The narrative about how Uvalde police responded to Tuesday’s shooting keeps changing. It may be another week before we have the whole story. At the moment it appears they just plain royally screwed up.
In the meantime, the Right is coming up with more excuses for why gun control laws are still off the table. Media matters compiled a list of excuses offered on Fox News. These included a lack of booby traps around the schools (seriously), a “lack of discipline” in schools, the decay of “Judeo-Christian principles,” and blaming the children by claiming they didn’t call 911 for fear of being a “snitch.” We know at least one ten-year-old girl, Amerie Garza, was killed while trying to call 911, so that last one is especially cruel.
Regarding the decay of “Judeo-Christian principles,” Paul Waldman pointed out yesterday that the United States is far and away the most religious of the world’s wealthy countries, yet our homicide rate is 7.5 times higher than the homicide rate in the other high-income countries combined, largely attributable to a firearm homicide rate that is 24.9 times higher.
“Many of the least religious countries, on the other hand, are also the ones with the lowest rates of homicide,” Waldman wrote. “To take just one example, in the Netherlands, 20 percent of people say religion is very important to them, compared to 53 percent of Americans. Yet their homicide rate is one tenth of ours.”
See also Fox News’ Coverage of the Uvalde Shooting Was Sickening by Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone.
And see Erik Wemple, Fox News is your HQ for post-Uvalde thoughts and prayers. Wemple writes that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick got on Tucker Carlson’s show — “We’ve got to unify in prayer, we have to unify in faith. We have to unify in who are we?” Patrick said.
You might remember Dan Patrick as the guy who thought the elderly should agree to die of covid to save the economy. Last year Mr. Unify also accused Democrats of allowing illegal immigrants into the country to “take over our country without firing a shot.” Not exactly a beacon of peace and love.
There are many reports today about how Texas had already “hardened” schools to prevent mass shootings. This is from the Texas Tribune:
In January 2020, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received $69,000 from a one-time, $100 million state grant to enhance physical security in Texas public schools, according to a dataset detailing the Texas Education Agency grants. The funds were comparable to what similarly sized districts received.
Even with more funds and better enforcement of policies, experts have said there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented any violence. …
…“This concept of hardening, the more it has been done, it’s not shown the results,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University who studies school security practices and their effectiveness.
Khubchandani said the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.
After a review of 18 years of school security measures, Khubchandani and James Price from the University of Toledo did not find any evidence that such tactics or more armed teachers reduced gun violence in schools.
Texas law already allows teachers to be armed, btw.
Next: Choosing guns over children.
Coming soon to a town near you:
Ronald Reagan Super-Max Elementary School!
This should impress the world regarding our educational superiority/
It's a scientific fact that Ted Cruz causes mass shootings.
Uvalde resident Vice President 1933-1941 John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner quote update: "The Uvalde P.D. ain't worth a bucket of warm piss."
Wether it's spiritual decay or mental illness is up for debate but here is a prime example of the condition that currently plagues us as a nation.
Rittenhouse gets standing ovation at conservative conference – ABC News
It blows my mind how anybody could venerate Rittenhouse with a standing ovation and not see how sick his overarching actions and motivations were. A major distortion of values.
I was doing a little moral introspection and wondering how I would hold to the temptations that Sen. Ted Cruz is confronted with concerning gun control. I like to think I'd be morally upstanding but, if I had somebody waving $400,000.00 in easy money under my nose with the stipulation that all I had to do to earn it is get stupid and offer solutions designed to confuse and distract from the issue. I might succumb to that temptation myself. I hope I wouldn't but, that's a huge temptation considering the payoff is guaranteed. You can take an awful lot of vacation trips to Cancun for $400,000.00 dollars
Who would ever know my stupidity welled from a source of greed rather than occurring naturally from ignorance?
Here's a good one.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1531019935308304386
When it comes to offering meaningless thoughts and prayers to the victims of gun violence I kinda like Ted Cruz's style of delivery. He uses Christain venacular to lift them up in prayer thereby capturing for himself a barely perceptable measure of selfless benevolence. It would be nice if Cruz would have worked toward legislating a hedge of protection around the victims of gun violence before they became victims.
The one direction they've pointed with any basis is reality is towards a mental health crisis. The problem, aside from the fact that these same people cut and block funding for mental health services at every opportunity, is that if Democrats actually tried to pass funding to specifically address the issue of gun violence and the mentally ill, conservatives everywhere would howl that this was intended to target them, and they were going to be declared mentally ill by the Democrats who would confiscate their guns and throw them in mental institutions.
And who can blame them being worried, because most of them likely do belong in an institution.