The Outsider Perspective Issue 293 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! It’s one of those weeks where all the news happens. I’ve focused on economic news and more for several months now. But the events in Uvalde, Texas demand a response. So, that’s where we’re going this week — links to follow.

Where you can find me this week

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[05/23/2022] The whisper of recession gets louder at the White House – Conservative Institute

[05/27/2022] Time was missed in Uvalde, and it cost lives – Conservative Institute

When police don’t answer, society is in a lurch.

Recently, I’ve gone back and started re-reading the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. The purpose of these articles was to argue in favor of the new Constitution, which would eventually replace the articles of confederation.

The Federalist Papers also happen to be the best arguments for American representative democracy ever laid to paper. They’re brilliant political philosophy and delve into the intricacies of state-building — the express purpose of the constitutional convention.

One of the early points they make is to describe the need for government and its overarching purpose. Jay writes in Federalist 3:

Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their SAFETY seems to be the first. The SAFETY of the people doubtless has relation to a great variety of circumstances and considerations, and consequently affords great latitude to those who wish to define it precisely and comprehensively.

Safety is a fundamental goal of government. We need a government structure to perform the essential tasks of national defense and provide for domestic tranquility by furnishing a police force. The extent to which a state performs these tasks is debatable — but the basic need never leaves. A government that does not provide safety has failed the first prerogative.

We start at that point because it appears at this stage that the police/government response to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School was a shocking failure of all law enforcement in that area. They failed to do the one thing they got hired to do.

I’m drawing primarily from the following sources for what happened:

I want you to note the timeline presented in this Fox News story:

Texas officials said on Thursday afternoon that the alleged school shooter was inside a Uvalde, Texas elementary school for one hour before being taken down by a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team member and is believed to have entered the school unobstructed without confronting a school resource officer, as previous statements suggested.

Victor Escalon, Texas Department of Public Safety regional director for South Texas said Thursday that Salvador Ramos, the alleged school shooter, was inside for one hour before being shot and killed. Ramos allegedly killed 19 students and two teachers during the shooting on Tuesday.

Escalon also said that the officers who first arrived on the scene did not make entry initially because of the “gunfire they’re receiving,” adding that the U.S. Border Patrol tactical teams arrived one hour later.

“Approximately an hour later, U.S. Border Patrol tactical teams arrive. They make entry, shoot and kill the suspect,” Escalon said.

Texas officials said on Thursday afternoon that the alleged school shooter was inside a Uvalde, Texas elementary school for one hour before being taken down by a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team member and is believed to have entered the school unobstructed without confronting a school resource officer, as previous statements suggested.

Victor Escalon, Texas Department of Public Safety regional director for South Texas said Thursday that Salvador Ramos, the alleged school shooter, was inside for one hour before being shot and killed. Ramos allegedly killed 19 students and two teachers during the shooting on Tuesday.

Escalon also said that the officers who first arrived on the scene did not make entry initially because of the “gunfire they’re receiving,” adding that the U.S. Border Patrol tactical teams arrived one hour later.

“Approximately an hour later, U.S. Border Patrol tactical teams arrive. They make entry, shoot and kill the suspect,” Escalon said.

Initially, the reports said that police engaged the shooter before he went into the school and started killing people. That was untrue. The police never engaged him outside the school.

That’s not all that happened. The Wall Street Journal report adds this:

Local residents voiced anger Thursday about the time it took to end the mass shooting at an elementary school here, as police laid out a fresh timeline that showed the gunman entered the building unobstructed after lingering outside for 12 minutes firing shots.

Mr. Escalon said he couldn’t say why no one stopped Ramos from entering the school during that time Tuesday. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes after he entered the school, Mr. Escalon said.

So, we have a guy outside the school loitering around, firing shots. He then enters the school and kills people. And police do not engage him for an hour. Even after they arrived, they did not engage.

When I first heard all this, I was shocked. I was hoping there was some policy in place or anything to explain this kind of behavior. But then an interview on CNN ended that hope, which Mediaite captured:

On Thursday’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the host discussed the Tuesday’s horrifying events with DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez.

“Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?” Blitzer asked him.

Olivarez said the officers who arrived at the school quickly might have been shot had they attempted to take out the gunman alone.

[Olivarez] said,

“The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that – of course, the American people need to understand — that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots.”

“They are receiving gunshots. At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.”

Note first: Olivarez contradicts the official police statements, which said no one engaged the shooter. He says they did — there’s no evidence of that. He then says that the policy is to confront an active shooter to prevent a loss of life. The chilling part of that interview: he was concerned the officers could have gotten shot.

Of course, they could have been shot. It was an active shooter situation.

The school was defenseless, it was an elementary school, and they were the only armed response possible. They did not act.

There were people who wanted to act, though. Parents.

Let’s go back and tell one of the stories the WSJ captured:

“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez, who after learning about the shooting drove 40 miles to Robb Elementary, where her children are in second and third grade. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

Mr. Escalon said officers inside the school were evacuating students and school employees from the premises, as well as calling for backup. “There’s a lot going on,” he said.

Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, was also waiting outside for her children. She said she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner. After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.

Ms. Gomez said she convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service said deputy marshals never placed anyone in handcuffs while securing Robb Elementary’s perimeter. “Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school,” he said.

Ms. Gomez described the scene as frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.

