Not Police Cowardice in Uvalde. Nor Weak Gun Laws. Highest Concern of Gov. Greg Abbott is Polished Image
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s tragic theme that brave cops prevented what “could’ve been much worse” in the Uvalde school massacre is a sad and continuing lie.
In truth, bad cops thwarted both heroic good cops and parents who tried to save lives.
Yet Abbott and some other State of Texas officials try to minimize the role of cowardly or incompetent cops in the Uvalde school massacre. They show more concern for their public images than the horrors to victims, families, loved ones.
His deep anger was not directed at the shooter or law enforcement failures on site. In an astounding display of self-absorption, Greg Abbott reserved his anger for the person or persons who briefed him.
Worse, they work to minimize the role of heroic victims, parents, loved ones and even the brave police officers who were constrained by fellow officers, as detailed in the new Texas House of Representatives Uvalde Report. The committee also issued its report in Spanish.
We should not allow state officials who are responsible for law enforcement misconduct to shift focus from the initial hail of bullets from the shooters’ assault weapon the weapon making this massacre possible — and the abject, cowering failure of law enforcement’s response.
We now have factual evidence that rational gun laws could have prevented the shooter’s use of an assault rifle. That an 18-year-old can buy an assault rifle and unlimited amounts of ammunition with no notice to local law enforcement is an issue that Abbott and his people want to avoid.
Haircuts and Guns
We should not allow officials to conclude that the incompetence of officers on the scene didn’t contribute to massive suffering and death.
Nor should we ignore the fact that driving a car requires a license. To cut hair in Texas, you must take 1,000 hours of instruction and much more to be licensed. But any 18-year-old with mass murder on his mind can buy a military-style weapon designed for only one purpose: to kill as many people as quickly as possible.
While buying an assault rifle is easy in Texas, check out the hoops you must jump through to be allowed to hunt or fish in the State of Texas. Such requirements and actions are regulated by the state to enable conservation of “our natural resources” and serve Texas citizens “with the highest standards of service, professionalism, fairness, courtesy and respect.”
Our public officials must be accountable for the mistakes of law enforcement.
Any decent, public spirited official must begin to see the horrors of the needless suffering due to delays in rescue and the need to take rational steps to make future massacres less likely.
Deadly Inaction by Cops
The victims included the horribly wounded children — and those who taught and loved them — as they died or survived horrors which we cannot imagine, but which the survivors will never forget.
Law enforcement is responsible for every second that passed after the shooter’s entry and the massive suffering — as well as deaths — which would have been averted had the involved officers at Robb Elementary School promptly done their sworn duties.
Instead, the irresponsible officers thwarted brave officers willing to risk their own lives to protect others.
My mind keeps returning to the tragic irony of Abbott’s initial and utterly false statement to the press that “brave law enforcement officials” prevented what “could have been much worse.”
What happened was “horrible,” the governor said, adding “it could have been worse.”
The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do.”
He added: “They showed amazing courage.”
We now know that was untrue. Police showed cowardice and blocked the few officers willing to risk their lives.
Later, as we shall see, the Texas Governor’s outrageously self-centered reaction to proof he had spread horrible falsehoods on a world stage outraged compassionate people everywhere.
Legislative Report
The Texas House Investigating Committee report, especially at pages 58-60 and 68, identifies actual heroes. Among them are Uvalde Police Lt. Javier Martinez and Sgt. Eduardo Canales and Uvalde Schools Police Officer Ruben Ruiz, who were impeded, stopped, and thwarted by other law enforcement officers and denied permission to storm the classroom where then-surviving victims were bleeding out for more than an hour. Prompt action could have prevented additional shooting, alleviated suffering and saved the lives of some who were shot.
The House report reveals that Officer Ruiz “was escorted away from the building” by other police who go unnamed.
The Report doesn’t say who removed Officer Ruiz nor does it tell us why. However, early news accounts indicated that Ruiz, whose wife Eva Mireles was seriously wounded and bleeding out in the room the attacker occupied, wanted to use his weapon, and go to the rescue.
Who took away Officer Ruiz’s gun? Who thwarted his rescue efforts? The Uvalde House Report establishes that the shooter was active. So why did police thwart efforts to rescue the children and teachers?
There was, however, an effort to smear Officer Ruiz.
