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This could shape to be peak toxoplasma. A lot of things are still unknown so my thoughts are pure speculation.
The police seemed to have actually acted adequately. It was not Uvalde - so the only thing resembling a good thing in the situation.
This is the first mass school shooting by a woman that I know. Probably the first mass shooting I hear at all committed by a woman.
The police released the race and age of the shooter, but not name or picture. There was a macabre joke that if the picture is not shown - the shooter is black. She is unidentified so far - which decreases slightly the chances the shooter was far right.
Two AR-15 and a handgun ... probably a loadout a bit high unless you are Caleb. (if you get the Blood reference - sorry buddy - you are officially in the risk cohort for covid by age)
Low body count - unexperienced shooter.
So I have the suspicion that either the shooter is trans or someone radicalized over Roe v Wade overturn. Also some last minute news outlets started saying female instead of woman. So I guess trans. Anyway CW-wise - will be toxic as hell.
Edit: NBCNews and NYPOST openly call it transgender woman. Not clear if MtF or FtM. And there seems to be manifesto.
WARNING: The following video contains potentially dangerous levels of Freedom™. Do not watch if you have recently been exposed to DDT.
Nashville Police release body-cam footage of officers entering the school and engaging the shooter.
Good to see the police doing a good job putting down a criminal. They need the PR
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Good job. I especially appreciated the second officer subtly giving other cops a push when he noticed them vacillating - it can sometimes mean the difference between cowardice and bravery.
Could interpret it either as a push to get them to move forward against their instincts, or perhaps an "I've got your back man, let's do this together" encouragement thing.
Either way, definitely one of those subtle acts that can break a person out of paralysis and into meaningful action.
Probably both.
It's worth noting that pushing the rifle forward was unequivocally the right answer; you don't want to engage a rifle with a pistol if you can help it.
Yeah, I was seriously impressed with the sheer presence of mind on display too. Running headfirst into the shooter wielding a pistol can indeed still be 'heroic' but when you've got backup with shotguns and rifles right behind you, choosing the tactically sound option is completely justified.
Again, keeping those guys moving forward and coordinated enough to act together pretty much ensured a swift end to the conflict. Basically the shooter might have been able to get a lucky shot off and take out one of the officers, but even the mighty AR-15 isn't going to let you gun down 5-6 armed responders before they get you. Unless they panic and can't aim for shit.
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Fuck man this stuff really gets me :( - like there's a switch that flips in some peoples' minds when there's somebody that needs help, and they just focus in and do the work.
These guys aren't being slow about it, they're methodically moving towards somebody trying to kill them, because there are some kids that need them.
I don't have much to add here I guess. This video made me tear up. Most human beings have an incredibly powerful instinctual caring for one another, and will absolutely march themselves directly into a meat grinder, without even thinking about it, when it's necessary to help vulnerable people, especially children. If you've ever seen people in this situation you know what I'm talking about.
Same. Especially because everything about the situation is maximally distressing. The lights flashing, the blaring siren, having to walk past a dead kid, not being sure where the shooter is AND knowing there are more kids in the building at risk. Only way it could have been worse is if the power went out and they were plunged into darkness.
Just guys rising to the fucking occasion. I noticed that Officer Rex there dropped the shooter with his first shot and only fired three shots total, no mag dump or panic firing. Complete discipline. Marksmanship like that during an adrenaline rush is impressive on many levels.
Putting my own mind into that situation, I can't say for certain that I'd be able to acquit myself so admirably, but damned if this isn't the standard I WANT to live up to.
As I understand, the alarm was blaring to help the officers by stressing and disorienting the suspect.
And I heard it was one of the students who pulled the fire alarm to warn people about the shooter.
Could be either. All I know is the blaring alarm was causing ME anxiety just hearing it on video.
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There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct. That's the only way I can see to explain the seeming unanimity of the response here vs the contrary unanimity at e.g. Uvalde and Broward County. We're not looking at two different models of human, right? There have to be at least a few potential heroes and a few potential cowards in all places? But if you want to be a hero and yet your peers and/or your boss are dithering about "establishing a perimeter", maybe that's enough to keep you from advancing on a gun-toting murderer by yourself; conversely, if your peers are charging forward, even someone who'd rather be elsewhere might not want to be the only coward who doesn't have his friends' backs.
You might be interested in ACoUP’s blogging on military psychology, specifically Total Generalship
Basically, hunkering down and waiting for a change is a really common historical response, the natural combination of bystander effect and mortal fear. Armies rely on officers and training to try and get around this, and it’s part of the reason a disciplined military tends to steamroll larger ones. The Metro police appear to have had their training and personal initiative kick in, while the Uvalde cops congealed at the perimeter.
Even if we grant this as excusable, they were completely willing to prevent others from going in and doing the job. So that really lays the insult of comparing them to these guys thick.
So yeah, whatever training the Uvalde guys had, it clearly isn't ideal.
Oh yeah. I’m not trying to excuse their behavior. Out of all the possible options they defaulted to a pretty awful one.
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The most plausible explanation I've seen for Uvalde is that the bystander effect took hold as soon as the first few officers didn't charge in. When there are already half a dozen guys with guns standing by the door, there's no rush for the next responders to do something different, then you start calling leadership asking for explicit direction to go in, and the next thing you know it's dozens of minutes later.
I'm not saying it exonerates their behavior, but I can see how it could have happened -- or indeed, gone quite differently with a few minor changes. If so, it's probably reducible with explicit training points about initial response.
As I recall, they actively prevented anyone else from acting and entering the school, which is where it really crosses over into inexcusability.
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It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino (visibly so), while up to 50% of the US Border Patrol is Hispanic or latino.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/26/fact-check-are-half-of-all-border-patrol-agents-hispanic/
Dude, come on. Hispanic cultures have their flaws, but cowardice is not one of them.
