TEXAS EDITORIAL ROUNDUP
Those of us fortunate enough to have been spared direct involvement in a mass shooting perhaps assume that communities undergo stages of grief, so to speak. They move through initial shock and disbelief, to horror, to a communal coming-together — “Uvalde Strong” — in support of those who have suffered grievous loss and then, ultimately, to acceptance. Perhaps we assume it’s a process similar to the five-stage model of death and dying pioneered by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. For survivors, for a community, Kubler-Ross’s final stage, acceptance, would be necessary for life to go on.
However apt the comparison, the experience of most communities is not that simple. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators, has been battling truth-deniers for more than a decade. Members of First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, survivors of a mass shooting that slaughtered 26 Sunday morning worshippers, are fighting the federal government over a financial settlement more than six years after the worst mass shooting in Texas history.
Uvalde is the most recent aching example of the lingering devastation of a mass shooting. Uvalde survivors and family members, to put it bluntly, continue to get kicked in the teeth.
Nearly two years after the small southwest Texas city lost 19 of its precious youngsters and two of its teachers in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary, emotions are still raw, still jagged. Too many of those in a position to help ease a community’s suffering — politicians and law enforcement in particular — continue to fail those they presume to serve.
The latest outrage is an independent investigation commissioned by the Uvalde City Council and conducted by a retired Austin police detective turned consultant. The 182-page report exonerates all 25 Uvalde Police Department officers who, for the most part, responded to the shooting on the morning of May 22, 2022, by standing around in a school hallway and doing nothing while children died in nearby classrooms. The 25 were among some 400 law enforcement officers from eight local, state and federal agencies who showed up at the school and waited as children and teachers were trapped for an agonizing 77 minutes with the 18-year-old shooter before officers killed him. The consultant concluded that the Uvalde officers acted in “good faith.”
Don McLaughlin, the former Uvalde mayor best remembered for cursing at then-gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke for interrupting a news conference Gov. Greg Abbott was holding, told the Texas Newsroom he was shocked at the conclusion exonerating the acting Uvalde police chief. “I don’t fault the officers as much as I fault the leadership, because those officers were put on hold at one point and were waiting for somebody to do something,” he said. “I honestly believe if those officers had been told to go in they would have.”
The report says that the acting Uvalde chief had no doubt the school was
