A guard is carrying out the mission of their job, not exercising fear. Anyone entering a school is subject to challenge. An openly armed person entering a school presents a threat. Seems reasonable to shoot.
More, and now slightly different but important, details: per NYT (who got it from “a preliminary timeline compiled by Texas law enforcement officials and described by a person familiar with the investigation”)…again, I’d imagine this is only part of the picture.
The first report of a gunman approaching the school came around 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday. By the time the 18-year-old high school dropout had been killed just after 1 p.m., he had shot dead 19 students and two teachers.
Questions remained about how the police and at least one armed security guard at the school had handled the gunman.
Previous reports had said that the gunman had exchanged fire with an officer outside the school, but that did not happen, according to a preliminary timeline compiled by Texas law enforcement officials and described by a person familiar with the investigation.
That police officer was not stationed at the school, but was instead in a car nearby and rushed to the scene after the first 911 calls came in.
As the officer arrived at the school, the gunman was already approaching, began firing at the school and entered, according to the timeline. Within minutes, other law enforcement officers had arrived at the school, according to the timeline. Two members of the Uvalde Police Department entered the school.
The gunman, at that point, had gone inside a pair of adjoining classrooms and was shooting, according to the timeline. The two officers attempted to enter the classroom and were shot. At that point, they fell back as the shooting continued inside the classroom, according to the timeline.
Most if not all of the victims were believed to have been shot within the first minutes that the gunman arrived at the school, according to the timeline.
Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter was killed in the massacre, said that officials have been misrepresenting the response of law enforcement officials. “They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,” said Mr. Cazares, 43, who was outside the school during the attack and heard gunshots.
The gunman continued shooting through the wall and door at law enforcement who were arriving outside the classroom. It was during those minutes, law enforcement officials believe, that the gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, shot most if not all of the children inside adjoining classrooms. There was sporadic gunfire from the suspect until a tactical team arrived and killed him around 1 p.m., according the timeline.
State Police said they have so far found no apparent motive or any warning signs — a history of mental illness or a criminal record — that would have predicted that the gunman would commit such atrocities. In the week before the shooting, just days after turning 18, he purchased two AR-style rifles and up to 375 rounds of ammunition, according to officials.
No, but I’m not sure that was my position then, either. As it stands, schools are gun-free zones, and it’s pretty clear anyone entering a school with a gun who isn’t the police officer assigned to that school is an obvious threat. But the obviousness of the threat didn’t stop the kid in Uvalde either. Apparently he ran into a security guard and then shot two cops before he started shooting kids or teachers. (Or maybe not, after reading CoolHandCox’s article above, I guess the details are still being sorted out.)
But also, we once had a world where schools weren’t gun free zones, and could again if we wanted. It seems obvious to me that it would be quite different seeing the principal who works there and carries everyday walking in to work with a gun on his hip, than if a random teenager in body armor with a few rifles on his back walked in in the middle of the day.
For that matter, I’ve known kids who were expelled for having a hunting rifle in their car on school property, and that wasn’t hurting anybody. In fact, the Pearl High School shooting was stopped by the principal going out to his car, retrieving his pistol, and holding the assailant at gunpoint until police arrived. So expelling or jailing someone for simply having a gun in a locked car in the school parking lot (and not holding it or carrying it at all) seems like zero-tolerance overkill to me, and counterproductive as well.
So while I would not say “mind your own business” if you see an obvious gunman enter a school, I can imagine many circumstances where strict, zero-tolerance policies on guns hurt innocent people, make kids less safe, and doesn’t decrease the threat of school massacres at all.
I find it interesting that you are unable to see that the focus should be on guns.
Thanks - Mr. Casares still has questions
Well, yes, because the guilty will be easily identified by the number of dead children.
Okay but how is that different from what happened Monday? The school was a gun free zone, he was challenged by police, and he just shot them and starting killing kids.
Did I miss the part of the story where the cops were like “guns are legal, he’s no threat” and just let him walk into the school and start killing people before they thought to do anything about it? I mean, I know there were complaints that police were just standing around while the killing happened, but I’m not sure how your “you can shoot anyone with a visible gun” rule would change that. They already had plenty of legal justification to engage, and they just didn’t.
We really don’t know yet.
From an interview with a teacher in another classroom, it seems that these rooms do have windows, so they could have busted out a window instead of waiting for a key. 
The last 20-odd posts merely make plain the cognitive dissonance between “open carry” and “good guy with a gun”. People who think they have the right to lug around their weapons willy-nilly anywhere they damn well please run the risk – and rightly so – of getting shot,
The right time to shoot someone is when they are an imminent threat to life or limb. I imagine there are times when simply having a gun is enough to justify deadly force in response, but certainly not every time.
Again, the police. Is everyone supposed to just know who is a police officer or not? I know they usually wear uniforms, but certainly not always. And it’s easy enough to find a uniform if you want to carry a while without being shot, like on the way to the massacre you’ve planned, and which you may or may not care if you survive. We could shoot undercover cops who have a weapon? Could we shoot cops in uniform, if we believe they aren’t really cops but just playing dress-up for nefarious reasons?
