It’s become painfully clear the past couple of days that the Texas Department of Public Safety is all hat and no cattle.
Or, in the alternative, all cowboy but no law enforcement.
Check this out…
Those boys with the 10-gallon hats, gray suits and red ties look pretty dang formidable don’t they?
Well, I think it was guys like those — at least in spirit, if not attire — who held their ground in Uvalde on Tuesday while an 18-year-old with an AR-15 was inside an elementary school killing 19 children and two teachers.
Not only wouldn’t “law enforcement” enter the building, they wouldn’t let a specially trained cadre of Border Patrol agents go in… agents who had arrived within half an hour of reports of an “active shooter” and were champing at the bit to be cut loose to go get the turd with the semi-automatic rifle. They had to cool their heels for about 45 minutes before Texas authorities gave them the green light.
For the first couple of days after the shooting, this was an all-out “cover-your-ass” effort by Texas law enforcement authorities.
It took two days for them to officially retract the bogus report that a school security guard had confronted the shooter when he entered the school. Remember that business about “confusion” over whether the guard and the shooter had exchanged gunfire?
Not only was there no exchange of gunfire, there was no guard!
The shooter entered through an unlocked door — a fact that is probably going to cost the school district, or its insurance company, millions of dollars.
Then there was NRA-lapdog Gov. Greg Abbott’s initial reaction. On Tuesday, several hours after the shooting, he took to the podium in Uvalde (this was after attending a fund-raiser in a county north of Houston, which showed what he’s really made of) and praised law enforcement’s response to the shooting…
“As horrible as what happened, it could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do. They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”
What they showed, in truth, was amazing cowardice.
On Friday, The Washington Post quoted Texas state Rep. Richard Raymon, a Democrat, as saying: “If I were the governor, when you have something this terrible affecting so many lives, I would want to make sure my information is rock solid. You can’t fumble this one.”
Abbott, who is running for re-election this year, didn’t just fumble the ball; he never made it to the huddle. He just went on stage and ad libbed.
It remains to be seen if Texas voters will hold Abbott responsible for the Department of Public Safety’s meltdown. My guess is they won’t because, as I’ve said, before — or at least intimated — Texas is probably the worst state in the country.
Many elected officials in Texas, like Abbott, are horrible. One of the good ones, Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro put it on Abbott when he told The Post that the erroneous statements from state leaders and law enforcement had “shaken Texans’ confidence in state government and in the governor.”
Castro also accused Abbott of having made state “more dangerous by making it easier for dangerous people to get a gun.”
Among other things, a year ago Abbott signed into law a bill allowing Texans to carry handguns without a license or training. Salvador Ramos may have directly benefited from that.
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In Wednesday’s post, I ran a couple of graphics that illustrate how disproportionate the homicide and mass-shooting rates are in the U.S., compared to other wealthy and developed countries.
Here’s another graphic that my friend Lonnie Shalton, a retired attorney with the Polsinelli firm, sent me yesterday. It shows how the number of mass shootings in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent decades.
All the arguments made by advocates of few or no restrictions on gun purchasing — arguments like it’s a mental-health problem or we need to increase prison terms for violent criminals — pale beside this and similar graphics.
Back in the 1980s, mass shootings looked, on this chart, like a rifle shot. Now they look like a shotgun blast…And the body count reflects the evolving horror.
And now, to wrap up this grim treatise, I want to quote New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, whose latest piece was published online today under the headline “America May Be Broken Beyond Repair.”
The last paragraph is the gut punch.
“The real nightmare is not that the repetition of nihilist terrorism brings American politics to an inflection point, but that it doesn’t. The nightmare is that we simply stumble on, helpless as things keep getting worse.”
Read it again, then get to bed (it’s after midnight) and sleep as tight as you can.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
“could have been worse”, good God. The only sure thing is that it will be worse because these nitwits encourage militarized madmen to get AR-15’s to solve their problems.
The readers’ comments to the Goldberg piece were also chilling. One reader was urging her college age children to move out of the USA and make lives elsewhere. Several spoke of moving to blue states and those states seceding.
Former Senator McCaskill recently recommended young woman attend college in states where abortions were legal. I know three young families who have moved to countries because of their strict gun laws. I moved to California from St. Louis six years ago in part because I wanted to live in a Blue State.
This NY Times article might be of interest to your readers. It provides a pretty good summary of the difficult decision-making behind whether to attack the shooter vs. holding back in situations where gunshots are (at least for the moment) no longer heard. Below is an excerpt:
“An entirely different approach may be called for if the gunfire ends, experts say. Then police are trained to use slower tactics appropriate for a barricaded gunman or hostage situation.
“The guidelines sound straightforward, but the scenarios often are not. The protocols have been examined time and again over the last two decades amid devastating massacres in cities around the country. Officers must make moment-by-moment judgment calls based on often incomplete information in shifting, highly volatile situations where every second is essential. And none of it, experts acknowledge, can serve as an antidote to the underlying problem of gunmen intent on causing violence inside grocery stores, churches and schools.”
It’s impossible to comprehend evil that sits right in front of us. We know the path to peace but are blocked by forces with a disproportionate power. That power is fueled by one sad fact – money. We’ve allowed $ to influence and overtake any semblance of right. Placed in the wrong hands by evil intentions we’re sitting on the outside looking in
It seems that “active shooter” training got put by the wayside as those Texas cowards trained to stop black people for a broken tail light.
Our two children, grandchildren and my sister live in Dallas. When people ask, why don’t we move to Dallas, I give them two reasons. Traffic and Texans.
Two good reasons, Randy, but I think there’s a third, too — you’re dedicated to KC. When you cover a city, its events, its sports, its culture, its politics for as long as we did, it’s very hard to pull up stakes.
Yes, it’s a great city for work, to raise a family and for retirement.