US Politics: A Post-Roe Country

[Lord of Oop North]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Hey, what could go wrong with herding everyone to one location? Also, way to make burning down the school way more problematic.

Silly comment. You can easily have a door that allows emergency egress from interior but no access from exterior. There are literally millions of these doors in service across North America.

[Fragile Bird]

After the Floyd killing and the defund the police movement started, Canadian media investigated how much was spent on policing by municipalities. It’s 15 to 20% in Eastern Canada and slightly more in Western Canada. The Eastern Canada number may be skewed higher by Toronto, where 25% of the budget is spent on the police, a number people find outrageous.

And while I was typing this, a story came up saying a guy with a rifle was seen near a school in east end Toronto. Police went out to intercept him and the “young man” is now dead. Not much info yet, such confrontations automatically trigger an investigation.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Texas Transparency:

 

[Lord of Oop North]

 

7 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Texas Transparency:

These are pretty dumb comments. Done with complete benefit of hindsight. Breach the door? At that point, it is effectively a hostage situation.

Should the SWAT team have battered down the door and then rushed in firing? Come on. Can you imagine the response if that had happened? 

Quite honestly, the fact that the predominant opinion seems to be that the response should be that police go in guns blazing says a lot about the fucked up gun fetish culture that has caused this problem in the first place.

I agree with mormont, focusing on this aspect is not productive.

[Week]

33 minutes ago, Lord of Oop North said:

I agree with mormont, focusing on this aspect is not productive.

Frustrating as the police are, you are correct.

A person being able to arm themselves sufficiently to commit murder and intimidate police is the problem. C

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

42 minutes ago, Lord of Oop North said:

 

These are pretty dumb comments. Done with complete benefit of hindsight. Breach the door? At that point, it is effectively a hostage situation.

Should the SWAT team have battered down the door and then rushed in firing? Come on. Can you imagine the response if that had happened? 

Quite honestly, the fact that the predominant opinion seems to be that the response should be that police go in guns blazing says a lot about the fucked up gun fetish culture that has caused this problem in the first place.

I agree with mormont, focusing on this aspect is not productive.

I appreciate that Law Enforcement inaction may appear to distract from issues regarding Gun Control.  However, it highlights the insane degrees to which Law Enforcement in the US has been empowered and empowered with little or no accountability for that empowerment.

[Fez]

45 minutes ago, Lord of Oop North said:

 

These are pretty dumb comments. Done with complete benefit of hindsight. Breach the door? At that point, it is effectively a hostage situation.

Should the SWAT team have battered down the door and then rushed in firing? Come on. Can you imagine the response if that had happened? 

 

The whole point is it's not a hostage situation; it never is in these school shooting. Everyone the shooter can reach is dead until they are stopped. So yes, of course the police should breach immediately. Anything else is an absolute disgrace and any police there who refused to act should be charged with negligent homicide.

It doesn't take away from the need to address the underlying issues that fuck-ups should be investigated and punished as well.

ETA: It should also be remembered that, until now, this has been the conservative response; that "good guys with guns" would solve the problem. So yeah, it should be rubbed in their fucking faces that their "good guys" were cowards, inept, or scum.

[Zorral]

54 minutes ago, Lord of Oop North said:

Should the SWAT team have battered down the door and then rushed in firing?

Nobody suggested such a thing.  Nor was there a SWAT team present -- guess they were all busy battering down doors and rushing in and firing upon innocent persons elsewhere, as TX SWATS have done in the not at all distant past.

However, what in heck did the the Border Patrol who actually went in there, do?  They had to get a school custodian find a key to get into the classroom where the killer had killed so many and then was shot by the border patrol.

What is different about this and what you all are shrilling shouldn't have happened?

Moreover there was no confrontation between him and school police or anybody else when went into the school; it is now reported he "walked in unobstructed -- fucking useless ARMED all of them, the school police, the Uvalde police, etc.:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61600914

https://www.cnn.com/

The cops here and particularly in TX are utterly beyond control and not doing their jobs.  We haven't forgotten how our city's cops just ignored the organized criminal gangs who trashed and plundered my neighborhood in the summer of 2020 and DID NOT A SINGLE THING except laugh.

 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 hour ago, Ormond said:

I said there probably would be things to criticize them for. And that 40% of a small town's budget goes for the police force doesn't seem out of line to me, and hasn't resulted in huge salaries. (The school district is separate from the city so none of the money for schools is included in the city budget.)

I find 40% rather excessive. But I admittedly know very little of city budgets in the US.

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know, the lives of children have very little value in law, because they are merely children who have not yet proven that they actually have worth.

Adults, on the other hand, have track records and proven values. They have been invested in! Think how much money was spent to train those police officers! They own houses and cars and many are married with families! Their lives are important!

That is not entirely correct. Childrens' lives have value, while they are in their mothers' wombs. Their value just drops like it was a Trump business soon after birth. Admittedly, I used the term children rather generously to make that point.  I'd guess there might be a very small point in time (after birth, before going to school), when child's life has sufficient value compared to the second amendment. But as of now, we have to find it. Maybe if maternity ward shootings become a thing instead of school shootings. 

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

Children are replaceable, with other children. A dead child may bring grief and pain, but that will largely go away after a period of time. Not completely, but hey, just make another kid!

 

I've said it before, overturning Roe vs Wade might be primarily about keeping women financially dependent. But it's also about providing opportunities for late term abortions performed by NRA certified specialists at schools across the US. And for lawyers to work for the manufacturers of assault rifles. Why doesn'T anybody ever think about the lawyers.

[Zorral]

People in other countries and the vile toxic portion of the abbotts and costellos may throw up their hands in anger and despair that 'at such a time' people are talking about and criticizing police behavior and lack of action, criticizing THEM for their determination to have the entire country be an assault weapons arsenal on two legs, but people are talking about both things and criticizing the same politicians and cops that the rest of the country's been talking about and criticizing for years already.

Maybe people who don 't live in the USA are unaware of this?

In any case you cannot stop the media, the journalists and just people from talking and criticizing because it's coming from every quarter including D.C.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Lord of Oop North said:

Silly comment. You can easily have a door that allows emergency egress from interior but no access from exterior. There are literally millions of these doors in service across North America.

I know, the local cinema where I grew up had a one way emergency exit in every theater and it’s how we saw all the movies for free. 

But in this instance I was responding to what Cruz exactly said which was one and only one door for both entrance and exit. It’s a profoundly dumb idea and deserves all the mocking it’s getting.

[Durckad]

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I know, the local cinema where I grew up had a one way emergency exit in every theater and it’s how we saw all the movies for free. 

But in this instance I was responding to what Cruz exactly said which was one and only one door for both entrance and exit. It’s a profoundly dumb idea and deserves all the mocking it’s getting.

It's Ted 'A Nest Of Squirming Eels' Cruz. What did you expect? A not patently dumb idea?

[ThinkerX]

A victory of sorts on the climate change front. Not much of victory, I suppose, but a victory all the same:

Supreme Court rejects red states' plea to block Biden climate metric - POLITICO

 

The Supreme Court will not torpedo the Biden administration’s estimate of the social impacts of climate change, rejecting on Thursday a request from Louisiana and other Republican-controlled states to block agencies from using the metric in rulemakings and other decisions.

The decision means the White House can move forward with its plans to overhaul and likely significantly increase the number known as the social cost of carbon — a dollar value assigned to future damages from climate change. The current value is $51 for each ton of greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere, but experts believe it should be raised to as much as four times that amount.

Background: In response to a legal challenge led by Louisiana, Judge James Cain of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana — a Trump appointee — in February issued an injunction against any use of the social cost of carbon, which had been previously deployed by the Obama and Trump administrations. That decision threw a wrench into rulemakings, environmental reviews, lease sales and grant disbursements, the Biden administration warned.

[Jaxom 1974]

Regardless of where you fall on the issue of what the police should and shouldn't have done...something is rotten in the state of Texas with how this particular situation was handled.  There does need to be an investigation, and if need be, accountability. 

[Zorral]

Not to mention that the reason cops are armed to the teeth is that arming is supposed to stop this this, and they aren't stopping it.  It's just getting worse.

