From a reader of this article -
"Aren't you being too harsh on the police?"
First:
Noted firearms instructor Greg Ellifritz had this to say:
This is looking worse and worse.
They let the guy go for up to 90 minutes because they said they didn't have a key to the classroom door that the killer locked.
This is the prime example why I no longer train police agencies or write articles about best practices in police response. The cops don't care and refuse to learn lessons from past tragedies.
We've long known that cops responding to school shootings need breaching gear. This became apparent after the 2006 Nickel Mines school shooting (link in comments).
I wrote about cops needing breaching tools in the first month I started my website. That article (linked in comments) was in 2012. Since then I have written 18 different articles on my site about the importance of breaching capability for responding cops.
We've known since Columbine (1999) that cops need to make immediate entry to stop the killing. Yet these cops waited for swat.
20+ years of death and tragedy has taught us nothing because most are too lazy to seek understanding.
The problems these cops faced are not new. Ample information is freely available to the officers who want to learn how to best handle these incidents. But cops remain ignorant and their bosses are never held accountable.
You are on your own.
Firearms Instructor Extraordinaire, Tom Givens, had this to say:Well, it happened again.
In Columbine, at Sandy Hook, at Marjorie Stoneman in Broward County, now at Uvalde, Texas, police officers stood by outside for up to an hour while a madman slaughtered helpless children. There were men outside with body armor, handguns plus a long gun, and a hatful of ammunition, but they stood there listening to gunshots and screams rather than enter and do their jobs.
(Emphasis mine)
My experience -
Exactly ONE police officer ever took martial arts classes from me while an officer. Another man actually stopped taking the classes once he became an officer!
Exactly TWO active duty law enforcement officers have taken a firearms class from me ever. One of whom was a file clerk and also an avid sport shooter... definitely an outlier. The other was a theif.
Summary
Nobody is coming to save you.
Police want to do the bare minimum they need to do in order to keep their jobs. And given how difficult it usually is to fire a cop, that threshold is very low.
The vast majority of law enforcement persons absolutely REFUSE to become professionals in their field.
I can't disagree with any of this, it's simply true.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's bad enough. Even worse though (imo) is the massive Kruger-Dunning effect which is killing all of us...
My God the Kruger-Dunning effect on display especially with people I have to work with who think being a big shot at work carries over to them being big shots who should be running the country. Not a one of them could pass even a basic gun safety test to get into my range/club, but they listen to NPR and are just on their high horses about banning "high caliber bullets" and "high capacity clips" and you don't need that to hunt with.
The unqualified and ignorant, coming up with solutions to a problem they haven't the remotest clue about except for what they see on tv.
I can't remember if you have "family language" rules here so I'll have to settle for saying "a pox on all of them".
In their ignorant arrogance they're going to bring down the Republic.
Grrrr.
Tom from East Tenn
Not to beat the dead horse further, but it helps me to re-articulate this, in the unlikely event I do stumble across an undecided person with an open mind, to whom I can give the elevator speech.
ReplyDelete1) the people screeching about how guns are the problem, are almost entirely grossly ignorant of what guns are, how they work, and what current gun laws are
2) the people screeching for more gun control CERTAINLY are grossly ignorant of the realities of armed defense and of gunfights. ie having unarmed victims locked up in a controlled area with an active shooter is why so many people are wounded/killed.
3) these same people also couldn't tell you how many people each year are actually murdered in the US, and how many were murdered by guns.
4) So, the people screeching for more gun control thus don't understand the guns, the law, or how gunfights work, yet they have no problem trampling the rights of everyone to fix what they see as a problem that the government created or at least made worse.
Given their complete ignorance of the technical, legal, and tactical aspects of guns and armed defense, why would you think their solution would work any better than it has before in places with extreme gun control like NYC and Chicago?
Tom from E Tenn
It was looking worse and worse, and now I think it's gotten even yet more worse and worse beyond that. Now the Uvalde PD has stopped cooperating with the Texas DPS (what would happen to you or me if we tried that?) and is now doing their best to block the police bodycam footage from getting out. Word is that the bodycam footage contradicts earlier police claims that they were trying to get into the room... seems the bodycam footage shows them standing around and making no effort to get in.
ReplyDelete