Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Texas elementary school shooting
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May 24, 2022 at 9:58 pm #139042znModeratorShooting at Texas elementary schoolCNN
Deadly shooting at Texas elementary school: Live updates–https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/texas-elementary-school-shooting-05-24-22/index.html.AP News
Gunman kills at least 18 children at Texas elementary school: https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-b4e4648ed0ae454897d540e787d092b2May 24, 2022 at 10:03 pm #139043joemadParticipantSteve Kerr on today's tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas. pic.twitter.com/lsJ8RzPcmC
— Golden State Warriors (@warriors) May 24, 2022
May 24, 2022 at 10:11 pm #139044znModeratorfrom https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61573377
Guns overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death for US children and teenagers in 2020, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last month.
On Monday, an FBI report found that “active shooter” rampage attacks have doubled since the coronavirus began in 2020.
May 24, 2022 at 10:18 pm #139045znModeratorOver 20 killed in Texas elementary school shooting
May 24, 2022
SUMMARY
A gunman killed at least 20, including 18 students and two teachers, at an elementary school in south Texas Tuesday. Gov. Abbott says the 18-year-old shooter was killed by police. The mass shooting took place in the city of Uvalde about 85 miles west of San Antonio. Tony Plohetski, an investigative reporter for the Austin American-Statesman who is covering the shooting, joins William Brangham with more. (Note: the full toll of the shooting was not yet known at the time this piece was broadcast).
…
May 24, 2022 at 10:36 pm #139046JackPMillerParticipantYou have people in Congress, or running for Congress, ranting & raving, in commercials, that say, we will protect your 2nd Amendment, while not willing to pass any responsible gun reform. This is what happens, with the NRA, B.S., that they throw out. Nobody should be killed, or murdered like this, especially children. This makes me pissed & disgusted.
May 24, 2022 at 11:19 pm #139047ZooeyModeratorMay 25, 2022 at 7:28 pm #139051wvParticipantI tell ya, some of these memes, theze days, are so god-dam-good
they wanna make me cry/laugh on a deep level. Such good work out there on the internets.
…btw, I have reached the point where i no longer even check in on the mass shootings. They are so common now, I just nod, and go on with my day.
I’m not saying my reaction is good (or bad), just noting it — Another shooting. Ok. Its a late-stage-capitalist hellscape. Of course there are shootings. And the response will be – the people will buy more guns, the gun manufacturers will make more money, the ‘security companies’ will make more money, the rich will build more gates and separate themselves even more, and the government will spend more on capitalist-police.
And so it goes.
w
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May 25, 2022 at 8:17 pm #139052TSRFParticipantThis is so fucking raw for me and mine. We’re coming up on 10 years in December for the Sandy Hook slaughter. I can’t even look at people who have NRA stickers on their car. I’m sick, I’m hurt, and I am so sad for all the families.
What is wrong with us?!!
May 25, 2022 at 9:06 pm #139053Billy_TParticipantSick to death of hearing this mantra: Guns don’t kill. People do. That’s like saying planes don’t fly, pilots do.
It’s the gun, stupid. Take away those AR-15s, and a lot of kids would still be alive today, and after each school, church, synagogue slaughter, etc. It’s the gun of choice for mass shooters, and no one needs them. No way to argue morally, ethically, or accurately, that anyone‘s supposed “right” to unlimited consumer choice outweighs the rights of those kids to live.
Do what Australia did. Ban them. Massive national buyback. Add licensing and registration for all weapons purchases, plus universal background checks. Limit “legal” guns to internal chambers only, six bullets max. If a gun has removable containers for bullets of any kind, it’s shouldn’t be legal. Hand-loading only. Ban all those external containers too.
Remove the ban on CDC studying gun violence too. Staff it, fund it, make sure it is never under the sway of corporate America.
I think the above would save tens of thousands of lives a year.
May 26, 2022 at 1:06 am #139056znModeratorPlease watch this. pic.twitter.com/eCgezYa8nN
— Jim Weber (@JimMWeber) May 26, 2022
May 26, 2022 at 1:13 am #139057znModeratorOnlookers urged police to charge into the Texas grade school where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, a witness says. The rampage lasted upwards of 40 minutes, ending when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team. https://t.co/Q11bo5eR6j
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 26, 2022
May 26, 2022 at 7:58 am #139058Billy_TParticipantAmerica is a very sick place.
Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
May 26, 2022 at 8:03 am #139059JackPMillerParticipantMay 26, 2022 at 1:18 pm #139060znModeratorChrist almighty. What were the cops doing pic.twitter.com/4JQKF5QlU1
— Jordan (@SLCLunk) May 25, 2022
May 26, 2022 at 1:49 pm #139071znModeratorCops stood outside the school while the killer rampaged inside.
Onlookers yelled at them to go in. They didn’t. One parent urged bystanders:
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to.” @AP story: https://t.co/l2CqPCzmAf
— Andy Specht (@AndySpecht) May 26, 2022
May 26, 2022 at 1:53 pm #139072znModerator– When the police did enter the classroom, they failed to neutralize the shooter first, and as a result another child died due to their incompetence
– Initially lied about the timeline
– Police is 40% of Uvalde's budget https://t.co/V2U2XWpQBX pic.twitter.com/zL7KufYCRX
— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) May 26, 2022
May 26, 2022 at 2:16 pm #139074znModeratorClose.
