What Have We Learned?
I’m feeling especially salty today. I’m working my way through the DOJ report on the 2022 Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and I already know it is not going to be good for my blood pressure. (I’ll just have to hope my doctor doesn’t read this.)
With appendices, the report totals a whopping 610 pages. I’m probably not going to make it through the whole thing, and I don’t think I’ll need to. Excellent summaries of the content are already available through many news outlets, and they all offer the same impression: Law enforcement failed to apply lessons learned…or that should have been learned…nearly 25 years ago. Go read the full report here, or a news media summary here if you like. I’m not here today to dice it all out…I’m here to vent.
On April 20, 1999, America watched in horror as the story unfolded of two psychopaths rampaging through Columbine High School in Colorado, shooting and killing twelve students and a teacher. Aside from the tragic loss of life, the most significant impact of that incident was the revelation that the first responding law enforcement officers had waited outside for the arrival of specialized SWAT teams…even as the killing continued inside the school.
At the time, the Columbine response was viewed as both wholly inadequate, yet somewhat understandable, given existing police tactics. SWAT teams were proliferating among police agencies in the 1990s, and a pretty standard response to a critical incident was for patrol officers to establish a containment perimeter around the scene, and call out the SWAT team to actually deal with the situation. But after action reviews of the Columbine response concluded (correctly, in my opinion) that this sort of response was insufficient to deal with this type of incident, newly labeled as an “active shooting”.
I was a police officer in a municipal agency at the time, and I recall the reaction within law enforcement to have been rather immediate and emphatic, as police departments and law enforcement professional organizations scrambled to update tactics to deal with what was seen as a new threat. It wasn’t really new, but the combination of dead children and the unavoidable conclusion that poor police tactics contributed to the body count made it seem so.
In fairly short order, immediate armed response was recognized as the best practice for dealing with an active shooter threat, and tactics were developed to implement that philosophy. Every police officer in my area received this newly developed “active shooter response” training. At least in my police peer group, we all steeled ourselves mentally to the idea that if something like Columbine were to occur in our town, all bets were off. The otherwise standard goal of going home safe at the end of the shift was going out the window; this would be the day of days, where doing our jobs and doing the right thing meant that we may well have to pay the ultimate price. So we trained and prepared ourselves mentally for that eventuality.
Thankfully, that day never came for me. But I can tell you that in the immediate aftermath of Columbine, my friends and I took the lesson of that tragedy very much to heart. For my part, I still do. And if any consideration can be given to the Uvalde “responders,” perhaps it is that since they didn’t live through that rather seismic shift in law enforcement tactics, maybe they didn’t experience the similarly drastic change in mindset we all went through.
But that is still pretty weak sauce, in my opinion. Especially as I delve into the Uvalde report and its dissection of the extremely long timeline of the police response, rife with poor leadership, poor decisions, poor organization, and flat out cowardice of many at that scene who wore a shield on their chests but not in their hearts. As someone who has served virtually their entire adult life as a protector of others, it simultaneously makes me sick to my stomach, and exceedingly angry.
God help me, it makes me angry.
And perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, it’s easy for you to say what should have been done. You weren’t there, and you don’t know what you’d do in that situation.” Maybe. Maybe I’d fold up like a cheap lawn chair, but I don’t think so. I think I know what I’d do. I know because as a lifelong, soldier, cop, and security professional, I have thought about things like this in advance. I’ve thought about it a lot. I have prepared myself mentally, and trained physically. I’ve done all this so that if I am ever confronted with that day of days, I will not falter.
But here we are, a quarter century past the supposed lessons of Columbine, reading yet another after action report (after inaction report?), and it appears that after these 610 pages of examination and analysis, we will confirm what many of us have suspected since May 24, 2022. What have we learned since Columbine? Nothing.
Nothing at all.
What should we be learning? Coming from the assumption that a killer has already entered a school, nothing should be any higher priority than a rapid, violent response to end the killing. Nothing is more important. NOTHING. Prevention is no longer an option, and once the killing has begun, the only remaining variable is how long it will be allowed to go on. Saving lives is a race against the clock. Speed and violence of action is the only thing that will save lives at this point. To this end, anything that can be done to facilitate a faster response must be embraced. Unfortunately, this also means accepting that police cannot (and perhaps will not) come to the rescue in time.
Gun free zones must end. We cannot afford…our children cannot afford…to indulge this fantasy any longer. Legally armed citizens must not just be allowed to carry in schools, they must be encouraged to do so. The idea of an unarmed teacher, principal, or janitor nobly laying down their life in a fruitless attempt to save children should no longer be celebrated. It should be repugnant to any sensible person. We should not measure their devotion to the children in their charge by whether or not they are willing to die in vain for them, but whether or not they are willing to kill for them.
And police must commit to doing everything in their power to ensure that school staff are not put in that position. Every cop in the country should be forced to watch the video of the Nashville Police Department response to the Covenant School shooter, and told, “This is what is expected of you. If you cannot aggressively advance on someone who is murdering children, if you doubt your ability to put your own safety aside in that situation, go sell used cars. This job is not for you.”
Yeah, I’m angry. Read the Uvalde report and see if you don’t get angry, too. Argue for gun control if you like, but the fact remains that with likely ~500 million guns in the USA, getting guns away from psychopathic murderers is a childish fantasy. It will not happen. Ever.
This report makes it clearer than ever that it matters not who guns down the next school shooter. Cop, teacher, visiting parent, or lunch lady…it does not matter. The only metric which matters is how fast that can be made to happen. It is the pinnacle of stupidity to insist that only someone with a badge and uniform be allowed to kill a murderer of children. Communities and the schools which serve their children should be full of armed protectors, uniformed or not, who are prepared to move to the sound of the guns in defense of the helpless. This is the lesson of Columbine, of Uvalde…of so many more soft targets created by an unwillingness to call evil by its name and kill it.
This is the lesson. When will we learn it?
