But the people I’ve got real heartburn with are the people who were supposed to come and rescue them. Yes, I’m referring to the police shown getting themselves organized while crouching behind trees and squad cars outside Norris Hall. And this criticism especially is directed at the SWAT types in their helmets, flak jackets, and high power automatic weapons.
What the hell is all that gear for?
What the hell is all that training for?
Bragging rights down at the local bar?
Some extra bucks in the paycheck?
Oh, is it so they can go in and confront and outgun the bad guy?
Oh, really?
Well, you couldn’t prove it by the way things went down in Norris Hall.
The officers were probably very good at getting the students out. They’ve trained for it; all very organized and professional, I’m sure. Maybe they should have been more concerned with finding and killing the shooter quickly.
The very moment the first shooting started in Norris Hall, it should have been full of cops - armed with whatever they had - ready or not - confronting anything that even remotely resembled a shooter. And, even if one went down, they should have kept coming at him hard until they got him.
As it was, the killer roamed the halls for what? An hour or more. Unchallenged, it appears. They didn’t even kill the SOB. He shot himself.
Yes, maybe a few cops and innocent students might have been killed or injured. But in the calculus of this day, that would have been an improvement.
Their caution actually aided the murderer ... 32 (possibly more) dead, a score more wounded.
Yes, this is harsh, and I'm probably wrong but there's enough here to know they didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory today either.
I’ve been in only one situation even remotely similar to this and I panicked. A police car drove right past me and my abductor when all I needed to do was turn the wheel and cause an accident to free myself. When the time came that the truck was slowed down enough I jumped out and ran as fast as I could, even weaving back & forth because I was convinced I would have a few rounds coming my way. But I learned on that day that people do panic, it happened to me. When you’re stuck inside 4 walls, the fight-or-flight syndrome can go off into the weeds. As a p.s. to this story, about 15 years later I saw an article that had a picture of someone who looked like him, so I read the article — it was about a guy who had been executed in California for picking up hitchhikers, raping, torturing & murdering them.
Other than that, I find myself nodding in agreement to what you posted. When I see the videos of Columbine, Rodney King, Virginia Tech, et al, I see a lot of police officers standing around. In the massacre at San Ysidro McDonald’s restaurant, one of the police lieutenants actually called out that the code was not Green (don’t fire on assailant) but it was Red until he got to the scene. There might have been 2 more lives lost just because he wanted to be in charge. But they’re full of high-fives when they go after 92-year old ladies who could just as easily be picked up at the grocery store. So whenever I see a situation like that where the suspect could have been picked up ahead of time at the laundromat or whatever, I put in a keyword of “adrenaline cowboys”. But this situation does not apply because the policy makers didn’t stand around and plan this activity beforehand, they just responded to a known dangerous situation and went into self-protection mode.