It was more like an hour. With witnesses and parents begging them to go in.
But don’t worry, spokesman said that they had the gunman “contained in a classroom” while cops organized a stack.
They don’t mention the classroom was filled with a class. pic.twitter.com/HPBjFeMzQh
— American Heathen (@Spicy_Heathen) May 26, 2022
May 27, 2022 at 1:43 pm #139081joemadParticipantURL = Letters from an American | Heather Cox Richardson | Substack
Heather Cox Richardson
May 27
One of the key things that drove the rise of the current Republican Party was the celebration of a certain model of an ideal man, patterned on the image of the American cowboy. Republicans claimed to be defending individual men who could protect their families if only the federal government would stop interfering with them. Beginning in the 1950s, those opposed to government regulation and civil rights decisions pushed the imagery of the cowboy, who ran cattle on the Great Plains from 1866 to about 1886 and who, in legend, was a white man who worked hard, fought hard against Indigenous Americans, and wanted only for the government to leave him alone.
That image was not true to the real cowboys, at least a third of whom were Black or men of color, or to the reality of government intervention in the Great Plains, which was more extensive there than in any other region of the country. It was a reaction to federal laws after the Civil War defending Black rights in the post–Civil War South, laws white racists said were federal overreach that could only lead to what they insisted was “socialism.”
In the 1950s, the idea of an individual hardworking man taking care of his family and beholden to no one was an attractive image to those who disliked government protection of civil rights, and politicians who wanted to dissolve business regulation pulled them into the Republican Party by playing to the mythology of movie heroes like John Wayne. Part of that mythology, of course, was the idea that men with guns could defend their families, religion, and freedom against a government trying to crush them. By the 1980s, the National Rifle Association had abandoned its traditional stance promoting gun safety and was defending “gun rights” and the Republican Party; in the 1990s, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh fed the militia movement with inflammatory warnings that the government was coming for a man’s guns, destroying his ability to protect his family.
That cowboy image has stoked an obsession with guns and with military hardware and war training in police departments. It feeds a conviction that true men dominate situations, both at home and abroad, with violence. That dominance, in turn, is supposed to protect society’s vulnerable women and children.
In 2008, in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the Supreme Court said that individuals have a right to own firearms outside of membership in a militia or for traditional purposes such as hunting or self-defense, and dramatically limited federal regulation of them. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority decision, was a leading “originalist” on the court, eager to erase the decisions of the post-WWII courts that upheld business regulation and civil rights.
In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. Zusha Elinson, who is writing a history of the bestselling AR-15 military style weapon used in many mass shootings, notes that there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.
For years now, Republicans have stood firmly against measures to guard Americans against gun violence, even as a majority of Americans support commonsense measures like background checks. Notably, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when a gunman murdered 20 six- and seven-year-old students and 6 staff members, Republicans in the Senate filibustered a bipartisan bill sponsored by Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) that would have expanded background checks, killing it despite the 55 votes in favor of it.
Since Sandy Hook, the nation has suffered more than 3500 mass shootings, and Republicans have excused them by claiming they didn’t actually happen, or by insisting we need more guns so there will be “a good guy with a gun” to take out a shooter, or that we need to “harden targets,” or that we need more police in the schools (which has simply led to more student arrests), or as Senator Ted Cruz said today, to limit the number of doors in schools, or, as a guest on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show said, to put “mantraps” and trip wires in the schools.
The initial story of what happened on Tuesday in Uvalde fit the Republican myth. Police spokespeople told reporters that a school district police officer confronted the shooter outside the building before he barricaded himself in a classroom, killing 19 and wounding 22 others in his rampage.
But as more details are emerging today, they are undermining the myth itself.
Robb Elementary School, where the murders took place, had already been “hardened” with the town investing more than $650,000 in security enhancements, but the shooter apparently entered through an unlocked door. The Uvalde police department consumes 40% of the town’s budget and has its own Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit. And yet, the stories that are emerging from Uvalde suggest that the shooter fired shots outside the school for 12 minutes before entering it and that he was not, in fact, confronted outside. Police officers arrived at the same time he entered the school, but they did not go in until after he had been in the building for four minutes. Seven officers then entered, but the lone gunman apparently drove them out with gunfire, and they stayed outside, holding back frantic parents, until Border Patrol tactical officers arrived a full hour later.
Parents tried to get the police to go in but instead found themselves under attack for interfering with an investigation. One man was thrown to the ground and pepper sprayed. U.S. Marshals arrested and handcuffed Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children were in the school and who had had time to drive 40 miles to get to them, for interfering as she demanded they do something. Gomez got local officers she knew to talk the Marshals into releasing her. Then she jumped the school fence, ran in, grabbed her two kids, and ran out.
A Texas Department of Safety official told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tonight that the law enforcement officers at the school were reluctant to engage the gunman because “they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.”