Instead of storming the classroom, where children with cell phones called 911 pleading for help, police set up a perimeter around the school. The school district police chief had no radio and, obviously, no plan despite being trained in how to deal with active shooting situations. Federal Customs and Border Patrol officers finally opened the unlocked classroom door, fatally shooting the attacker who local and state police were afraid to confront.
Ignoring Actual Heroes
The Abbott presser—and his subsequent claims—suppressed any mention of any of these true profiles in courage. Instead, Abbott created a false narrative about brave cops preventing an even worse massacre.
Why?
One answer lies in Abbott’s strange, hand-written notes, They suggest his inability to organize or conduct even the basics of an interview, let alone oversee or understand an investigation. The evidence also shows that the Texas Department of Public Safety gave the governor the misleading briefing which he bought hook, line, and sinker. It was “ based entirely on secondhand knowledge” which “repeated a false narrative,” per page 66 of the House Report.
What did Abbott do when he learned that the narrative he helped promote to the world was proven false? Abbott doubled down on his lack of compassion for victims as he thought only of his embarrassing performances.
His deep anger was not directed at the shooter or law enforcement failures on site. In an astounding display of self-absorption, Greg Abbott reserved his anger for the person or persons who briefed him.
Apparently, Abbott never thought to ask questions of the DPS official briefing him. Abbott apparently never thought to question his briefer’s source of knowledge, either.
That shows a disturbing kind of passivity and lack of diligence we also saw in those cops who thwarted efforts to storm the classroom and confront the shooter.
Abbott Livid
Later the governor announced that he was “livid,” not over the facts but over being misled.
That’s a feeble-minded for any responsible adult, especially one who bragged:
“I wrote hand notes in sequential order. When I came out on that stage and told the public what happened, it was a recitation of what everyone told me.”
Yes, the Texas Governor’s anger — in the face of a school massacre — was aimed not at the cowardly failure to storm the classroom, but at at law enforcement lies he repeated. He was angry because he was embarrassed.
Instead of owning his responsibilities as governor to lead, Abbott’s focus was on blaming others. And his focus was not on the cowardice and dishonesty by people in a state law enforcement agency he directs.
Well, at least we know Gov. Abbott’s priorities. Polishing his image comes first and foremost.
Governor Tells Lies
Abbott also lied during his presser.
He declared that he spoke to “everyone” and they all had the same story. That the stories, if he did hear them, all lined up perfectly would give any competent leader pause because that’s not how the world works. To a competent leader it would be a troubling signal that law enforcement officials had gotten their stories together to deceive.
The consistency, the lack of any conflicting facts, never gave Abbott pause.
Well, at least we now know that Abbott has a child’s level of gullibility.
In truth, Abbott didn’t speak to “everyone.” Hardly.
Per the House Report: Abbott was briefed by a mid-level Public Safety official named Victor Escalon who wasn’t based in Uvalde, wasn’t there to witness key events and relied entirely on secondhand information. Escalon only repeated what was a “false narrative,” according to the House report. Abbott never probed the source, depth and reliability of what Escalon told him.
What makes Abbott’s failure to inquire, and his lies, astounding is that Abbott is a lawyer. Indeed, he was a trial judge for three years and served more than five years on the Texas Supreme Court after then-Gov. George W. Bush appointed him. Imagine having your money—or liberty—judged by a man so lacking in inquisitiveness.
Former Texas Supreme Court Justice
How could a lawyer and former judge neglect to ask whether he was receiving a first-hand account?
Abbott’s personal notes are incoherent, scrawled, with big Xs on pages. They are a mess.
A teenager could have done a much better job of writing and asking his briefer basic questions like: How do you know this? Did you witness this or are you just repeating what someone told you? Who told you? What written reports did you examine? Who had a different perspective? What did the federal agents who stormed the classroom tell you? What did the Uvalde school police chief tell you about why he didn’t order the classroom stormed immediately? Was police fear of the assault rifle a factor? How long from the first moment a law enforcement officer saw the shooter until police shot him? Why did it take more than an hour for police to storm the classroom?
We now can see clearly that Abbott’s whitewashed, repeated and embellished lies that fit the governor’s pro-assault rifle fantasies, not the cold reality of cops cowering before a teenager with his finger on the trigger of a killing machine.
At his press ops, Abbott apparently missed—or chose to ignore— all news about the parents. He said nothing about police who didn’t just prevent parents from attempting rescues, but instead manhandled them and treated them with disrespect.
