It’s not easy to make sense of the 77-minute video shot from an overhead camera near the classrooms where 19 children and two teachers were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24.
The video — released last week by the Austin American-Statesman — has an audio track that is garbled to near-unintelligibility. The gunshots — more than a hundred — are audible, but the screams of the terrified children have been, appropriately, erased. The camera captures an important slice of the events of May 24, but only a slice.
In other words, a significant amount of the context is not represented in the video. But there’s enough to deeply disturb most viewers.
An initial attempt to subdue the shooter fails. Then the video shows more than an hour of powerful-looking, well-armed men milling around in the hall, apparently uncertain what to do.
Sometimes they barricade behind ballistic shields and train four or five weapons down a long, empty hallway toward the classrooms for minutes at a time. Other times they stroll up and down the same hallway, seemingly unconcerned.
Sometimes the officers — representing at least five law enforcement agencies — appear to be examining the building’s floor plan. Sometimes they text or talk on their phones. They gesture, wave, signal each other, appearing to plan and strategize, but then for long minutes nothing happens.
At one point, an armed, helmeted member of the sheriff’s department strolls casually through an area previously barricaded by four or five men to use the wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser.
In short, it’s hard to tell what — if anything — is happening. The word that kept occurring to me as I watched was “confusion.”
Experts better trained to evaluate situations such as this one were unsparing in their criticism. Former Austin, Houston and Miami police chief Art Acevedo called the episode “the most incompetent response that I’ve ever seen. It’s not defensible.”
Acevedo is correct: The inaction of these officers is impossible to defend. But at the risk of appearing to defend them, I offer two elements of context that aren’t immediately apparent in the video:
Despite the bluster and bravado from some quarters, none of us knows how we would behave in these circumstances. After the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17, former President Donald Trump said that he would have run into the building “even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
Sure. But people of a more thoughtful turn of mind must concede that while they think they know what they would do, they can’t know for sure until they are in the situation.
Of course, this isn’t a defense of these officers. Bad leadership and a failure of courage appear to have immobilized them. If they don’t have the initiative and courage to act, they are in the wrong profession.
The second element not immediately apparent in the video isn’t a defense of them either. But it illuminates the question of responsibility for the failures in Uvalde.
The Uvalde shooter grew up in a culture awash in guns. It’s not just the 400 million weapons in the hands of private citizens. Gunplay is an essential element of our entertainment, in movies, television and video games. Kids can’t be blamed for growing up thinking that weapons are part of what it means to be an American.
The Uvalde shooter evidently had mental problems, but no one paid much attention. Nevertheless, as soon as he turned 18, we gave him legal access to high-powered, high-capacity weapons of war.
A few things the officers milling around confusedly in the hallway could be sure of: The kid was in a defensive position. He was probably ready to die. He very likely had a magazine in his semi-automatic weapon that holds at least 30 rounds.
If you judge these officers harshly, well, they deserve it. But don’t forget that we’re asking them to do something that you and I might not have the courage to do. And the most important thing that would make these officers’ jobs a little safer — limiting access to high-powered, high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons — we absolutely refuse to do.