There are still many, many questions about what happened in Uvalde, but it seems clear that the heroes protecting the children were not the guys with guns, but the moms and the dads and the two female teachers who died trying to protect their students: Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia. News reports today say that Garcia’s husband, Joseph, died this morning of a heart attack, leaving four children.
Last week, in the aftermath of the deadly attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly passed a a domestic terrorism bill. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tried to get the Senate to take it up today. It would have sparked a debate on gun safety. Republicans blocked it. In the aftermath of Tuesday’s massacre, only five Republicans have said they are willing to consider background checks for gun purchases. That is not enough to break a filibuster.
Last night, Texas candidate for governor Beto O’Rourke confronted Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference. Last year, Abbott signed at least seven new laws to make it easier to obtain guns, and after the Uvalde murders, he said tougher gun laws are not “a real solution.” O’Rourke offered a different vision for defending our children than stocking up on guns. “The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said, standing in front of a dais at which Abbott sat. “You said this is not predictable…. This is totally predictable…. This is on you, until you choose to do something different…. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed, just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.”
Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin shouted profanities at O’Rourke; Texas Republican lieutenant governorDan Patrick told the former congressman, “You’re out of line and an embarrassment”; and Senator Ted Cruz told him, “Sit down.”
But this evening the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays announced they would use their social media channels not to cover tonight’s game but to share facts about gun violence. “The devastating events that have taken place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable.”
May 27, 2022 at 11:54 pm #139085znModeratorMay 28, 2022 at 9:54 am #139089Billy_TParticipantIt boggles the mind how a minority of Americans holds us hostage. Just 30% own guns, and a sizable percentage of that minority favors strict gun safety measures. It’s just a minority within a minority that sets the gun agenda, and Americans keep dying as a result.
It’s the guns, stupid. And it’s insane to try to suggest that guns aren’t THE main cause of gun violence. That it’s everything and anything but guns. That’s like saying the plane you flew on from New York to London last year was irrelevant. People fly, not planes.
This is not a sane society.
May 28, 2022 at 12:01 pm #139090ZooeyModeratorMay 28, 2022 at 9:14 pm #139095znModeratorPaul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.”
He forgot to add black ivy leaguer and convicted pedophile. From France.
May 28, 2022 at 9:48 pm #139097znModerator78 Minutes Long
Here's a new timeline where you can scroll through every single minute from the moment the gunman entered Robb Elementary until officers enter the classroom.
78 minutes. An excruciatingly long time.https://t.co/CO4p7RF4dE pic.twitter.com/Dxvh0k3xtg
— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) May 29, 2022
May 29, 2022 at 8:09 am #139100canadaramParticipantHere’s a video about buying a gun in Canada. This is from 2016, so some of our regulations have likely changed, I’m certainly no expert on gun ownership in Canada. There is often talk of more regulations being needed or regulations needing to be altered or relaxed depending on who is in charge federally. Anyway, AR-15s are not banned up here and it’s not like we never have mass shootings up here, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the issue that it is down there. I find it frustrating to hear American conservatives say that regulating gun ownership won’t make a difference and it’s about mental health, but access to mental health services seem to be extremely limited in many places in America. Anyway, I am no expert on any of this. It just hurts to keep seeing it happen and then listen to how conservatives respond.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by canadaram.
May 29, 2022 at 1:55 pm #139103canadaramParticipantJust saw this from 2020. Clearly I don’t follow things very well up here
Trudeau announces ban on 1,500 types of 'assault-style' firearms — effective immediately | CBC News https://t.co/gQF6TMFTOt
— Bruce Steiner (@bruce_steiner) May 28, 2022
- This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by canadaram.
June 1, 2022 at 9:25 am #139129znModeratorAaron Katersky@AaronKatersky
The Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde ISD police force are no longer cooperating with the @TxDPS investigation into the massacre at Robb Elementary and the state’s review of police response, multiple law enforcement sources told @ABC w/ @JoshMargolinThe decision to stop cooperating occurred soon after Col. Steven McCraw held a news conference Friday during which he said the delayed police entry into the classroom was “the wrong decision” and contrary to protocol
“Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde CISD Police have been cooperating with investigators. The chief of the Uvalde CISD Police provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago”
XLProfessor@XLProfessor
…following Conservative practice, they claim that any investigation into their actions is partisan and illegitimate and lacks appropriate purposethey say they want to look forward and not backward…
June 2, 2022 at 10:08 am #139137ZooeyModeratorYou’re not safe at school.
Not safe at a hospital. Not safe in a grocery store. Not safe in a mall.But there are no guns allowed at the NRA meetings. Remember that. https://t.co/TZZi2tQ76H
— jinx, the nowhere queen (@PunishedJinx) June 2, 2022
June 4, 2022 at 3:39 am #139149znModeratorThe mom that ran in and saved her kids after being handcuffed in Uvalde finally spoke out. pic.twitter.com/wHNouRkCY7
— barbarism critic (luxury gay space communist arc) (@SxarletRed) June 3, 2022
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