This is what I heard frequently now that the immediate danger is over in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. I hear people blaming other people, no one ready to stand up and say “we messed this up”. After police officers arrived at the school, they stayed outside the classroom for almost an hour while children were being murdered.

Everyone says that the responders to a school have been trained, and know exactly what to do. But what happened? Where was the training? As parents began to arrive at the school, and pleaded with the police to break-in and stop this horror, the police refused.

Inside, children were calling emergency services at 911, and begged for people to save them. Children whispering, hiding themselves in dark bathrooms, in other classrooms and other small places where groups of them hid. All the while pleading for the police to come. Essentially, pleading for their lives; 10-year-olds pleading for their lives, while police stood outside the classroom while the killing continued, doing nothing. The police were armed, allegedly trained for this very event, and they did NOTHING.

Some of the children have begun to speak out about their ordeal. The one that touched my heart the most, was the young girl who smeared her dead friend’s blood all over herself so the gunman would think she was also dead and not shoot her. There is no way that does not leave her psychologically damaged. This 11-year-old should be thinking about roller skating, riding her bike, being happy, not about her dead friend’s blood on her body. We know what that young girl said, because it was relayed by a female reporter on CNN. She talked to the woman reporter because the young girl is now too afraid to talk to men. She is too scared to appear on camera, because she is now afraid that if her picture is shown on the television, another gunman will come and find her and kill her, too.

As parents gathered outside the school, they began urging the police to go inside and stop the shooter. As the number of parents outside the school grew, and were trying to get the police to go inside and stop the shooter, the police began to threaten the parents with tasers, to keep them away and to “calm them down.”

The saddest part of the hour that the gunman was in the school with the children alone is that some of their lives could possibly had been saved if the police had gone in and shot him. Some of them could have been saved from bleeding out; pressure and dressings could have been applied to the wounds until the ambulances arrived and paramedics could have taken over treatment.

The one teacher who was murdered had a husband and four children. Her husband has since died of a heart attack. I think that perhaps he could not handle losing his wife. I think prayers should go out for him, as well as his wife, and for their orphaned children, and I hope that there is other family who can take them in, because this is a terrible, awful tragedy for them, also.

Namaste,

Idealisticrebel