As a native Texan the news of the mass shooting was shocking. (Actually that's a little misleading. I was a 3-month-old USAF military brat whose Dad got reassigned to Cape Cod, and we didn't return to Texas until the summer before my high school. But except for a short Navy assignment in Orlando, I spent most of my young adult years in Texas while earning 4 college degrees, before moving to Wisconsin to start my academic career as a young professor. I've held 2 Texas jobs since, and I routinely visit since my mom and 5 of 6 siblings live there and a majority of nephews and nieces.) I had gone to a public high school in a south Texas border city. I don't think I've been in Uvalde personally. I had to think about it because I had represented my high school in UIL science and number sense competitions all around south Texas.)
Attending a south Texas high school and undergraduate college located in a heavily Latino section of San Antonio I've been friends with a number of Latino friends throughout my school/college and work history, including a one-year appointment at UTEP. (In fact, one of my Mexican students invited me to his family's celebration of his graduation. Unfortunately, I had prior plans to attend my baby sister's college graduation at UTSA the same day.) I've dated/asked out multiple Latinas. Two of my grandmephews (different mothers) have a Latina mother. As a Franco-American (Quebec province-born great-grandparents), there are similarities in our cultures, including a strong connection to the Catholic Church, family-centered and many large families, and hard work ethic. We have sometimes faced acceptance issues from other Americans. (In past posts, I've mentioned how the Gray Lady in the nineteenth-century ranted against rapidly breeding Canucks who (in their opinion) resisted integration and developed Catholic schools vs. public (i.e., then Protestant-dominated) schools. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized Franco-American communities because we checked off two of their target categories: immigrants and Catholics. I never knew my immigrant great-grandparents but all my older relatives were bilingual and fiercely American. They mostly spoke French at home or talking among themselves and friends, which is why French was my primary language when I started kindergarten.)
It's hard to explain my horror of Tuesday's mass murder; we libertarians abhor violations of the non-aggression principle. I love kids, despite being a bachelor with no dependents. I love my 21 nephews and nieces and 23 grandnephews and grandnieces, some of the latter in primary school like the 19 Uvalde student victims. At least one each nephew and niece are elementary school teachers, like the 2 Uvalde teacher victims. It's hard not to think "what if" especially when a large plurality live in Texas.
I don't have new facts on the tragedy, but let me summarize what I understand, The 18-year-old perpetrator Salvador Ramos was a recent high school dropout who had a reputation as a loner and outsider, reportedly teased by peers for a lisp and stutter; he did show some signs of aggression, including sometimes walking around with boxing gloves, even cutting his own face with a knife and occasionally demonstrated a strong personality in dealing with others, including fast food co-workers ans exchanging text messages with others. Shortly after his recent birthday, he legally bought two rifles and ammunition (used in the massacre).
He lived with his maternal grandmother and had some type of confrontation with his grandmother that morning (which seemed to have something to do with possibly losing his cellphone privileges) and shot her in the face; she survived the incident, called 9/11 and at last mention was in stable condition at an area hospital.
And then came the massacre itself in 2 adjoined fourth-grade classrooms. Some of the details are still murky. There were initial reports of an early confrontation with school security; a school entrance propped open by a teacher. Ramos had run his car into a ditch near the target elementary school; when two people at a nearby funeral home approached the accident, Ramos fired at them. A teacher called 9/11 to report the gunfire. Police arrived at the funeral home a couple of minutes before Ramos entered the school through the opened entrance and then entered presumably unlocked classrooms 111 or 112, locking the door(s) behind him. He fired more than 100 rounds before police arrived at the scene He fired shots at approaching cops through the door, grazing 2 of them. Minutes later another 16 rounds were shot inside the classroom. Within 20 minutes more than 19 officers were in the hallway.It would take nearly an hour before officers, now including a tactical/SWAT team with shields from Border Patrol, breached the classroom using the janitor's keys and killed Ramos, with some interim fire from Ramos at security outside the classroom.