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On its own, this would just be a bad comment I'd probably ding for booing your outgroup and not speaking clearly.
However, you now have a very lengthy record of warnings and bans for these kind of low-effort insinuations made without any kind of substantiation, just a curled upper lip and metaphorical wiggling of eyebrows.
We don't ban criticism of Jews, Chinese, blacks, women, Hispanics, and whichever group you hate today. That doesn't mean this is a place where you can just drop your edgiest hot take about the Racial Outgroup of the day. If you wanted to elaborate on why its "relevant to note" that a mostly Hispanic police force performed poorly compared to a mostly white one, you could have done that, if you'd put enough effort into it for it not to be just like your last few manifestos about Chinese robbers or low-effort sneers about the lower breeds.
But you didn't. You're just doing the same thing, over and over, and degrading the quality of the conversation, and certainly not contributing anything interesting or intelligent in the way of racial theorizing.
@naraburns just told you to stop doing this, and he explicitly told you you were looking at a longer ban. I'm making it two weeks this time. Next time will be months if not permanent.
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It was a Hispanic bortac agent who took the guy down.
Shh you weren't supposed to notice that, you were supposed to mindlessly parrot the rationalist consensus. ;-)
Eh, what consensus? I don’t even see anything about the unknowable female mindset.
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Are you equating "rationalist" with "white supremacist" now?
Not "white supremacist" so much as "bio determinist".
Edit to elaborate/be less inflametory: Let's be blunt the willingness to argue that things like culture, upbringing, economic background, might matter more than one's skin color has already marked guys like facelesscraven and I as outliers here. The rationalist consensus is that "it's all genetics". As much as this particular user may get downvoted, takes like that of @Lepidus' above are the norm here rather than the exception and far more representative of what "rationalism" as a movement stands for than anything I might write.
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I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.
It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.
Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.
This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.
It's their fundamental responsibility as cops: willingly going into danger on behalf of the larger community. At those tho haven't forgotten they "protect and serve" the people by upholding the law.
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While Texas has gotten more Hispanic over the past years, uvalde has, uh, not been a magnet for immigrants. It’s a fairly homogenously Hispanic town that can plausibly claim to have been homogenously Mexican-American Hispanic since 1848 if not before.
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Not a fan of this 'as men' line. Try 'as police officers', or as 'a good person'. I really don't think women should be absolved of such costly responsibilities when they clamor for equality. 'Women can be heroes too'. No, they have to be. Else, the kitchen.
Just because feminism wins in some arenas with its unsustainable social ideas doesn't mean we should cater to all of its delusions. Asymmetry is sometimes better than equality. If we start insisting lady teachers storm doors to stop terrorists, we will get more dead children and teachers. And that will have the disastrous downstream affect of legitimizing more gun control.
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I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.
* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")
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So were the students. Not exactly an argument that supports a racial solidarity angle.
At least one of the Uvalde cops, if I remember correctly, had a child inside the school and was restrained from entering. Still trying to get my head around the videos of all that beyond a dismissive 'people get weird in weird situations'
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Why is that supposed to matter?
40% percent of Americans say that most people can be trusted while only 11% of Mexicans feel the same way. That demographics that differ in social trust people might show differing levels of willingness to take on risks for strangers --- matters.
https://ourworldindata.org/trust
Upvoted for bringing data, but come on: your support for "trust is genetic, not cultural" includes a graph showing levels of trust in Mexico dropping by two thirds in barely a single generation. Did Mexico just finally get colonized by untrusting Mexican people? Or have there been environmental changes (cartel violence) that didn't reflect in America? The Ciudad Juarez homicide rate went from "3x the USA" to "50x the USA" and back (briefly; it's gotten worse again) in just one decade, while on the other side of a river (and wall, and freeways...) the city of El Paso (14% non-Hispanic white, 80% Hispanic) was untouched at "1/2 the USA". It would be entirely reasonable for Hispanics on just one side of the river to get really skeptical about "trust".
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Were any of the Uvalde responders not Americans?
If you’re suggesting a mixed-race Latino police force implies a Mexican national’s level of trust implies lower risk-tolerance for strangers explains their terrible response…that seems pretty tenuous.
Why would it be? Garrett Jones makes a compelling case that even European immigrants only assimilate about half-way, generations after they've forgotten even their original language. There is a considerable IQ gap between mestizos and white europeans. Why shouldn't our prior be an absence of complete integration?
Also, the idea that American citizenship means much when you can obtain it without knowing the language is prima-facie absurd. Even if you are a Civ Nat it should be obvious that we are a long way away from anything resembling integration conducive conditions.
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I don’t know what DDT has to do with this, but I’m proud of the officer response. Training and confidence carry the day.
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Unfathomably based. Rex Engelbert, shotgun officer with Rex, and Michael Collazo fuck.
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Lots I could say about that officer, but from the culture war perspective:
Just last week there were some interviews released regarding the Uvalde shooting and discussion about how they were allegedly scared to go in because the shooter had an AR-15, making it too big a threat to them. Apparently some claimed this was a sufficient excuse.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/20/uvalde-shooting-police-ar-15/
As per usual, gun control is the proposed remedy.
Can't think of a greater refutation to that argument than this very video, where decisive action and coordinated aggression ended the threat quickly.
Meanwhile, these guys went up against someone who had two AR-15s!
they didn't have two ARs. they had an AR, a sub-2000 PCC, and a handgun.
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Too scared to do the right thing then too scared to do the right thing now.
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Look at that, they actually figured out the lock! And ran towards gunshots instead of away from them! And had multiple teams clearing rooms at once!
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