For nearly an hour, children in Uvalde, Texas called 911, pleading for the police to come save them. Instead, more than a dozen officers stood in the school hallway, listening to gunshots and waiting for a janitor to unlock the classroom door. Others were outside, tackling, pepper-spraying, and handcuffing desperate parents who tried to run into the school once they realized the police were just standing there.

Eleven year-old survivor Miah Cerrillo—who smeared a friend’s blood all over her body so she could play dead—cried when telling reporters about the police waiting outside instead of rushing in. She didn’t understand, she said, why they didn’t come to rescue them.

Americans have been sold a lie about brave men. A myth that assures us the police are there to help, and that the old men in suits creating laws are simply protecting us. We should be glad, they say, that these very brave men are there to keep us safe.

What they don’t want us to know, of course, is that these brave men are the most dangerous of all.

OXFORD, Mich. (WNEM) - New controversy surrounds who is responsible for police waiting outside a Uvalde, Texas classroom for nearly an hour before border patrol agents went in and killed the gunman.

The shooter killed 19 children and two teachers to at Robb Elementary School.

The Oakland County Sheriff said when chaos erupted in Oxford last November, his team didn’t hesitate, they did what they were trained to do.

“I know what’s happening right now in Texas and I know they’re going through, not just the worst day of their life, but having a lot of second layer questions of: why did the response do what it did,” Sheriff Mike Bouchard said.

Bouchard is recalling his own agency’s own response to the shooting at Oxford High School last November. He said it took minutes from the first 911 call to when the suspect was apprehended. Five minutes, in fact.

The day 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered, we held a moment of silence at sporting events around the country, then we played the national anthem, and we went on with our lives.

Players, staff and fans stood for the moment of silence, grieving the lives lost, and then we (myself included) continued to stand, proudly proclaiming ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave. We didn’t stop to reflect on whether we are actually free and brave after this horrific event, we just stood at attention.

When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now.

This particular time, an 18 year old walked into a store, bought multiple assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, walked into a school with an armed resource officer and its own police district and was able to murder children for nearly an hour. Parents begged and pleaded with police officers to do something, police officers who had weapons and who receive nearly 40% of the city’s funding, as their children were being murdered.

Sometimes it’s little details that evoke the biggest feels. I have been writing about the Uvalde massacre most of the week. I have been so focused on facts and argument, I haven’t sobbed. But the tears came this morning after reading a report by KENS 5, a TV news station local to that Texas community, where 19 fourth-graders were shot to pieces.

The report was an eyewitness account by a survivor of the shooting. The boy, whom the reporter did not identify, said he and a friend “heard the shooting through the door.” He added that, “I told my friend to hide under something so he won’t find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”

He recalled what happened after police came through the classroom door that Salvador Ramos had locked behind him. “When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the people in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her.”

That’s it. That’s the detail that got me. A child desperately needing to trust a caring adult. A child shot to pieces for needing and trusting.

Because of a cop’s incompetence.

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.

“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.

Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

An 18-year-old gunman killed his grandmother Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas, a majority Hispanic town 85 miles west of San Antonio, before going to a local elementary school. He found a teacher and 19 fourth-graders in a classroom. He locked the door behind him. He shot them to pieces.

The shooter is dead. Police broke down a barricade and killed him. Salvador Rolando Ramos went to Robb Elementary School, the site of the shooting. Not since Sandy Hook, nearly a decade ago, down the road from where I’m writing, have so many children been massacred.

Facts
Many facts are still being determined. Known is that Ramos legally purchased two semiautomatic rifles days before the rampage. One he left in his vehicle. The other he took with him. He wore a “tactical vest.” He left a backpack full of magazines at the entrance. Per the AP:

One of the guns was purchased at a federally licensed dealer in the Uvalde area on May 17, according to state Sen. John Whitmire. Ramos bought 375 rounds of ammunition the next day, then purchased the second rifle on May 20. On that day, an Instagram account appearing to belong to the gunman shared a photo of two AR-style rifles.

By Tuesday afternoon, Ted Cruz, US Senator from Texas, tweeted that he and wife Heidi were “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting in Uvalde. We are in close contact with local officials, but the precise details are still unfolding. Thank you to heroic law enforcement & first responders for acting so swiftly.”

In response, Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, tweeted: “Just to be clear fuck you @tedcruz you fucking baby killer.”

Bait
Perhaps no one in the Congress represents “gun rights” more than Ted Cruz. In a Senate hearing held the week after another 18-year-old gunman shot to pieces 10 Black people on Buffalo’s eastside, Cruz accused his Democratic colleagues, who proposed a federal red-flag law, of trying to criminalize the conduct of “law-abiding citizens.”

If the objective is to stop violent crime, what is effective is targeting actual violent criminals. The approach of today’s Senate Democrats is to try to go after the firearms of law-abiding citizens instead of targeting the violent criminals that are the real threat.

He said something similar last night on CNN:

Inevitably when there’s a murderer of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it, you see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens.

Switch
What Cruz is really saying, when he says pap like this, is that he and his party would rather have a debate over the Constitution, the Second Amendment and law. As long as we go along with that, they win.

There has been no way forward on gun control, because the framing of the debate is usually deadlocked, as rights against rights – the right of citizens to safety and security, and the right of citizens to bear arms.

Indeed, after Sandy Hook, the Republicans broke that apparent deadlock. The best means of security, they said, was more guns. GOP legislators loosened previous firearms restrictions “for safety’s sake.” Of course, in reality, they made guns more accessible to criminals.

Put another way, all this “law-abiding citizens” verbiage is bait. They don’t care about the fact that Ramos was a “law-abiding citizen,” as was Buffalo killer Payton Gendron, before turning to mass murder.

Don’t take the bait.

Democracy’s betrayal
Instead, switch.

The debate we should be having, if liberals would stop nit-picking, is about democracy and, within that context, equal treatment under law.

After the 2008 election, but especially after the 2012 election, the rightwing bloc of the Republican Party felt “betrayed” by democracy. After all, it created conditions by which voters elected a Black man.

In their eyes, the rule of law can’t include equal treatment, because “the rule of law” was never equal. It was racialized. In fact, “the rule of law,” for most of our country’s history, was “rule by white power.”

To the rightwingers, that’s the natural order of things. That’s what God intended for these United States. Matter of fact, rule by white power is the superstructure of this constitutional republic. Barack Obama’s election turned these orders of sociopolitical power upside down.

Suddenly, a Black man wasn’t solely subject to “the law.” Instead, he was enforcing it. Given that “the law” was never prosecuted equally but instead for the defense and protection of white power, you can see why rightwingers took “the rule of law” to mean “rule by a Black man.”

When democracy and the law are against you, what do you do?

You reach for a gun.

Violence is the goal
After Obama’s reelection, Republican governors and legislators began loosening previous firearms restrictions, allowing guns in churches, parks and other public spaces. The liberal reaction was befuddlement. After the bloodbath at Sandy Hook, what they were doing was insane!

Not to the rightwingers, though. After all, the sociopolitical orders of power that had once put them on top had been turned upside down. The oppressors had become the oppressed under this rule by a Black man. Expanding the range of guns was a way out of that predicament.

To restore the natural order – the rule of white power – they first needed to bring down the current one, to knock out its foundation.

As a result, in the decade since the Sandy Hook massacre, this country has witnessed one mass murder after another. Liberals and gun-control advocates blamed the GOP, naturally. They also blamed the NRA and “gun lobby.” But they were missing two crucial elements.

One, that to be for gun control is to be against white power.