May 27, 2022: Uvalde Reflection

We do not have all the facts yet about the tragedy at Uvalde, but we do have some information and can certainly speak about some of the important lessons for every school. If as reported by WSJ the shooter shot outside for 12 minutes before coming inside, a part of the painful reckoning from this incident will be the tremendous guilt properly felt from all those who failed to protect the students at Robb Elementary.

1. Access control is very important. School buildings can and in many places have been hardened where they are difficult to access if you are not supposed to be there. This is only extremely rarely a mass shooter, but not infrequently involves the risk of contraband smuggled into schools, non custodial parents seeking to pick up children etc. There should be serious consequences for those who prop open doors, and generally for those who violate access control.

2. School resource officers who are unarmed are not effective at stopping people who are armed. "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight" is an idiom that became popular in my view because it is so obvious.

3. The "fatal funnel" of doorways are effective for defending. I am a pretty good shot. Airsoft is an effective way to learn lessons without long term damage, but the truth is that if I faced off against a determined attacker armed with a hand gun and they have an AR 15, I am almost certain to lose. I do not think the solution is for teachers to go to schools carrying an AR 15. Thankfully there is an easier solution. A reason already given as to why police waited and did not rush in to attack the shooter in Uvalde is that he was behind a locked steel door. The incredibly painful irony of this situation should not cause us to lose sight of the obvious solution.

If I had to get children in a classroom away from a locked door and I knew that I had to kill anyone who came through it with a handgun (which is what needs to be the posture of a locked down school that is effectively protected from a school shooter) the shooter would die. It doesn't matter if he has an AR 15 and I have a pistol, if he has to break down a door and come through a doorway and I am defending students, I feel quite confident I could empty my magazine into his body before he made it into the room.

4. The trauma of shootings like this is real. My children are not allowed to use the internet yet except to watch Dude Perfect videos, but they are reading the Wall Street journal and are praying for those in Ukraine, and for the families impacted by these mass shootings in Buffalo and now Uvalde. As a child I am old enough that our drills were in case of the USSR lofting ICBMs (and I am not sure why getting under the desk would have helped with that). Children need to know the truth, and the comforting part is that it is incredibly rare for a mass shooter to attack your school, but the part that should be sobering is that there could be an attack someday, and so you need to listen to your teachers and be prepared to run and hide.

5. The last part is the part that makes my stomach hurt most from what I think I know about Uvalde. It seems that the school wide communications was not working. The shooter crashed his vehicle next to the school and fired shots outside it. He then walked over to the school and entered in an open door (failure of access control) and whatever protocols existed for a lockdown did not happen, so he went into an unlocked classroom and locked it behind him. Those teachers who were ruthlessly murdered would have responded to protect those sweet children if they knew a shooter was coming. The schools I know most intimately here in the city where I live have had excellent leaders. Some of them have first hand experience with school shootings. They not only have access control, they have protocols for informing the whole school about a problem and going into lockdown.

Best case scenario is that guys who cut their face and brag about it at school are given the mental health help they need and also added to a system that makes them unable to legally purchase firearms. In the rare and horrific case of a suicidal person who wants to get famous attacking a school, the best case for that is they are killed outside the school without being able to get in. If they are able to get in, the best case is they are killed by the SRO before they can harm anyone inside. This requires 3 things, access control to the building, armed SRO, and a lock-down plan that teachers and students take seriously and follow in an emergency.

Do not wait for federal action. If you are a parent with concerns find out what is happening at your child's school. Most that I am aware of are much more prepared than it seems Uvalde was. If a terrorist came on a plane with guns and a bomb because the airport decided not to do any screening, we would be talking about the airport system failures, not saying there is nothing we can do except ban bombs and box cutters.