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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18758 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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You seem very certain of yourself and like you have experience so I'd like to ask you, what were the police supposed to do when the door was locked and the suspect was firing through it whenever he heard them messing with it?

There are close quarters combat protocols for how to go through a doorway as team. That's dangerous but with training you can minimize the danger. But what's the protocol for trying to open a door when bullets are coming through it? Are the men, unable to live with themselves if they don't act, supposed to line up by the door and take bullets until the shooter runs out of bullets, or someone manages to break it open?

AFAICT, the reason they were able to breach it is because a Border Patrol agent came on scene and was just a lot more effective at finding the master key and opening the door. Maybe he was much smarter and more competent and took his oath more seriously, but he also could have had the benefit of coming in very late with a fresh perspective and no chain of command diffusing his own sense of responsibility.

In the meantime the police were looking for keys and stealthily trying them out and none worked. It seems they got confused about locating keys and keeping track of which they tried. Everyone thought someone else was apparently on it.

This strikes me as systemic idiocy that comes up in crises, not individual cowardice. But I say this as an armchair QB.

The standard protocol would be to destroy the door.

Honest question: how? Doesn't using, say, a shotgun on the lock risk collateral damage? Doesn't trying to use a contact tool mean whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at?

the harder and more massive a projectile is, the worse the risk of collateral damage. Hard projectiles retain more energy from a penetration or deflection, larger projectiles have more energy.

Shotguns fire shot, ie lots of small, soft projectiles. These have low individual energy and are bad at retaining the energy they do have through an impact. Dedicated breaching rounds generally use something like compressed lead dust to greatly minimize the chance of a ricochet, but even with buckshot the danger is much, much lower than that presented by an active shooter.

The short version is that any reasonable risk assessment would have held that breaching the door was a good idea, even if they didn't have dedicated breaching rounds on-hand.

It's... a little more morbid than that.

At 12:21 p.m., 48 minutes after the subject entered the school, the subject fired four additional shots inside classrooms 111/112. Officers moved forward into formation outside the classroom doors but did not make entry. Instead, presuming the classroom doors were locked, the officers tested a set of keys on the door of a janitor’s closet next to room 112. When the keys did not work, the responders began searching for additional keys and breaching tools. UCISD PD Chief Arredondo continued to attempt to communicate with the subject, while UPD Acting Chief Pargas continued to provide no direction, command, or control to personnel. After another 15 minutes, officers found a second set of keys and used them to successfully open the janitor’s closet. With working keys in hand, the officers then waited to determine whether a sniper and a drone could obtain sight of and eliminate the subject through the window. Those efforts were unsuccessful. At 12:48 p.m., 27 minutes after hearing multiple gunshots inside classrooms 111 and 112, and 75 minutes after first responders first entered Robb Elementary, officers opened the door to room 111. A team composed of BORTAC members, a member of the U.S. Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit (BORSTAR), and deputies from two local sheriffs’ offices entered the rooms, and officers killed the subject when he emerged shooting from a closet. The subject was killed at approximately 12:50 p.m., 77 minutes after the first officers entered the school and after 45 rounds were fired by the shooter in the presence of officers.

With master keys in hand and confirmed to work, the BORTAC commander paused on the room entry so that a sniper and drone could attempt to get a visual on the classroom. If successful, the sniper could have mitigated a great deal of risk posed by a gun battle inside the classroom. The sniper or drone could have provided valuable intelligence on the layout of the room, location of victims, and the shooter that would create a great tactical advantage for the entry team. However, assessing these options added 10 minutes to the overall response time.

And separately:

“Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter”

There's a variety of failures, here, and it's very much a 'porque no los dos' situation. But the other side's more overt:

In some instances, outside the school and near the funeral home across the street, officers also used force to keep concerned parents from approaching the school or funeral home, where some of the evacuated students had been taken. One mother was handcuffed by the U.S. Marshals, who accused her of being uncooperative regarding where to park her car and remaining outside the law enforcementperimeter. As soon as she was released from the handcuffs, she ran and got her two children out of the school and to safety. She indicated that law enforcement “was more aggressive with keeping us parents out than going in to get the shooter.” In another instance, one family member who was very upset on the scene, trying to get information on the whereabouts of their child, was thrown to the ground by law enforcement and threatened with a Taser when they tried to go to their child.

Ah, but those were just the untrained, and as laudable as their bravery or desperation might have been, they could have been killed or caused further harm. Surely the officers in command didn't stop other poli--

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw said that [Officer] Ruiz tried to save his wife, but was barred from doing so. State Rep. Joe Moody said despite what surfaced in the video, he confirmed that Ruiz had tried to engage the shooter but was disarmed.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Yikes. The cringe, it's too much.

The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.

Especially when an armed pack of parents would almost certainly have been much more effective than the police.

EDIT: Thinking about how much better a job motivated and armed parents would have done, I wonder if trying to train Uvalde police mopes made them more incapable of acting, not less. You have to follow the procedures! You have to listen to the chain of command! Everyone struggle to remember what you were taught. With adrenaline! If a kid dies when you did the wrong thing, it'll be your fault! Wait is this a barricaded shooter situation or a hostage situation or something else? Where are the tools? The protocols man, the protocols!

Whereas parents would just be like, do some of us have guns? Good, let's go.

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