Uvalde suspends elementary school principal in latest effort to find a scapegoat for police inaction during massacre

sad to think they could have had better security if they’d paid for enough janitors instead of paying for their own school police department :confused:

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that is some mighty fine reasoning they have there.

now i don’t know where you would hide children in a public school to keep them safe from an ar-15, but it’s good to know that locking the doors would have given them time to lock the doors

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This is an objectively false statement.

In many (most?) schools there is a single authorized point of entry during the school day where guests, visitors, delivery folks etc. are expected to enter and sign in at a front office. So in many cases all a shooter would need to do to evade security measures would be to ignore the sign-in sheet and start murdering people. Or enter at the beginning of the school day with all the other students. Or hop a chain-link fence. Or force open a door or window. Or shoot students as they were leaving the school. Or find any one of a thousand other ways to carry out a mass shooting.

Schools are not fortresses or maximum security prisons, nor should they be expected to be.

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Yep. People also need to remember that schools, especially middle and high schools, consist of multiple buildings with multiple doors. There is generally a fence surrounding the campus and a central access, but fences–even tall ones–can be easily climbed.

Exactly. Students need to go to their lockers, use bathrooms, go to office, which means the leave building A to go to building B and then retun to building A. The doors to these buildings are not locked. Teachers could try to keep students in their classrooms for the entire 57 minutes, but then parents would complain.

It all comes down to the easy availability of semiautomatic guns.

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Maybe. It’s definitely a standard best practice, if not one used by every school system. It’s certainly been a best practice followed by every school that my children have attended (they have used an intercom for allowing entry during the day).

It’s also pretty clearly recommended as a best practice here.

I understand that it’s not a foolproof security measure, and it’s certainly failed in some other school shootings. We’ll never know if it would have helped in Uvalde, but it couldn’t have hurt.

What, exactly, have I made up? I’m also not sure what I’ve said that implies I’m indifferent to their deaths.

It’s a good thing most shooters haven’t realized they could commit mass murder in grocery stores and shopping centers, because nobody would imagine businesses could function under those kinds of conditions. Of course schools can’t be either but somehow we have decided to pretend and blame the victims when they aren’t. :unamused:

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The cops would have been able to do their jobs properly if we just LOVED THEM MORE

Everybody clap your hands for the cops’ precious “morale”—Tinkerbell isn’t dead, she’s just sleeping

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Locking doors may be a best practice for keeping perverts out, but they are not going to do much against a guy with a lot of firepower on a suicide mission. Maybe if they start designing schools as underground bunkers with single, secured points of entry and exit…

But the problem is that things have come to that in the first place.

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and while you tried to “clarify” your way away from the way that statement sounded by saying–

you still keep making this about your feelings based on your perception about the locked/unlocked status of a door in the face of a determined shooter and 376 law enforcement officers who refused to act, a perception which is disputed–

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IIRC, the initial complaint the police had about school security was that a door was locked not that a door was unlocked. At this point, it’s Schroedinger’s door.

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I hate to break it to you, but your children don’t go to a school. They go to a prison.

That is not a best practice in any modern educational system.

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SURPRISING MATH FACT: However we add the waveforms together, nothing is ever the cops’ fault

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Those are imaginary numbers.

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Well, whichever it was, it must have been wrong! How else could 21 people have died while the door did nothing to prevent it?
(Very bitter /s)

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All the evidence to date suggests that all the school security measures you’ve proposed amount to little more than security theater when it comes to their efficacy in preventing mass shootings.

Even if it was possible to turn a place like my kids’ school into something akin to a high security prison (it’s not, because it’s one of countless school campuses around the country comprised of multiple buildings that students move through throughout the day) I don’t think it would be a good thing to force my children to attend school in a high-security prison.

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Have you never been in a public building? All public buildings have doors that can be locked from the outside while providing an easy way to open them from the inside. Usually in the form of a nice wide bar that can be easily pushed while running.

I think I’ve made it very clear that, in my opinion, a principal who fails to enforce a school’s security protocols has committed a fireable offense. I’ve also made it clear that I do not believe that in any way absolves any of the other people who failed to do their jobs. This especially includes the aforementioned law enforcement officers.

I think I’ve also been clear that believing the door should have been locked does not mean that I think it was the only thing that went wrong or that locking doors is a panacea that will prevent all school shootings. If that has not in fact been clear, then let this stand as my assertion that that is in fact what I believe.

If the principal’s statements turn out to be correct, then I will take back my assessment of what should happen to her and apologize. I’m a bit cynical about it, though, because there have been a lot of statements from people I this tragedy that have deflected responsibility and then later proved to be false.

I suppose. It’s a major public school system in one of the most progressive cities in the country.

This would seem to back up my assertions that it’s a common practice (though saying “every school system” may have been a bit of an exaggeration).

All of those people are police.

I think you may be misunderstanding what that document means when it says “controlled access.” That means that unmonitored doors are often locked but monitored doors are not. It’s also VERY common for students or teachers to wedge doors open for ingress/egress, especially in hot weather such as in SW Texas in summer. Not every door is unlocked, but not every door is locked. It is literally impossible to run a school with every door locked. Even more so in warm climates during hot weather, as many schools simply don’t have AC. Doors are propped, windows are open to let as much air flow as possible.

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Those tax dollars are better spent so Qomrad Qruz could take VeruQa to Qancun. /s.

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I believe this is close to the design required. Probably still too many points of entry.

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