A Challenger Challenges
And Abbott certainly didn’t want to hear from the Democrat running against him this fall: Beto O’Rourke.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, and other Republicans denounced O’Rourke after he said “You are doing nothing. You are offering up nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”
They along with many law enforcement officials and town leaders at the governor’s press conference had O’Rourke hustled out of the room lest the public hear anything but their self-serving claims.
O’Rourke, unlike Abbott, is known for his compassion. O’Rourke met with, listened to, learned from, and comforted the Uvalde families.
Gov. Abbott appeared to be unaware of news accounts lauding Angeli Rose Gomez. the mom who wanted to enter the classroom to rescue her children.
It was a story, with video, so powerful that even Fox News covered it. Gomez
was handcuffed by officers to make sure she could not try to rescue her children.
Gomez found others who released her cuffs. She then jumped a fence, found her children in the school, and got them safely away.
Profiles in Courage
These Uvalde parents are profiles in courage for acting courageously while Texas law enforcement cowered, caring more for their own lives than those of the public they are sworn, and paid well, to protect.
So, Abbott’s press conference theme should not have been the lie that “brave cops saved it from being worse.”
A truthful narrative: assault rifles are so powerful that even heavily armed cops with Kevlar vests, shields and their own assault rifles cower in fear and hold back rather than risk being fatally shot with a weapon that only belongs in the hands of trained soldiers in combat and yet our Congress allows to be sold openly.
Astonishingly, the House Report somehow concludes there were no villains except the shooter. Why such a conclusion? The Republicans dominating Texas government fear the reaction if they focus on the simple truth that police do fear assault rifles in the hands of shooters with no regard for human life.
The real theme emerging from the House investigative committee’s fact-finding: Good laws worked to prevent a mass shooting until the shooter turned 18, when he aged out of gun purchase prohibitions.
What Abbott Won’t Talk About
The Report, at pages 34 and 35, shows that at age 17 he acquired assault rifle paraphernalia and tried to get at least two different people to make illegal “straw” purchases of weapons before he could legally buy a gun on his own. The two individuals are not named in the report, nor does it address why they didn’t report the attempts to law enforcement as required by U.S. Code 18, Section 4.
Facts prove the effectiveness of gun laws in two ways.
Both federal and state law prevented the shooter from buying guns before he was 18. Why anyone of any age can buy such a gun remains an urgent public policy question that Abbott and his crew have no interest in talking about.
Second, at least two people refused the shooter’s requests that they make illegal straw purchases for him. That the people the shooter approached refused to break both federal and state gun purchase laws for him shows that federal gun laws can be effective, they just need to be strengthened.
Imagine a law requiring anyone asked to make a straw purchase to report this to law enforcement immediately and in writing. Imagine a law requiring that law enforcement must be notified each time a weapon, even an assault rifle, is purchased.
Bizarrely, federal law requires notifying local sheriffs of handgun purchases, but not of assault rifles (see Pages 36).
Adding assault rifles to the notification requirements, expanding the scope to to sheriffs, state and municipal police agencies seems an obvious reform, but you won’t hear Abbott and his friends say that.
California Comparison
We also know that with sensible gun laws fewer people die. Consider the experience in another large state:
“California’s gun laws are among America’s strictest, helping the state deliver one of the nation’s lowest rates of gun deaths. In 2020, the Golden State’s rate of firearm mortality was about 40 percent lower than the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Public Policy Institute of California has determined that Californians are about 25 percent less likely to die in mass shootings, compared with residents of other states.”
The House report (at page 35) also notes that the gun seller said the buyer seemed normal. Unmentioned in the House report is the simple fact that the gun seller has a motive to lie because he will likely be sued by the survivors and the families of the dead.
Two Republicans and one Democrat served on the House investigating committee that produced the report, which tries to teach us that there are no villains except the gunman. The Report would have us believe they found no malice or ill motives on anyone else’s part even as it cites police officers to placing their own safety over their duty to protect innocent children and teachers.
Is that not an ill motive?
Good as it is, the Texas House report is only one step, leaves many facts awaiting examination, reflects certain partisan pushes for conclusions that are weak and will not help end massacres in modern America. It does factually prove that specific laws do — effectively — keep guns out of the hands of individuals prohibited by law from obtaining them.
And so long as people like Greg Abbott, who care more about their political image than the lives of their constituents, hold office we will see more mass shootings.
Author Image by Dalton DeHart.