Understanding the failure at Uvalde

Just about every aspect of the law enforcement response before, during, and after the May, 2022, mass shooting atrocity at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was a failure, the U.S. Justice Department has said in a blistering report released last Thursday. While the botched response has already been well documented, the 610-page report offers the most complete account yet of just how a gunman could massacre 19 fourth-graders and two teachers and yet nearly 400 law enforcement officers, some just down the hall, failed to intervene.

The report chronicles a litany of “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training” at every level. But the most egregious failure was responding officers not reacting appropriately to the incident as an active shooter situation. Since Columbine, a fundamental precept in active shooter response is that the first priority must be to immediately eliminate the threat. “Everything else,” the report asserts, “including officer safety, is subordinate to that objective.” Such an effort “must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available to those first on the scene.” In Uvalde, this didn’t happen.

Instead, the first responding officers entered the school—impressively—within three minutes of the gunman firing his first barrage into the child-filled classroom. Propellant smoke, bullet casings, and active gunfire made it clear where the attacker was. A team of officers advanced toward the threat before they were fired on from inside the classroom. They retreated. What followed was a 77-minute lull in which an increasing number of local, state, and federal officers—heavily armed, some in armor, with ballistic shields—did a whole lot of preparatory things, or some really nothing at all, just outside the killer’s door. During that time there were at least six separate instances of gunfire from within the classrooms, totaling approximately 45 rounds. Any one of these instances should have pushed the loitering officers to take steps to stop the killing. They did not.

Christian charity demands that we not discount the terror the police officers, many surely inadequately trained, must have felt, nor that we ignore the psychological or institutional conditions that can paralyze large groups. Charity ought also to couple with humility and demand as well that those of us who have not been so tested not proclaim too confidently how we would ourselves react to direct gunfire aimed our way. But Christian duty, fortified by that same charity, must also make other demands. One would be that grown men ought never to do nothing while children are slaughtered.

Continue reading at WORLD here.

Marc LiVecche is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College in the College of Leadership & Ethics. He is the author of The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury.