Posted on 08/23/2022 11:02:18 PM PDT by robowombat
The Failure in Uvalde Was Societal
The preventable school shooting was due more to the breakdown of American institutions than any discrete cause.
Kevin Roberts Aug 9, 2022 12:00 PM
The needless tragedy that unfolded in Uvalde, Texas cannot and will not be stuffed into a convenient political narrative. It wasn’t about law enforcement ineptitude, though that was a factor. It wasn’t about rudderless, confused, and often angry young men, though that played into the events, as well. It wasn’t about unlocked doors or absent and unobservant parents.
The Uvalde shooting springs from the breakdown of our society’s most basic institutions—the fruits of the left’s long march to delegitimize the freest, most prosperous, and most generous nation in the history of the world. It’s about the fracturing of the family, the collapse of community, and the undermining of trust in our police.
The House report “The Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting” ignores these factors, but it’s still pretty damning. Yet it tries to soft-pedal its findings.
“Other than the attacker, the Committee did not find any ‘villains’ in the course of its investigation,” the report reads. “There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making.”
The committee did not look hard enough. Let’s begin with the failure at the family level.
According to the report, the shooter was born to a mother who struggled with drugs and her boyfriend, who left almost immediately. The attacker lived with his grandmother. Though he continued his relationship with his mother, it was uneasy. No one “raised” this kid; he was left to raise himself.
“The attacker began to demonstrate interest in gore and violent sex, watching and sometimes sharing gruesome videos and images of suicides, beheadings, accidents, and the like, as well as sending unexpected explicit messages to others online,” the report says.
The shooter was chronically absent from school—at-risk in every sense of the term, yet no one seems to have sought help for his learning disabilities, his bullying, or his increasingly dangerous behavior.
This is the end result of fractured families and the collapse of community. Everything we’ve learned about fatherless families and weary grandmothers raising a lost generation of children is on display here. We set our young men up for failure and then stand aside, aghast, when they fail.
The Uvalde report could be an epilogue to Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. When America’s communities were thriving, fewer troubled youths were allowed to fall through the cracks. Strong relationships between parents and teachers, and between families and their neighbors, served as the kind of safety net that can never be replaced by government programs.
Parenting was often done by the nearest adult at hand (and punishments often re-applied when Mom found out). Kids with scraped knees looked for the nearest grown-up. And people paid attention, at least, when a young person began to go astray. None of that happened here; despite every red flag, no one stepped in.
Finally, there was the feckless response by law enforcement leaders on-site at Uvalde. This was reprehensible. But was it also predictable?
“Despite obvious deficiencies in command and control at the scene which should have been recognized by other law enforcement responders, none approached Chief Arredondo or any of the officers around him or subordinate to him to affirmatively offer assistance with incident command,” the report states.
Perhaps this is because we’ve undermined and sowed distrust in our law enforcement officials. Retirements and suicides have increased in recent years. If we don’t treat police as trusted servants and protectors, can we expect them to truly serve and protect?
The Psalmist asks, “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” The answer for us, at least, must be to rebuild.
We must restore the family—the traditional family—to its rightful place of honor as the bedrock of our society. This means empowering parents to make the best decisions on behalf of their children on everything from vaccines to education; it means removing tax disincentives to marriage; it means recognizing that fathers matter. We must incentivize work, not welfare, because strong, independent families are the strength of this nation.
We must rebuild community. That requires individual effort beyond bumper stickers or social media level. It means getting to know your neighbors, attending church, getting involved in your kids’ schools. The left would divide us by immutable characteristics; we must respond by building relationships based on the characteristic that truly matters.
And we must reconstruct a civil society that produces and promotes the confidence needed to entrust the police with our public safety. Law enforcement officers need to know we’ll have their backs, so long as they have ours.
Institutional failure is the story behind the Uvalde tragedy. No single solution—not gun control, not red flag laws, not more DEI officers in schools—will suffice. We must address the disease, not the horrific symptom. And that means restoring the institutions that made America the last, best hope—for all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kevin Roberts Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., is president of the Heritage Foundation.
Unmentioned here, as it is unmentionable, is whether Arredondo’s ridiculous behavior covered him desperately trying to contact some narco trafficante cutout to find out whether the shooter was a ‘muchacho’ and therefore protected or just a stray nut. People who live in the Neches Strip constantly talk in general terms off the record as to how powerful the cartels have become in the area from the river to San Antonio. Short of martial law, which is impossible to even imagine, there is no way to retake the region that has been throughly infiltrated and police and governments bought off and intimidated. This is absolutely taboo to talk about in any media.
Very nearly 100% of the school shooters have been losers. It makes me wonder if a hybrid education in a trade, where they can earn some money while going tomschool might ameliorate some of this.
This gets to the heart of it all.
The failure was LIBERAL.
It’s more simple than that. It’s called cowardliness
Actually, had the police done their job and not acted like cowards...
Gee, not one mention of the shooter being a mentally ill tranny?
It was about cowardly cops who tazed and cuffed parents so they couldn’t protect their kids.
This
Societal?
Really?
So if it wasn’t for the ‘societal’ issues, the Uvalde police would have stopped the shooter instead of standing around with their collective fingers up their asses and preventing parents from doing what they themselves should have been doing: saving children’s lives?
The war on traditional fatherhood, straight white men and ‘toxic masculinity’ might be a part of the problem. The 19th century popular literature was full of stories of fatherless boys ( dad died he didn’t run off) who were paragons who went to school, worked full time to help support mom and younger siblings and rose to a respectable estate. Check the true story of Captain George Wallace of the US Army who is about the only heroic figure from the white side on the dismal day of Wounded Knee (he was the soldier who loved peace and made the Lakota his lifetime object of study and he died trying to stop a battle not cause one.)
One odd aspect that you never see much about....this police chief (Arrendondo) and his resume. What exactly did the guy do for the past 30 years?
I was never faced with a moral choice such as those police had but I did once suggest to a company commander and a master sgt that what was being done was dangerous and foolish. The response was ‘Fu, no one asked you.Get the F back in formation or I will kick your ass and charge you with indiscipline. Things went sideways and battalion staff covered it up.No one killed but a real goat screw ensued.
Another deliberate blank spot. Like what did FDR’s son who became a MG in the Army AF actually do?
Jonty30 is on the right track. Family breakdown started with the pill, then no-fault divorce, then Roe v Wade, and finally with courts overwhelmingly giving custody and financial support exclusively to women. Our institutions have done their damned best to relegate men to second-class citizenship, if not to strive to make them seen as subhuman.
Moral leadership is treated as criminal by authoritarian structures that deny the effort to make decisions to end violence and heal broken lives. The demons of indifference to the needs of others and insistence upon protecting one’s personal interests have invaded police, teachers, ministers, and care takers of all types.
Uvalde is the casual consequence of indifference to the suffering of children couched in the sincerely held belief that risking one’s comfort to help someone in trouble is foolish. We have come to believe that evil is the undeniable way of the world and nothing can or should be done to stop its plunder.
Our society is broken by wickedness. We are sickened by moral corruption. Pornography, abortion, atheism, and hatred are the 4 horsemen of our epoch. We stand against them at our peril but stand against them we must. The few who know this have kept their powder dry. The time to end this evil reign by calling upon the power of God and marching in his army is nigh.
Diversity. You can’t have more diversity and at the same time expect society to remain stable.
I hope you are right, as the current status quo took years to infiltrate our culture, few grasp its pervasive rot. A friend’s son asked a pertinent question, ‘why should anyone tell the truth about any situation? Those who do and accept any blame will be destroyed. Truth telling just means being punished amid a huge hypocritical clamor and fake moral outrage by those who are practicing CYA which is the new national default model.
Satan’s minion’s do literally appear to be among us. Take a look at this post and the picture of the ‘nurse’ perpetrator:
Traveling nurse, 52, is charged with murdering veteran, 97, ‘after illegally administering shot of “something special” and disabling his oxygen machine’
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