This is going to be a pretty limited post. I live north of San Antonio and have driven through Uvalde quite a few times. It seemed like a sleepy town with the usual police radar. My personal beliefs are that we need either trained and armed school security or at the very least, trained teachers/admins with concealed carry--in every school.
On gun control, there are reportedly over 800 million guns in the US with only 330 million people. You are not going to successfully confiscate those guns. And a semi-automatic handgun (what almost every gun owner carries) would be just as effective as a semi-automatic AR-15 in classrooms and hallways. Banning AR-15's is a waste of time, and most gun owners have at least one. Please note semi-automatics fire one shot at a time; none of them fire in full-auto or burst mode. It only takes a few seconds to switch magazines, so the AR-15 and handgun distinction in a tactical situation in a school is negligible.
Now to my main point. I would like to address a statement that I have seen in nearly every recent article. This quote is from the New York Post on May 29th: "The first responders wrongly believing the situation had gone from an “active shooter” to a “barricaded” scenario, and waited more than an hour after the shooting started before they entered the classroom and shot the shooter." I'm ignoring the grammar mistakes.
But in a school shooting, where multiple shots have been fired, you have to assume kids have been shot. You cannot assume that all of those shot are dead. Or that there are no more living (wounded or not shot) in the area of the active shooter. Time is essential; children could be bleeding out or slowly dying. That's why current guidance is for police to enter schools immediately and take out the shooter. Training for a 'barricaded' school shooter scenario (as Uvalde reportedly did two months earlier) is just wrong. So is any assumption that a school shooting situation has transitioned into a 'barricaded' scenario.
The police chief and/or any other first responder leadership that concurred in the decision to hold-off and treat the situation as a 'barricaded' shooter should be fired and/or prosecuted for manslaughter. For their own dignity and honor, they should resign immediately.
