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New report on Uvalde mass shooting exposes why law enforcement sat on their hands for over an hour [1]
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Date: 2023-03-20
The Texas Tribune reports that very early on in law enforcement’s engagement with the Uvalde shooter, they were warning one another that he was in possession of “an AR.” In an interview with investigators after the mass murder, Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page said that once they realized the suspect was handling an AR rifle, “We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”
Every single person in this photo is soaked in the blood of children.
“We weren’t equipped to make entry into that room without several casualties,” Uvalde Police Department Detective Louis Landry said in a separate investigative interview. He added, “Once we found out it was a rifle he was using, it was a different game plan we would have had to come up with. It wasn’t just going in guns blazing, the Old West style, and take him out.”
It is clear that even if police had been able to quickly stop the shooter upon arriving on the scene, the casualties at Uvalde would have been almost as high as they ended up being. A large part of that is the fact that the shooter carried a weapon that is made to murder things as easily as possible, while also being able to carry it around as easily as possible.
Meanwhile, gun groups from trying to sanitize online information around mass shootings to try and reframe the AR-15’s legality as an issue of personal safety, and not the public health crisis that it is. They are not alone. Many gun fetishists try and take issue with technicalities. Calling an AR an “assault rifle” will send a gun nut off on a big tirade about knowing the differences between the two classifications. But the fact remains: Arguing that there are even worse and more powerful guns than the AR-15 is not the argument you think it is.
Nine people were killed and another 27 injured when a gunman identified as 24-year-old Connor Betts opened fire with a AR-15 style rifle in a popular entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio.
In February, in a move to try and both own the liberals and make conservative Christians seem to be the most terrible voting block in recent memory, Reps. Lauren Boebert and George Santos co-sponsored a bill to make the AR-15 the “National Gun of the United States.” Boebert, who came up through the right-wing gun fetishist world, has also recently joked that Jesus of Nazareth—the guy all of Christendom is based on—wouldn’t have been crucified if he (or is it “He,” Mrs. Boebert?) had owned an AR-15 rifle.
After the mass murder in Uvalde, Texas, the conservatives in Uvalde and across the country have: come up with a plan to spend tens of millions on bulletproof shields for police officers; spent money on trying to fight the release of public shooting records connected to the failures of Texas law enforcement that terrible day in Uvalde; placed more AR-15 rifles into schools—but in safes; and have vowed to ban kids from attending drag shows to protect kids.
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Sen. John Thune says Americans need AR-15s to fend off ‘prairie dogs’
In the wake of Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Republican promises to bar kids from drag shows
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