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this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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There is zero reason to be pro-police here.
And who gives a fuck about the weapon used. That does not excuse their lack of action.
Rightists always have such misguided takes.
The people defending the police here are literally saying that the children should fend for themselves in situations like this because it's too dangerous for the police.
Fuck. That. Noise.
The thin yellow line, everyone. Laugh and point whenever you see the blue stripe on the American flag. It's a joke.
Pistols don't beat AR15 rifles. If the opponent outguns you, you need to wait for backup and bigger guns. Basic tactics.
And if everyone is using big guns during a hostage situation, the "Good Guys" have a huge disadvantage due to the penetrative effects of powerful guns. Good Guys don't want to kill children with missed (or even hit) shots. A headshot vs the shooter would not only penetrate the shooter's skull, but also the wall behind the shooter. A wall that you're not sure if the children or the teachers of the school were hiding behind yet.
Why is that? Does the AR15 generate a forcefield around the person wielding it making the shooter immune to any "lesser" weapons? Catching a bullet from a pistol will kill you just the same and this shooter was severely outnumbered. What police lacked was the guts to actually put their lives on the line to protect these children, even though they love to talk about how they put their lives on the line every day as they arrest people for weed or hand out tickets for going 5MPH over the speed limit.
The police know it is a machine gun, the police know that many bullets can be fired in a very short period of time. They know the bullets kill. Ban guns. If you want to hunt, use a bow, or don't hunt.
Yes. Its called effective firing range.
A typical pistol (ex M1911) has an effective range of 50m and only when you've got very good practice. A typical AR15 has an effective range of 550 meters (11x the range).
The effective range is a measurement of the accuracy of the shot. In effect, if you have an AR15 at 100 meters, you've got better accuracy than a cop at 10meters. (Effective firing range is mostly about accuracy and bullet placement. Rifles are much, much, much more accurate than pistols)
Learn to tactics bro. Rifle range and accuracy is a real thing. You don't fight enemies with rifles if you only got a pistol dude. Furthermore, you don't spray-and-pray with inaccurate pistols when there's lol hostages in the same room as the shooter.
This isn't a video game. This isn't a comic book where "the main character" holding a damn pistol has more accuracy than enemy riflemen. This is real life.
You are talking about a school. Effective range doesn't much matter past 25 meters. They are clearing rooms, not football stadiums.
And there is precedent for shorter range weapons being more optimal. Knife vs gun for instance https://youtu.be/Upxfo_jBrDE
I guarantee you that an AR15 will shoot quicker, more accurately, and with more penetration even at as short at 10 meters vs a pistol. And probably with a larger magazine to boot (fewer shots on the pistols).
The fact that you're arguing otherwise is a misunderstanding and/or ignorance of basic gun tactics. At any range, the AR15 is a superior weapon. 500 meters, 50 meters, 10 meters, 5 meters. AR15 always is better. Especially when body-armor is in play so that penetrating effect is even a bigger deal.
Speaking as a combat marksmanship coach for the Marines. I respectfully disagree with you in this instance.
Your facts while mostly true in a void do not account for training, tactics or the situation.
If i was standing next to someone that has an ar15 i would take a pistol or a knife all day. That AR can't do jack if i grab the barrel and point it away from me.
I appreciate you sharing your experience. And yes, I'm well aware that knives (and batons even), can beat a gun in short ranges. The famous Filipino Eskrima fighters of the early 1900s (the culture my parents came from) taught that lesson. And legend holds that pistols like the M1911 were specifically designed for those close-quarters combat situations (too many US soldiers dying to the Filipino eskrima stick fighters that US paid R&D to figure out a solution back then).
But the hallway of a school can stretch many dozens of meters, far longer than the distance you can close with a knife, and even stretching the effective firing range of a pistol and knife.
And given even the presence of a door: the knowledge that the AR15 on the other side could likely penetrate the door makes breaching operations difficult. And the presence of hostages / kids in the classroom prevents many weapons / breaching techniques from being used.
You keep varying the situation we are talking about. In the instance of the school. 5 officers with pistols should be able to take a lone, cornered assailant.
Half of the problem with clearing an area/building is not knowing where the enemy is. Knowing where they are allows for tactics, numbers and training to overcome firepower/body armour. Several pistol shots to body armour will incapacitate an untrained/un accustomed person to the pain.
I don't expect typical Police cops to be familiar with room breaching exercises. I want cops who are criminal law majors and other specialists in legal matters (knowing when to arrest someone, when it is legal and proper to escalate, etc. etc). I don't want soldier cops or warrior cops.
Under the assumption of untrained cops, they did fine. They cornered the assailant into a single room and then called in the SWAT team. The SWAT team is who took too long to deal with a cornered assailant.
I am firmly against treating cops like soldiers. And I get it, you were a soldier. I have huge respect for what you've done and what soldiers represent. But I also don't want soldiers patrolling the streets. The job of a cop is very different. I certainly don't want cops running exercises or focusing on these exceptionally rare events as part of their regular training either. I'm fully against it.
The Uvalde school shooting occurred in a school.
Not particularly long looking hallways.
Besides the department had the choice to make the situation pistol vs rifle (to use your paradigm) instead they left it unarmed vs rifle.
They cornered the shooter, and then waited for SWAT (the actual combat specialists of the police force). SWAT team took too long afterward, but the initial police response was quite heroic as far as I can see. The initial police did what they could with inferior weapons and less knowledge and less training.
This initial skirmish from 11:35am to 11:40am seemed to be fine. The long wait for SWAT after 11:40am is really where things get more ambiguous, but I will not support regular officers charging into these situations without training and armed with mostly pistols at that. If we do that, then we're accepting a significant escalation of warrior-cop mentality and expecting cops to have far more deadly-arms training than I'm honestly comfortable with.
This doctrine has been out of standard practice for over two decades. In response to Columbine the new mass adopted doctrine is go towards the gun fire. This is information any officer who has joined in the past ~25 years would have been taught.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/15/us/florida-school-shooting-columbine-lessons/index.html
Would you rush in to suicide yourself if you knew that it wouldn't help anything?
Some of the parents whose children were being slaughtered were willing to try while police stood around scrolling Facebook on their phone, but police arrested them for it.
I don't even understand what people think. Do you seriously think that thr cops there were in on it like a big conspiracy? Do you think the cops knew that the soccer moms could take out the mad man with armor destroying bullets, and they just wanted to save the madman from them?? Just think about it like a strategic video game, what do you genuinely think is the best way to deal with such a situation?
Look, I get it, cops generally suck. So many of them do. This isn't about that. Think about this situation objectively as a little mental exercise. The world is not so black and white all the time.
Do you not understand that the bullets tear through walls? Running in there with no plan to piss off someone with a gun that tears through walls while there are a bunch of kids behind those walls is stupid. It puts kids in extra danger. How is this a difficult to grasp concept?
You know what else puts kids in extra danger? Standing around for hours doing nothing while the shooter continues to slaughter them. Not only that, but they went in the school and shouted for kids to call out to be rescued, except they didn't rescue them and the kids who did call out were then shot. Your take is absolutely insane and indefensible. These people are specifically trained and paid to deal with these types of situations not stand around scrolling on their phones while children are being murdered just feet away.
Your poor reading comprehension has completely prevented you from being able to understand what I've said. I never said the police made the right choice. I never said cops are generally good. In fact, I've repeatedly explicitly said the opposite. OP brought up some interesting points about what they see as the main cause of the catastrophe, and I said they are interesting points that should be considered. As soon as you and other people who are unable to see past the emotions, ego, and the perceived hive mind saw that we were saying something other than "this was definetly 100% preventable, but all the cops in that town are cowards" you flip off your brain and go into mindless attack mode. It is OK to consider things. You don't need to fly off the handle and instantly resort to petty name calling whenever anyone disagrees with your your initial, unthought-out hunch. The biggest takeaway from this is that, and if you can realize it, then it will absolutely help you when interacting with people in your life.
This is a giant strawman. What names have I called you? You're the one doing mental gymnastics to defend the lack of action from these people who are paid and trained to handle situations like this.
You claim you "never said the police made the right call" yet you're sitting here claiming every one of their actions were correct "because AR15 shoot far." Absolutely absurd.
Go back and reread, you've massively misunderstood. The whole discussion is about how this could be prevented if AR15s were not so easy to get, and yet people are focused on the cops.
Specifically AR15 and how this particular gun tears through walls.
The penetrative effects of a bullet traveling at 300% the speed of regular pistol rounds is far deadlier and damaging than just a pistol. And you have all these dumbasses who are like "Yeah but pistols are still deadly".
Remember that energy is velocity squared. We're talking about like 900% of the energy per shot. The amount of firepower we're just casually accepting as "normal" in the USA is ridiculous, and is the real tragedy of the Uvalde situation. And everyone who is using this moment to blame the cop when they should 100% be blaming the gun-culture of AR15 is part of the problem.
We already have examples of what happens when gunowners take matters into their own hands. And that person's name is Kyle Rittenhouse. I have very little respect for that mindset.
You make really good points. I hadn't thought about this situation in this light until you brought it up. It is very alarming how difficult it is for people to understand that situations can be nuanced. It's like they just want everything to be black and white and simple, and they just want to be completely on the side of whatever they detect the majority is thinking. In this case, it really makes a difference as to what policies should be focused on.
Yes.
I would do something, not sit around worrying about my own arse while children are being killed.
And then you get shot. Worst case scenario, you don't die, but instead scream out in agony in the crossfire, getting 3 or 4 other guys in trouble as they come in to drag your ass away from the firing zone.
Firefights suck. And shitty people thinking they'd be heroes in this situation only make it worse for everyone.
OK, so explain. What would you do? "Something" isnt a plan, talk strategy. You have a gun that can shoot 1 bullet per second, can't go through the armor that the enemy is wearing, and you can hold about 8 bullets in your gun. The enemy has a gun that goes through your armor and the walls like they are butter, shoots 10 bullets per second, and holds 4x as many bullets as you do. There are kids all around, the walls may slow down your bullets, but not the enemies. Do you wait for bigger guns or do you go in there with terrible chances and high probability of getting even more kids killed?
I generally don't like cops, but if they charged in there on a suicide mission and got even more kids killed, then people would just be complaining about how stupid and shortsighted they were.