It's less potent than a deer-hunting rifle. It's not like a machine gun, which is what the military uses. The military would never use an AR-15, because it's not potent enough. If you want to call an AR-15 "high-powered", then what specifically is considered "low-powered"?
Gun sales are already regulated. When you purchase a gun at a reputable dealer, like Sportsman's Warehouse, then the gun dealer runs an FBI background check on you, which takes about 45 minutes.
Many gun owners have concealed gun permits, which I also possess. They expire every 4 years, and the Sheriff runs an FBI background check on you when you get your permit renewed every 4 years. Lawful gun owners are constantly regulated. If you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will own guns.
The police dropped the ball in Texas. They are paid to be "heroes", but they played "cowards" instead. They should have all worn bullet-proof vests, and helmets, and stormed the school building. The cops were thinking of themselves instead of the children. It was a poor showing by the cops in-general (other than by the few Border Agents who did eventually kill the shooter).
Guns are intended to be used to fight government tyranny. If the tyrannical government has tanks, jets, bombers, missiles, machines guns, and bombs, then what do expect the citizenry to use to fight the tyrants? BB guns? Even a pistol isn't enough to fight a corrupt government, and now senile Joe Biden also wants to outlaw 9 mm pistols. It's clear that Democrats don't want the citizens to own ANY guns, so they'll be easy to control by a dictator. Citizens need to own weapons that scare the tyrants so that they won't enslave the population. You Democrats don't seem to understand the facts. We're not giving-up our guns so that you can enslave us in your one-world government, and treat us like the Nazis did to the Jews. If you want to push the issue, then expect anther civil war in which YOU'LL get annihilated. The Constitution (which Democrats hate) gives us the right to own guns, for a reason.
Curt Ankerberg
Medford, OR
In the ongoing saga of America’s psychotic obsession with guns, Uvalde is but the latest sad chapter. The only cowards in this sorry tale are those who repeatedly refuse to enact commonsense national gun regulations. Republicans consider social justice, or “wokeness,” more of a threat than the gun violence that kills so many people every day. And God forbid they should interfere with anybody’s right to inflict pain and suffering on others, which I’m sure is what the Founding Fathers intended.
I started to write a response earlier than deleted it. My words won't change anything. The only action that will change the situation is the removal of these weapons.
A comment published above is purported to be by "Curt Ankerberg." It may be by him, nor not. Please do not assume it is by the political activist known locally who is named Curt Ankerberg.
One small correction to Ankerberg's rant: There is nothing in the Constitution (which Republicans hate) saying that guns are intended to fight the government. His threat of another civil war shows how deranged some gun worshippers are - they're willing to die for their false god. That's OK, it would undoubtedly raise the nation's IQ.
I watched some of the video circulated on social media recording the interactions of police officers with parents of children in the school and neighbors from local businesses and homes. The difference in ethnic composition of parents/bystanders and police seems to favor Hispanic civilians confronting white officers. I am thankful there will be a DoJ investigation of this incident because I really hope I’m wrong but what I observed was officers treating parents with contempt, hostility and bragadaccio. One parent was told the reason officers weren’t inside the school dealing with an active shooter was because the parents were there needing restrains. None of this discomfort I have with the way they police were handling themselves in the community speaks to the orders they were under from the incident commander who has a load on his mind now given the outcomes of his momentous decisions. All of the emotional distress I feel from the handling and outcome of this incident speaks to the prevalence of young, often white males (not this time I acknowledge the shooter was a member of the ethnic community), predominantly the shooters, white males as officers, white males who try to tell me they are the good guys with guns who can make all the difference of women and children are in danger. Well, here we have the perfect paradigm: trained and sworn white males with guns who were not making whit of difference to the women and the children who were slaughtered and in fact were impeding any other efforts to come to the aid of the victims.
I agree that guns should be licensed and will add that they should be insured.
Curt's rant about the AR-15 as being less powerful forgets that this was the chosen weapon of most of these mass killers. That gun can take out so many lives so fast.
These guns were once outlawed Between 1994 and 2004, certain “semiautomatic assault weapons” were banned at the federal level. Wikipedia reports "A 2019 DiMaggio et al. study looked at mass shooting data for 1981 to 2017 and found that mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur during the 1994 to 2004 federal ban period, and that the ban was associated with a 0.1% reduction in total firearm homicide fatalities due to the reduction in mass-shootings'contribution to total homicides.[29]". While it reports that overall homicide statistics were not really affected, I think that most of those were from suicides, crimes, and domestic violence. At least a lot of children would still be alive.
If you believe that the old assault weapons been was effective, or that a new one would be effective, I encourage you to read this article.
Pay special attention to the picture of the two rifles, and the description of how the lower one was illegal under the old assault weapons ban, the upper one was legal under the ban, and they were both mechanically identical and equally capable of firing the same number of bullets at the same rate.
During the time of the assault weapons ban, gun manufacturers produced guns that were equally capable but cosmetically altered to fit within the constraints of the ban. Claims that the ban caused a reduction shootings fly in the face of facts like this.
For a comparison, the muzzle velocity for an AR-15 is approximately 3300 feet per second and delivers kinetic energy of 1300 foot pounds. A 9 mm handgun has a muzzle velocity of around 1200 feet per second with kinetic energy of 400 foot pounds. It doesn't take a mathematician to understand which one is on the more powerful side, and which is on the less. Dismissing AR-15 bullets as being on the "smaller side" is to choose to be willfully ignorant of what primarily influences the damage a bullet causes when it hits something, because rate of travel rather than relative size is the determining factor.
This is borne out by numerous studies as well as the first hand experience of emergency room surgeons who have experience with dealing with gunshot wounds. Perhaps there IS a reason why the commenter in question proudly states that he owns 3 of these things... if they weren't powerful he would probably want something else to fend off the government.
Another faulty idea here is that because the AR isn't fully automatic, unlike actual military rifles, that somehow also makes it less dangerous. It shoots as fast as you can squeeze the trigger and comes basic with 30 round clips. In my experience with using one I was able to empty the clip in approximately 8 seconds. To put it in non-scientific terms, that's ALOT of bullets in a short time. And then, it's very easy and fast to reload a new clip. Sure it's not AS powerful as a fully automatic machine gun, but it's plenty powerful enough inflict tremendous damage real quick. Powerful enough to be a deterrent that prevented 19 officers from bursting into a room in which there was 1 bad guy for over an hour.
The notion that a assault rifle is not powerful related to its caliber is incorrect. While the AR15 has a comparative small caliber, it’s power derives from muzzle velocity which is very high. Indeed the CBS TV show 60 minutes did a scientific analysis of the tissue damage done by a high velocity rifle round as fired by a AR15 and showed the horrific consequences of being struck by such a round. Its true that commercially available assault style rifles are not fully automatic, but in these mass shootings it would make little difference in the carnage.
We just celebrated the fallen. War heroes. We can’t seem to celebrate the children fallen by mounting their names on a wall where we can come and feel the engraved stone. All the dead children dead by bullets. Sing America, resurrect Kate Smith, hand over heart, jet fly over , wave the flag as tsps are played. Have a pop cycle. And a hot dog. Wipe your tears with the napkin . How heavy are children’s souls, how many can you hold in your hand?
I rarely turn to the Constitution for guidance on thinking. Once upon a time, it was Constitutional to own a Black human being as property, but (later) unConstitutional to drink Bud Light. Look elsewhere for guidance, such as logic. Obviously, guns are far too dangerous to go unregulated and to be so freely available to average citizens. Admittedly, guns are as intrenched as slavery once was, and it is likely it will take decades to remove guns from everyday life in America. But, like the Abolitionists before us, we should not shirk the duty to prevail. The government must have the power to help keep society safe, within reason; and guns are clearly unreasonably lethal.
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