Maybe. I expect they were looking into the windows without the use of people standing in front of them. That would be a hard target to miss.
Easily affordable if you quit buying school supplies, fire the teachers and stick all the kids in one large room.
With one armored door where only one person can go through at a time.
What could go wrong?
Unless they’re beaming the kids in and out of the school that door doesn’t do much for them when coming and going or at recess. But don’t tell anybody, it’s a secret.
I don’t know if this has already been posted, but this article has a link to Texas’ police training materials for an active shooter.
Here are some relevant quotes:
“ First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent. First responders must understand and accept the role of ‘Protector’ and be prepared to meet violence with controlled aggression.”
“ In many cases that immediate response means a single (solo) officer response until such times as other forces can arrive. The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.”
“As first responders, we must recognize that innocent life must be defended. A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”
In 2019, after another school shooting in Texas, the state handed out $100 million to local school districts to improve security. Of that, Uvalde received $69,000. I have no idea how they spent that but it’s less than $10,000 for each of the eight schools in the district. So I don’t expect it improved things very much. And apparently just two months ago, the school district police held active shooter training. Weirdly, though, the class was taught by three of the six officers in the school district police force.
It was already posted, and from what I’ve read here and elsewhere the basic facts seem to be agreed that they did initially enter without much delay following active shooter protocol, but then encountered the locked classroom door. And then it’s a question of what they decided to do after that. It seems the bad decision was to change at that point to “barricaded hostage taker” tactics rather than active shooter tactics.
If you say so. I bought cameras for my house at $20 each that are connected via WIFI. No wiring needed. No monitoring cost required. I can monitor my house remotely from my phone.
It would surprise the fuck out of me if a large part of the money wasn’t spent on overtime for the officers training and for the officers instructing during active shooter training. Judge for yourself if the money was well spent.
In this emergency a phone on a selfie pole could have given a view inside the room through a window or a hole punched in the wall.
My company sent out training modules that employees had to take regarding building security. Don’t leave doors propped open. Don’t let strangers in the building.
This. So much this. It’s unfathomable that the ONLY key available was the one supplied to them when the janitor finally arrived on the scene. The SRO didn’t have a key? The principal didn’t have a key? There wasn’t a spare key available in the office?
This, among a plethora of other factors, simply does not compute.
Off-Topic
Well, lessee, Congress just nearly unanimously approved 40BN to help Ukrainians defend themselves from people with guns so let’s just set that as a benchmark. There are just under 100K public schools in the US so 40BN means $40,000 per school, which ought to afford quite a few cameras. Heck, if JUST ONCE Congress would refrain from tacking on another 50 or so billion dollars the Pentagon didn’t ask for this year we could double that. As the old saying goes, there are skill sets and there are will sets. I know we have the skills. Where that places us I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.
Modnote: Not on Topic, absolutely heading for a hijack and very close to politics, though not gun politics at least. I’ll be collapsing the post.
This topic was automatically opened after 5 minutes.
could you be more specific. Could you codify the parameters of the discussion?
I work in land development, including lots of school-related projects. For all these projects, the plans and specifications include “Knox boxes” (link) which provide access to keys for emergency services. The boxes are installed on buildings next to entrance/egress doors. The fire/police departments have keys to the boxes, and the boxes have keys to the doors. I don’t know if these sorts of boxes are the norm in Texas but I’ve yet to work on a school-related project here that didn’t have them. Seems like a fairly straightforward solution to the problem of providing access to schools for emergency services.
I was going to post this but not sure if it’s on-topic.
Very valid, and raised upthread in post #67.