There is a distinctly disturbing irony to the way Uvalde police responded — or should I say, did not respond — to the shooting at Robb Elementary School last Tuesday.
Heartbreaking footage of parents pleading with police to intervene as the shooting was underway has been making the rounds on social media. The video shows officers standing behind a barricade erected outside the school, keeping desperate parents at bay, as the gunman executed 19 children and 2 teachers.
Not even the most skilled literary legends of yesteryear could conceive of a more apt metaphor for the cowardice of Washington politicians. Much like the Uvalde officers who stood behind that barricade, watching safely from a distance as 21 innocent lives were lost inside that school, our elected leaders continue to hide behind tiresome excuses and empty rhetoric as another American town suffers through the aftermath of another mass killing.
It took about an hour for law enforcement to enter Robb Elementary and confront the shooter. Their excuse for refusing to intervene earlier? They were afraid of getting shot, according to Lieutenant Chris Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
That excuse isn’t going over well with anyone at all. Nor should it. Even the loyal-to-a-fault, back-the-blue bands of police supporters are gnashing their teeth over this incident.
Police get paid to put their lives on the line to defend the innocent. Those officers had both a professional and a moral obligation to intervene. They failed to fulfill that obligation and deserve all the criticism they’re receiving. To be fair, however, the excuse that “they could’ve been shot” is at least understandable, even if it is nonetheless completely unacceptable. If I were an officer at the scene of a mass shooting, I’m sure that I, too, would be afraid of losing my life.
But what’s Congress’s excuse? That they’re afraid of losing their jobs?
During an interview with Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business channel, Republican Senator Ron Johnson offered up his own ridiculous excuse for why Congress refuses to take meaningful action to address mass shootings. After Cavuto wondered whether “stiffer background checks” might have prevented the Uvalde massacre, Johnson tucked his tail between his legs and pivoted to the GOP’s new favorite boogeyman: critical race theory
“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” he told Cavuto. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues, but again, the solution lies in stronger families, more supportive communities — I would argue renewed faith. We’ve lost that.”
“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools,” he continued. “Now we’re teaching wokeness. We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”
Are you kidding me? Critical race theory? Wokeness?
If cowardice could be quantified, Johnson’s pathetic response would rival the combined weight of all the bodies of all the victims of all the mass shootings this nation has suffered since Columbine.
Johnson is hardly the only Republican running away from questions about gun control. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) blamed the breakdown of the traditional family unit and the “glorification of violence” while accusing the left of wanting to “crack down on law-abiding Americans” through gun control laws. Republican representative and professional demagogue Paul Gosar (R-AZ) insinuated that the shooter’s gender identity and immigration status were somehow to blame after a debunked rumor that the shooter was transgender and an unauthorized immigrant spread across social media. And after he was asked by a British journalist why shootings like these only seem to happen in America, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) simply got up and walked away.
I’m quite sure that if you pressed Senator Cruz on why his party refuses to engage in good-faith discussions about gun control, he would respond by insisting that the Second Amendment is not negotiable. But that response implies that every single gun control measure that’s been proposed is a violation of the right to keep and bear arms, and that’s simply not the case.
Red flag laws are already on the books in 19 states and the District of Columbia. There’s no legitimate reason why a federal red flag law shouldn’t at least be on the table. Universal background checks poll extremely well, and their constitutionality is not in question. There’s also a strong argument to be made that the minimum age for purchasing a semiautomatic firearm should be raised to 21, a proposal that even former President Donald Trump openly supported.
If Republicans want to argue against some, or even all, of the gun control laws that have been proposed thus far, they’re certainly free to do so. Some of the proposals that Democrats have made are indeed a bit questionable, both in terms of their potential effectiveness and their constitutionality. But to run away from that discussion altogether — to hide in the shadows of Capitol Hill, regurgitating one sorry excuse after another for their cowardice — is an indefensible abdication of the GOP’s duty to help find a solution to this problem.
It would perhaps be a little easier to tolerate that cowardice if they could at least be honest with the American people and confess their fear that they might lose some of the debates about some of these proposals. But that would require them to first be honest with themselves about the genesis of that fear, and there’s even less of a chance of that happening than there is of ever passing sensible, rational gun control laws in America.