You could call this a back-and-forth between anxious parents and police/LEOs responding to a highly distressing event. Texas authorities are denying any of these events happened. It’s a “he said, she said” situation.

The problem is this: there are videos.

I used HotAir because they grabbed the videos in question and shared them. You can see parents being arrested, tased, and shouted at by police. And I get it at a certain level: if you’re trying to secure a scene, you need to keep other outsiders from making things worse.

But the police have testified they did not engage, and the shooting continued. And let’s be clear: the shooter shot at police. During the 12 minutes outside and hour inside the school, the shooting and danger did not end. They did not engage an active shooter. This event was not short — it lasted a while.

This is, to say the least, problematic policing. At worst, it’s outright cowardice by people with weapons and badges.

And it’s not just these outlets describing the parents being livid at the police response. The New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, NBC News, and more detail these points by various parents, including the WSJ and Fox News stories I linked above. The consistency of all parent accounts vs. the changing descriptions of what the police claim they did isn’t a good sign either.

A long story short: it looks like the police and LEOs failed every possible response to this event. Beyond that, police departments and school resource officers in other states are saying as much.

That brings me to my last point: the gun control debate.

I’ve written many words on gun control and all its failings and don’t intend to regurgitate that here. But I feel I need to explain something, especially to my liberal friends on this story. A tweet sums up the reaction I’m seeing from the left:

If a weapon is so dangerous that a squad of police officers are too afraid to confront a single person wielding it, that weapon should be banned.

First, the police response was abysmal. That’s not what we expect of them, and the shooter’s weapon is not why they didn’t rush in. They failed their jobs. Giving the police a pass so you can run back to your preferred narrative is the pinnacle of privilege. If you live in such a safe world that you can think like this, congrats to you.

Second, if people witness police not responding to an active shooter, they’re not going to push for gun control, confiscation, or more. They’re going to buy a gun to protect their family.

How do I know this? Because it’s happened after every mass shooting. And because for the last two years, sales of guns and the number of new gun owners have skyrocketed. Here are the numbers:

Eighteen percent of U.S. households purchased a gun since the start of the pandemic (March 2020–March 2022), according to new survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago, increasing the percentage of U.S. adults living in a household with a gun to 46%. Over this period, one in 20 adults in America (5%) purchased a gun for the first time.

According to the FBI, an average of 13 million guns were sold legally in the U.S. each year between 2010 and 2019, increasing to about 20 million annual gun sales in both 2020 and 2021.

Those new gun owners were overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic, or female. And the most interesting part: these new firearm owners hold similar or more rigid views on gun rights than your average conservative/libertarian.

If you’re a leftist, you need to ask yourself why there was a surge in gun ownership over the last few years. If you don’t understand, let me help.

You can argue for Defunding the Police or disarming the police and sending out social workers instead.
OR, you can plead for full-scale gun control with bans in place.

Pick one. You cannot have both. If the people get disarmed, the police have to be armed, AND they have to respond to events like we’re witnessing. If you disarm or defund the police, the people will arm themselves. If the police don’t respond appropriately, people will arm themselves.

If you want a world without guns, create a world without danger or violence.

Why?

Remember the John Jay quotation I led from Federalist 3: the first purpose of the state is safety. If the state fails to provide that, the people will do it themselves. Security is not optional.

The gun control debate is idiotic in this country. But if the police are going to respond to mass shooter events like what we just witnessed, you cannot look anyone in the eye and claim, with a straight face, that we need gun control rather than a comprehensive overhaul of how police respond.

Links of the week

The Food Crisis Is Bad. US Crop Insurance Makes It Worse: Federal agricultural programs give farmers strong reasons to keep fields idle. In normal times, that can make sense. But nothing’s normal now. – Adam Minter, Bloomberg

Egypt’s Bread Crisis Awakens Old Fears of Political Unrest: The world’s top wheat importer faces strains to its subsidized food program in wake of Russian invasion of Ukraine; ‘you should have seen the fight’ – WSJ

A Hot, Deadly Summer Is Coming With Frequent Blackouts: There won’t be enough energy supplies to go around as sweltering heat boosts power demand in the months ahead, putting lives at risk. – Bloomberg

What Princeton Did to My Husband: My alma mater is not the school I once loved. But Joshua Katz is exactly the man I knew I married. – Solveig Lucia Gold

India’s protectionist moves spark concern rice may be next – Straits Times

The Federal Reserve’s Next Act Will Test Market Stability: No one can say whether more aggressive tightening of monetary policy will disrupt the financial system’s plumbing and force the central bank to alter course, as it has in the past. – Jenny Paris, Bloomberg

Florida IG report: ‘Insufficient evidence’ for DeSantis critic’s claims of Covid cover-up: Three accusations by fired health worker Rebekah Jones were “unsubstantiated,” and officials she had accused of wrongdoing were “exonerated.” – NBC News

Spain Initiates Energy Austerity With Air Conditioning Limits – OilPrice.com

White House Eyes Restarting Idle Refineries to Tame Fuel Prices – Bloomberg

Iran Used Secret U.N. Records to Evade Nuclear Probes: Internal IAEA documents, obtained by Iranian intelligence, were sent to top officials amid an investigation into a suspected past nuclear-weapons program – WSJ

Southern Baptist Convention leaders publish long-secret list of accused ministers – Tennesseean