Guns have become the leading cause of death for American kids

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/gun-deaths-children-america

Not to mention the sheer outrageous business of the sort of politicians who support them in killing unarmed people every day, blather on endlessly about saving the lives of children by denying women reproductive health care, these kids every single day are being killed by the guns the politicians they support insist be unregulated and proliferate.

Nobody's going to stop the voters in this country talking about what happened in Uvalde and what the cops did not do -- and what they did do to unarmed parents.

[Zorral]

As a retired cop wrote elsewhere:

Quote

I was a police officer for 27 years, and after Columbine, we were trained to NOT "secure the scene and wait for SWAT" but to enter the building as soon as four officers were on scene, then enter, locate the shooter, and eliminate the threat. We trained extensively on how to do this. Later, the required number was dropped to two, and after Sandy Hook, the training was "It doesn't matter if you're the only officer there, you ARE going in." We got periodic refresher training on how to enter as a single officer, locate, and eliminate the shooter, including how to navigate stairwells, doorways, intersections and corners. I thought this training was national in scope, but I guess we do things differently in Pennsylvania than they do in Texas

There is going to be an investigation -- and the FBI is probably going to do it.

 Not that any of us expect it to result in anything more than that what's her name Gray report of Partygate in the UK.

But like you all in England who keep talking about partygate, we here in the USA will be talking about the cops -- hell, most of us have been talking about them for years already -- even though nothing changes except they get worse every couple of years, getting more and more and more, doing less and less other than harassing people -- and killing people -- who shouldn't be killed.

 

Also, this is a town that so heavily funds their police force that a town of 15,000 residents actually HAS A S.WA.T. TEAM. a SWAT team that toured the local schools just a year ago to get the lay of the properties and create strategies to deal with this EXACT situation. 40% of the town's budget goes to the cops.

https://www.vice.com/en/art...

Uvalde P.D. got a half-million dollars from Governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star,”

No SWAT team was deployed in this situation. The PD didn't end up helping at all.

[Zorral]

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, ljkeane said:

It does look terrible, and clearly they were wrong to wait given how it's turned out, but if he wasn't actively shooting people at that point I could see why they might be reluctant just to charge into a classroom full of kids he'd barricaded himself into. It's hard to see how that wouldn't result in a lot of kids getting shot. Obviously with hindsight that happened anyway but I could see why they might want to try and convince him to surrender or at least use the best trained people they have to go in.

Once it gets to that stage I don't think there are any easy answers. The solution is far, far stricter gun control to prevent it happening in the first place but that isn't going to happen unfortunately.

The thing is, ever since they stood around at Columbine, the actual tactical response to school shootings has very clearly been: law enforcement will enter the building and neutralize the threat quickly under all conditions. Here is a recent article that talks about this: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/15/us/florida-school-shooting-columbine-lessons/index.html
 

As a former middle school teacher, our lockdown drills are designed to work if law enforcement enters the building quickly and efficiently.
 

I have little doubt that the refusal to enter this school had more to do with the fact that these kids were primarily Latino (in Texas) more than "they weren't sure how to respond."

I know a lot of people here weren't teachers (or are not law enforcement), but the fact is that everything naysayers in this thread are saying would be overkill is exactly the rapid response training LEOs receive in active shooter situations. I remember hearing that once 3 officers are on the scene, they will then move into the building and not wait for more backup. The article I linked supports that.

We do lockdown drills, not evacuation drills, with the belief that we stay locked in our rooms for a short time, get the halls empty, and LEO will enter the building and quickly neutralize the threat. I personally think this is as good a solution as we can have until we ban guns in this country--getting the halls cleared so kids don't get caught in crossfire. But if you're police are going to sit on their asses like they did at Columbine back in the 90s, then schools need to rethink how to respond to active shooters.
 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

8 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Honestly it boggles the mind that people still give police the benefit of doubt in the US.

There might be a tiny fraction of decent police but that's it.

The rest is just in for power abuse and discrimination and no help to anyone that they don't consider on their side of the thin blue line.

I've been happy to see the shift from uniform love and support of law enforcement over the last few years. 10 years ago, when you brought up the issues with law enforcement, you were treated like a terrorist. Now people who disagree often just seem annoyed, but it isn't like it used to be.

[Mindwalker]

Deleted because it might have been fake.