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Ex-Uvalde Officer Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting (NYT link, worked for me without an account)
My immediate thought, having read about prosecutions of police officers before, was that they found the special prosecutor version of Ralph Wiggums to ensure an acquittal. However, Bill Turner appears to have been the elected DA for Brazos County from 1983-2013, so it's hard to say. Many elected DAs have little trial experience and can be ineffective compared to a regular assistant DA who grinds 4-10+ trials per year, but maybe he's been getting some trial experience since 2013.
It's an interesting disparity that many people have commented on before: officers receive all kinds of "training and experience" (as they will brag about ad nauseum when testifying or in a pre-trial interview), but when it really counts and they fail to make effective use of that training and experience, it won't be held against them. They will instead be given infinite benefit of the doubt, as can be seen when officers are sued under 42 U.S.C. ยง 1983 lawsuits (heavily slanted law review article, but it correctly describes the reality of trying to sue for excessive force violations).
It takes a few minutes, but it's not hard to find examples of people with no training or experience engaging a mass shooter. Or officers who did so when they were off-duty: example 1, example 2.[1]
It seems to be one more piece of the overall modern American problem of failing to hold people accountable for high-profile failures because they had the correct credentials and merit badges. It's the brain on bureaucracy that 100ProofTollBooth notes below. "So-and-so had the correct credentials and followed the correct procedures, therefore no one is to blame for this terrible outcome." And then they might not even be held accountable when they don't follow those procedures, like here.
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?[1]Incidentally, this one is a fine example of wikipedia's slant on defensive use of arms. If you track down the shooter's post-arrest interview, he says he dropped his gun because he saw armed people approaching him, but wiki presents some witness statements to try to make it sound like he dropped his guns and the guys approaching with guns played no role in stopping the shooting.
Another random thought.
I remember when gun control laws limiting the ownership of AR-15s were dubbed "scary gun laws". The implication being these laws simply ban weapons guns the left thinks look scary. I am sure that some of the laws were focusing on the wrong characteristics, like Clinton's Federal assault weapon ban focusing on flash suppressors.
Still, looking at the Uvalde timeline, it is very apparent that pink haired leftists who have never held a gun in their lives are not the only ones who consider AR-15s "scary guns":
It seems to me that this was a major factor in the cops being reluctant to open/breach the door and engage the shooter.
I am not a gun expert, but I think there are some points which make a semiautomatic assault-style rifle much scarier than a handgun in a firefight. The 5.56x45mm is likely a lot more capable of defeating body armor than 9x19mm. If you are wearing body armor while facing a handgun, you can reasonably hope your opponent is shooting common JHPs, no such hope with an assault rifle. A rifle will enable a shooter to fire accurate shots in quicker succession than with a pistol. The magazine size is less likely to be a tactical limitation than for a handgun.
Sure, the cops will have AR-15s which fire bursts (once they fetch them from their vehicles), while civilians are restricted to semiautomatic versions, but it does not seem that this is a big difference in deadliness.
The primary purpose of an AR-15 seems to be to take out a guy in a firefight who dressed for the occasion. (Secondary purposes like sports shooting have been invented, but these seem like an excuse to own a cool gun to me. If you allowed Texans to own hand grenades, they would invent a 'sport' involving their use as well.) For home defense, they seem overkill -- the central example of a criminal home invader is some junkie carrying a stolen handgun, not a close quarter combat team in body armor.
So the point of civilian ownership would be that it is a rifle near the cutting edge of current military technology which will enable civilians to effectively engage government forces. Some consider this beneficial in itself. I think it is a bit of an odd place to set the border between prohibited and allowed technology, though.
An AR-15 might be used to effectively engage police departments. But any government (tyrannic or otherwise) faced with an insurgency (e.g. anti-government forces openly carrying long arms) will not rely on police departments to combat them. Against an infantry armed with small arms only, any commander would use armored vehicles (which are impervious to AR-15s) and helicopters (which are at least very hard to shoot down using rifles). Luckily, there are relatively cheap weapon systems which enable infantry to combat either effectively: RPGs and MPADSs. Any infantry force faced with even a third-rate military would want either. Simply having a credible threat against vehicles and aircrafts will limit the use your enemy gets out of his tens-of-million-dollar toys.
Of course, either could also do a lot of damage in the hands of someone bent on killing a lot of civilians, e.g. by shooting down an airliner, and legalizing them would by necessity also legalize high explosives. Still would be a more logical place to draw the line than at semi assault style rifles, IMO.
(Realistically, an US insurgency powered by 2A weapons would stick to the cities, hiding among a civil population a federal government might be reluctant to bomb. I just don't think AR-15s would play a big role. They are not very concealable, for one thing.)
And it does show.
This is always going to be a problem when you bring only your sidearm to a gunfight. Even if your opponent only has handguns (which have the problem of being easier to conceal), you'd still be better off grabbing your long gun from the trunk. Or, more likely, for modern departments running Ford Explorers from a center console mount.
See rule 6 of gun fighting:
Yes, any rifle cartridge fired from a rifle-length barrel will have more kinetic energy than a pistol caliber fired from a pistol-length barrel. No, this is not unique to guns that look particularly scary. No, there is nothing magical about 5.56; FMJ, varmint rounds, soft points, steel cores, etc., exist for all sorts of rifle rounds. The various American .30s used ubiquitously for game like deer in North America are all capable of being more powerful than the 5.56. The main advantage of the 5.56 is a flatter trajectory at intermediate distance, which doesn't matter indoors.
For home defense, there are different philosophies. The advantage of the 5.56 is the velocity gives you the ability to use frangible ammunition, which reduces the risk of overpenetration. There is also no need for portability or concealment for home defense, which favors the more effective long gun. See rule 6.
The cops do have other slight advantages in an indoor environment. Mainly, they can use carbine-length barrels, which are more wieldy for clearing work. The rest of us would have to fill out an eon's worth of paperwork to get permission from the ATF to make an SBR.
The AR platform is far from cutting-edge at this point, being designed in 1956 (70 years ago). They have, in fact, made a difference even if a government has armor, see, for example, the Troubles.
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