Sadly, that makes sense. Having the victims confined at close range and unable to escape would explain how damaging the attack was.
There’s usually only one door in a classroom, at least where I’m at. In terms of safety that’s a death trap, or can be. How horrible to have to even consider those things.
My kids are the age of those kids. I don’t even want to think about what it must be like living with a constant death threat like that. That’s the kind of stories I mostly hear from refugees from war zones.
Right now I’m very glad to be on the other side of the pond, in a country where hardly anyone ever gets shot. I wish all Americans much wisdom and strength in going forward from this.
some more facts.
summer break was 2 days away.
all fatalities and injuries were in one classroom. all those who died on site have been identified and removed.
the shooter’s grandmother is in critical condition.
law enforcement engaged the suspect, but he was able to get inside the school and barricade inside a classroom.
law enforcement broke windows to evacuate children and staff, while others were forcing entry to the gunman.
2 police officers had injuries from exchanging gunfire with the suspect.
the gunman bought 2 ar-15 type rifles as a self 18th birthday present.
eva mireles was a 4th grade teacher, died protecting her students.
xavier lopez 10 was honoured earlier in the day. the picture his mother took with his certificate is the last one she has of her son.
amerie jo garza was 10 and looking forward to her new school next year.
uziya garcia 10 loved anything with wheels and video games.
Maybe someday just the right number of kids will have been killed and regulations can at least be debated. Is there a firearm equivalent to Mothers Against Drunk Driving?
Walter Cronkite was committed to objectivity, but reached a point where the failure of our Vietnam policy was an objective fact.
Emmet Till’s open casket put an end to the prevailing consensus that “lynching is ugly, but white women need to be protected.” Torture and mutilation to protect from whistling?
But we live in a post-objective historical era. Polarization has replaced consensus. And the ability to inflict violence as an illusion to (mostly young males) replace lack of control over their lives remains from our prehistory.
I believe that civilians have no business owning assault weapons.
The AR-15 and its ilk are designed and manufactured for one reason, and one reason only: to kill PEOPLE.
It is a weapon of war.
Ban these damned things, melt them all into one blob, and be rid of them.
~VOW
It made international news. Zelensky even tweeted his condolences. Think how f’ed up that is. The guy who’s literally spearheading his country against a war takes the time to send condolences for a random act of violence half a world away.
The Buffalo supermarket shooter put something out ½ hour before he committed his shooting; even if the people who got it read it right away & took it as serious & called the police, they’d still have to locate him before he shot.
In this case, he contacted some random girl on social media; whether he typoed a friend’s handle & got her or just randomly found her isn’t known. he said things like, “I have a secret” & “you’ll see soon”; not a lot for her to take action on.
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Governor Abbot is on TV right now. He made a statement, he was tearing up, and opened it up for questions. Congressman Beto O’Rourke spoke first, setting off a shouting match. He was escorted out.
I suppose YouTube has or soo will have it available.
Abbot’s main idea of course is “now is not the time for politics.”
There is presently a news conference in Uvalde headed by Governor Abbott. Abbott was interrupted by a very loud, persistent, and vulgar Beto O’Rourke.
~VOW
A new development is being built in my area that includes an elementary school. I think it was after the Parkland shooting that the design of the school was revised from an open plan with several buildings, like most of the other schools in town, to one with a single, controlled entrance, with the whole security thing in mind…
“The school was designed as a two-story single building after significant research was done with the District on trends in curriculum, collaboration and safety,”
“An access control system is being provided with integration to intrusion and video surveillance systems to streamline security and safety features of the facility,”
My best friend from high school has become a leading architect of schools of all sorts around the state and elsewhere. We have discussed this.
Modern schools have a single controlled entrance. This entrance has a vestibule. There is a person at a checkpoint in this area in all our local schools.
The school and its campus have surveillance cameras. Several of these are more deluxe model that can detect gunshots. (I do not recall if he told me that the doors lock if a shot is sensed.)
He discussed a renovation of a school we both know. He mentioned he had to consider the possibility of a sniper attack from a nearby highway.
All in all, we live in a sad, sad world.
The Uvalde shooter had some sort of engagement with law enforcement before getting into the school in the first place. It’s a case where there was enough time to find and confront him but it wasn’t enough to stop him.
Warwick Elementary, part of the public Fremont Unified School District. (Disclaimer: my wife used to be a teacher there.)
They require visitors to check in at the office, of course, but the campus has no fencing. I myself walked to my wife’s classroom many times.
I did a presentation to my teacher friend’s class in a city school. The kids go thru metal detectors every day; I don’t think I had to as an adult. However, the person there was an unarmed monitor. Someone with intent could breach that easily enough.
Our local HS has the office right by the entrance so a parent only needs to go thru the first door & up to the window to drop off their student’s lunch/book/homework. You have to be remotely buzzed thru the second door. The school is equipped with bank-like silent alarm panic buttons, but again, someone hell bent on it could hop thru that window & be in the office & then into the rest of the school before PD arrives.
AIUI, they were looking for him because of how he parked/crashed his truck & not because they were looking for an armed person. TX is open carry; depending upon how it’s holstered/slung & where his hands were isn’t necessarily going to set PDs neck hair standing even if they see someone carrying.
Did I miss anything? Where are the parents of the killer?
This Washington Post article (paywalled, I’m fairly sure) indicates that he had a volatile relationship with his mother, who is reported by several sources to have issues with drug use, and who declined to comment about her son; it makes no mention of his father, suggesting that the father may not have been strongly involved with his son’s life. The shooter moved out from his mother’s house several months ago, and moved in with his grandmother.
It’s a little hard to parse in the article, but it sounds like the grandmother also owns the house where her daughter (the shooter’s mother) is living, and is trying to evict her from the house, due to her drug abuse. So, overall, not a good home life situation at all.
The article also quotes a number of his friends and classmates, who said that he was regularly bullied and mocked in school, primarily due to his stutter.
This morning there are reports that the police dawdled for forty minutes before storming the place. I hope these reports are mistaken and will take them with a grain of salt for the next few hours.
Also, the killer seems to have crashed his car into a ditch outside a funeral home and shot two people on his way from the wreck to the school.
All in all, I will force myself to read The Economist and the Sunday’s paper’s account of all this. By then, the details ought to have sorted themselves out.
Interesting. Where did you see that reported?
This feels like very early reporting, and subject to change, but …