UVALDE: What the Hell Were Cops Doing Outside While Kids Were Being Slaughtered in the School? [VIDEO]

Video emerging online from Tuesday’s schoolchildren massacre in Uvalde, Texas shows local police more concerned with stopping parents than stopping the killer.

Parents were pleading, “Give me the vest, I’ll go in there!” but some ended up in handcuffs instead of vests.

Before you watch this video, please remember that these are Robb Elementary School parents who have been waiting fruitlessly outside of their own children’s school while a madman was allowed all the time in the world to complete his rampage.

There’s no violence, no blood, and it’s still one of the most difficult videos I’ve ever watched.

Police arrest parents as their children are being massacred
pic.twitter.com/HGElai6Aax

— 🗯 (@vocdetox) May 26, 2022

What led to these arrests, at least in part, was what the Associated Press described as “frustrated onlookers” urging police to breach the school’s security door and stop the killer.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

Police put a stop to parents self-organizing to do themselves what the police apparently would not.

And it wasn’t like the police didn’t have time to prepare.

According to the AP, McCraw claimed that “The bottom line is law enforcement was there.” Police, he said, “did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”

But that claim doesn’t seem to hold up if you’ll read the key parts of the timeline of events, collated by Anna Kaplan for Forbes:

The Texas director of public safety, Steve McCraw, said during a press conference a school security district officer “encountered” 18-year-old Salvador Ramos after hearing reports of the crashed vehicle, and did not exchange gunfire, though the state later confirmed to NBC the officer was armed.

Ramos then entered the school, and the school officer followed him inside, where “rounds were exchanged,” McGraw said.

Ramos also fired shots from inside the school toward arriving Uvalde police officers outside of the school, causing injuries to some of the officers, according to Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine.

Ramos entered a classroom afterwards, locked the door and barricaded himself inside, killing 19 students in the classroom and two teachers, and injuring 17 others, before a tactical police unit eventually entered the room and killed Ramos.

Police don’t appear to have “contained” Ramos at all. Instead, he first got himself into the school, locked somewhat “safely” inside behind the security entrance. From there, the killer barricaded himself inside the classroom where his killing spree began in earnest.

I don’t know the details of the security door or how easy or difficult it might have been to breach. What I do know is that the door was no easier to breach after “40 minutes, an hour” had passed than it had been before.

What the police did do during that time was detain parents.

I never thought I would see armed Texans standing around while a gunman was killing children in a schoolhouse

Something has gone very, very wrong

— Davos Detainee Poso (@JackPosobiec) May 26, 2022

My friend and Townhall colleague Kurt Schlichter isn’t anyone’s idea of a #DefundThePolice-type progressive. He was, in fact, as a National Guard officer, sent to help quell the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

Nevertheless, Thursday morning on Twitter he described “such tactical stupidity — even cowardice” as “hard to imagine.”

“But if it is true, and I’m not yet sure it is, then wow…”

And yet, if it is true, it’s an almost perfect analog of how police failed to respond forcibly to the Parkland shooter.

Add the two together and, as Schlichter wrote, “you’re going to see a lot of cons rethinking defund the police.”

It’s been a difficult couple of days, and I hate to jump to any conclusions that might besmirch first responders trying to do their jobs.

But if they weren’t really doing their jobs, and kids and teachers might have been murdered after the killer could have been stopped, then that’s one of those “national conversations” we’re going to need to have.

And it’s a conversation much more important than another showboating attempt at passing more unproductive gun control legislation.