Or are you aiming for a cops-don’t-carry situation like in Britain? I’m actually a proponent of that idea in a perfect world, but in a country with half a billion guns already I don’t see it being workable at all.
Do you really think we should make it okay to just shoot random people as long as there is a gun on their person? What if there are no witnesses? Can you just commit murder, plant a gun on the body, and say it was justified? Or could we play the same game cops do now? Shoot anyone with a vape or cell phone in their hand and say you thought it was a gun? Get off scott free?
There’s also the pesky Second Amendment. We can argue over whether all sorts of restrictions are an infringement or not, but I think it’s clear to everyone that an “open season on anyone carrying a gun” law would be an indisputable infringement on the right to carry a weapon. If you’re arguing about what we should do after the Second Amendment is repealed, I guess that’s a different story.
Absolutely Mr. Cazares does. The NYT is reporting the police version of events.
With that said, the NYT latest version by police would account and allow an outsider hearing shooting for an extended period of time (but directed at police/door/wall inside the school) not knowing the massacre had already occurred. You’d still want to get inside the room to help kids who had been shot asap, which did not happen.
I really don’t know. I’m trying to get some credible info on here without offering much opinion. But what a shit show. I cannot fathom the frustration of a parent hearing gunshots and seeing police outside the school, and not allowing a parent to go inside to help their child (one asked for a police vest so he could go inside). I intellectually get that a free for all probably isn’t the answer, but man…seeing and recalling perceived inaction as you hear gunshots and learning your daughter was killed would drive me into insanity.
Why are having armed guards a bad idea?
When I went to public school back in the early 1980’s there was a school policeman, who was there as full time staff. I don’t know if he carried a weapon or not. The cop I remember from high school was an older buffoon anyway who probably couldn’t do much against an AR-15 or whatever gun it was.
If guns are legal in America then everyone should have a gun. I don’t like it but this is where this is heading.
Armed guards are a bad idea because there are like 130 thousand schools in America. And even if you could find the billions of dollars necessary to hire guards, they will probably be paid far less than normal police, be less engaged because they’re around shitty teenagers, and more bored because their job is to stand around for eight hours a day.
Normal cops kill 1700 people a year. The school guard force would be like 1/4 the size of the total police in America. So if they were as violent as normal cops they’d be expected to kill 400ish people a year. Even if they are far less violent than normal police (while making less money, having a less engaging job, and having to deal with utter shithead teenagers all day) they’d still probably kill more kids than they’d save.
ETA: I get that it mostly would be fat old men waddling around the halls as retirement jobs, but that also means they wouldn’t be particularly effective against shooters.
Did I say that it was a bad idea? At this point, it might be the best solution, because it’s obvious nothing else we’ve has done a damn thing to stop school shootings. And it’s also obvious that there is no political will to institute new policy that might change things.
Perhaps we should put a tax on guns and ammo to pay for these armed guards. I doubt that our school systems can afford it.
I’m thinking back to the various principals that I had in grade school and high school. Sorry, but there’s not one of those guys that I’d trust with a loaded firearm.
It’s not. If money were infinite. We can’t even afford basic teaching materials and lunches for the children. We can’t afford to pay teachers enough to afford a starter home in most places. You think we can afford a hundred and thirty thousand full-time, armed and trained professional security teams? Even if they’re teams of one, that’s just not a realistic number. That’s another entire military.
Thing is, your opinion doesn’t matter. Those guys do, or did, have the right to bear arms, and could have exercised it in all sorts of places. I’m just not sure why someone who can be trusted to carry a weapon in parks, traffic jams, restaurants, Little League games, and backyard barbecues, all the sudden becomes a huge threat to everyone around him when he walks into his place of employment. A place which is both unguarded, and apparently the favored target of the current biggest fad in violent crime.
Now, I certainly don’t propose arming teachers and making them take on this responsibility. That’s an absolutely absurd idea I’ve seen proposed recently. But if a teacher or administrator wants to take on that responsibility, and can show they legally carry a weapon and know how to use it, maybe even with some extra training requirements at their expense, I don’t see why we shouldn’t let them.
I suspect there are protocol issues. Like only the SWAT team engages shooters or the Cops just ran when Ramos fired. Either way it hardly supports Abbot’s groveling.
What should schools give up in order to afford armed guards? I know that right wing politicos are suggesting that it wouldn’t cost much at all if retired officers and security guards volunteered their time, but I rank that suggestion about as helpful as the “thoughts and prayers” they current offer grieving parents.
Not that it’s a good idea, but if we WERE going to do it, it should come out of the national defense budget.
This is a matter of defense against domestic terrorism, not education.
The dissonance is that the same people who think open carry is a swell idea, are generally the same people who think the solution to mass shootings is a “good guy with a gun”. It follows that some innocent gun-toting open-carry fan runs the risk of being shot in a case of mistaken identity, by a GGwaG.
The solution to this predicament is to repeal open carry, not the 2nd Amendment (although that’s not a bad idea, either).