I've heard of at least 2 students who survived the massacre, one boy who escaped through a classroom window and a girl who played dead, smearing her classmate's blood on her clothes.
This was a monstrous tragedy, and there's going to be a post audit, particularly why it took officers more than an hour to breach the classrooms in question. I'm not sure given the teacher's early 9/11 call, why the school didn't go immediately into lockdown, securing building and room entrances, why security didn't, say, toss tear gas grenades through classroom windows, why it took an hour to get janitor keys, etc. Of course, none of this will bring murdered kids back to life, but you would think, after prior high profile school shootings in CO, CT, and FL and improvements in surveillance/security technology, we would have better hardening of school security,
We now have the typical "don't let a good tragedy go to waste" with leftist gun control advocates trying to exploit public revulsion in the aftermath. of tragedy. In the immortal words of Barry Obama, "We can't afford to do nothing." Of course, doing the wrong thing is worse. And nothing can be worse than trying to deprive people of the means to self-defense, a natural right.
I'm well aware of how divided we are on gun control. I've never been an NRA member and you'll find few posts in my blog ranting on the Second Amendment. I did have one memorable Facebook clash. I and 4 of my cousins had reunited on Facebook after my surviving aunt suffered a major stroke, dying days later. My female cousin, the closest to me, had posted some vague gun control meme, which surprised me given she was a rabid Trumpkin and Trump embraced NRA support (although he had notably flirted with gun control in the aftermath of the Parkland and El Paso shooting incidents). I was ambivalent about commenting on the post until I saw some gun control troll's ranting comment. I basically sniped a response, and almost immediately found myself defriended by all 4 cousins, with my female cousin sending me a message rant, furious at my rebuke of (an unknown to me) a close family friend, She ended the note mocking me with language I had used some time back, warning her my Facebook stream might include some Never Trumper material, and I didn't want her personally upset over that. [I don't think I was aware at the time you can choose not to follow your Facebook friends.] There have been some family-related contacts since then, but we have not reconnected on Facebook, and for the most part I have stopped commenting on political posts in the interim. In part, I felt I was spending too much time on Facebook, but for whatever reason, some of my feeds (e.g., the Laissez Faire Capitalism group) stopped publishing in the interim; I don't know if they've been censored, or if the moderators just aren't posting.
There are multiple issues I have with the gun control Statists and I'm not going to present a comprehensive polemic here on them. But first of all, prohibitions don't work, and even if you restrict purchases in the open market, guns can be stolen or exchanged in other markets. Second, many of the proposed measures (background checks, etc.) probably wouldn't have stopped Ramos. As best I can tell, he legally obtained his weapons under Texas law and didn't have a criminal history.
I do think there is some merit in, say, age restrictions to certain classes of weapons (beyond handguns for personal safety and hunting rifles). I remember as a young male (< 25) , auto insurance was sky-high, even though I was a squeaky clean geek. We might require waiting periods, gun safety training, weapon liability insurance. We might monitor affiliations with gangs, militias, etc., review people with juvenile or criminal records, mental wellness history, etc.
But gun control advocates have unrealistic expectations in terms of effects of regulations on rare one-off events, like the Uvalde tragedy. The DOJ found in a recent year, up to 80% of the firearms used in violent crimes were not procured through the open market, and many of the sales in the open market, even though often requiring a background check, were not obtained under their own identity. And furthermore, the number of defensive uses of firearms against crimes (up to 2 million per year) vastly outnumbers criminal use (up to 500K). This is in a country with an estimated 100 million gun owners. Thus, only a tiny minority of gun owners abuse the responsibility of exercising their right to self-defense.
Everyone can and should mourn the victims of Ramos' Uvalde massacre. It breaks my heart; my thoughts and prayers are with the surviving family members of the victims. But beware of the political whores exploiting the tragedy for political gain. I would prefer to see more resources in hardening school defenses, real-time alerts/communication, and improved safety training for teachers, administrators and staff.
