At 11:31 a.m. on May 27, 2021, Salvador Ramos, who had just turned 18 years old, walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and started murdering people. Over the course of an hour he would shooting a total of 21 people, including 19 children, the youngest of whom was only 9-years-old. As horrific as this was though, it was actually his third act of violence.
Earlier in that day Ramos had shot his grandmother. She, surviving the gunshot, contacted the police who soon were began a manhunt for Ramos. As he was fleeing the police, Ramos crashed his car into a flood control channel near the elementary school. This was his first act of violence. His second came swiftly after when two people from a nearby funeral home, having seen the crash, start over to it to see if he was alright. Emerging from his car, Ramos starts shooting at them. They flee and survive unwounded. At this moment a teacher in the school, having seen the crash and the attempted murder, calls the police and reports what she has seen. Remember that by this point the police knew who he was, that he had already tried to murder his grandmother, and actually had mobilized police forces then in the act of hunting him down. So what do they do?
Nothing.
After his crash, Ramos stood outside the school and just fired off rounds at it with no police response. Uncontested, not even being stopped by a school resource officer, then Ramos walks through a backdoor in the school and right into Room 111 and Room 112. Unopposed, he then proceeds to murder 2 teachers and 19 children in cold-blood over the course of an hour. An hour. In less than ten minutes after his crash there are six police officers on scene, in the school even! And what do they do?
NOTHING!
No, they do something worse than nothing. By simply standing around the police made it possible for a madman to murder women and children with impunity. Eventually there were 19 police officers on scene and they still did nothing. They stood around and waited while a mass murdered slaughtered school rooms full of children. They stood there while children in the school called 911, as they’ve been trained to do having been told the police will come and save them from the evil people trying to hurt them. At least seven phone calls were made from two children are made over the course of the shooting reporting where Ramos is and what he is doing. Repeatedly these children reported that Ramos was murdering people right in front of them. Repeatedly the police stood outside and did nothing.
Finally, after an hour of giving Ramos free rein to butcher children and after taking over an hour (remember they knew about him before he even entered the school) the police finally managed to get their “specialized tactical team” organized so that it could enter the school and stop Ramos. That specialized team? Border Patrol agents with tactical shields, not even the Uvalde police’s SWAT team which supposedly exists for just these kind of crises.
The only people who actually tried to save the children being massacred were private individuals – the parents of the children in danger. And we have video evidence of the police response to them:
While the police couldn’t be bothered to save the children being slain, the police sure did everything they could to stop the parents from doing anything to save those kids. No amount of begging, pleading, or action on the part of the parents could convince the police to do anything. Well, anything other than threaten the parents, which make no mistake is exactly what is happening in that video above. You have to ask yourself, “Why would terrified parents who want to save their children not rush in to do so?” Why didn’t more parents agree with Javier Cazares and decide to rush the school and save their children, damn what the police think?
I’ll tell you the answer: Because a man, a police officer, in tactical gear with multiple weapons is standing in front of them whose very presences is a threat – “Do what I say or I can beat and kill you.”
The police might as well have been partners with Ramos because their actions are the only thing that made it possible for him to murder those children. These people learned the hard way what us voluntaryists already know – If you’re a civilian then the police on the scene are not your ally, they’re you’re enemy. Which is why the police had no problem attacking, handcuffing, pepper-spraying, and tasering the unarmed parents trying to rescue their children while the police simultaneously let Ramos wantonly murder children.
The Errors of Gun Control
In all of this terror there seems to have been only one hero, Angeli Rose Gomez. Her children went to Robb Elementary and when she heard what was happening she drove over 40 miles from work to get there. Of her, The Washington Post wrote:
“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez …“They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
Ms. Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that she was one of numerous parents who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school. After a few minutes, she said, federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.
Ms. Gomez convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free. Around her, the scene was frantic. She said she saw a father tackled and thrown to the ground by police and a third pepper-sprayed. Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.
Uvalde Shooter Fired Outside School for 12 Minutes Before Entering
Why does it matter that the hero of the entire tragedy was an unarmed working mothers as opposed to the well paid, highly armed, militantly trained government controlled police forces?
Because of what all of this tells us about gun control -namely that it is a delusion.
The typical arguments of those who want the central government to regulate and strictly control (even forbid) private gun ownership goes something like this:
- Guns are dangerous and are used to kill people.
- If the government strictly controlled who could or couldn’t purchase a gun and what kind of guns they could buy, this would lead to less guns in private hands.
- Less guns in private hands means it will be extremely hard for most people to get guns and kill people with them.
- This would mean less murders and gun deaths overall.
- At the same time, the government would use its access to guns to keep the public safe. This would be accomplished through the governments local law enforcement agents – the police.
The logic of gun control rests on two faulty premises.
The first is that more restrictive gun laws will keep you safe. There is pretty sound evidence against this assertion. First, when you look at statistics for school shootings specifically the ranking is a hodge podge of states with a wide variety of gun regulations. Number one is California, the state with the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Second is Texas, (in)famous for its minimally restrictive gun laws. Third is Illinois, where Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and some of its highest murder rates. The Top 10 continues like this, alternating between states with more restrictive gun laws and states with less restrictive gun laws. The number of murders in each state follow a similar pattern, though it is worth noting that many of the states with the least murders and mass shootings – such as Utah and Idaho – also have some of the least restrictive gun laws. Clearly something is at work here more than just “more gun laws make people safer,” otherwise it should always be that murders and mass shooting skyrocket in states with less gun laws and should be continuously plummeting in states with highly restrictive gun laws. But we don’t see that.
In terms of the nation as a whole, Ryan McMaken has already done a terrific job showing that once you stop cherry picking your comparisons excluding contrary data the United States doesn’t look nearly as scary when compared to almost all other countries in the world. The belief that, “Stricter gun laws lead to less murders and this is why places like France have fewer murders than the US” simply ignores all the countries where gun laws are far stricter than the US and there are more murders.
Look, for example, at Mexico.
Mexico is a wealthy country with the world’s fifteenth largest economy, one of the members of the G20 countries, and has some of the strictest gun laws in all of North America. There is only a single gun store in the entire nation, and it takes six months of background checks and licensing applications to even purchase a handgun. Yet, the murder rate in Mexico is nearly five times higher than the United States.
Why? If restrictive gun laws lead to less murders or mass shootings, why does Mexico have more murders with its more restrictive laws?
I’m sure many people would love to propose their own pet theory. I know I have my own. But that is rather the point. It turns out trying to explain why some societies have more violence in them than others is much more complex than the simple-minded assertion that restrictive gun laws prevent murders. The connection here between countries with gun laws and countries with fewer murders seems to be more correlation than causation. Which also explains why all crime has been trending downwards for decades, why the rate of firearm homicides has fallen by 41% since 1993, and why the percentage of people 12 or older who were victims of violent crime declined 15% from 2018 to 2020 – all despite Americans owning more firearms than ever.
The second faulty premise of government gun control arguments is the assertion that once disarmed the people will be protected by the police or other armed government agents. Uvalde is a perfect laboratory for testing this theory – all schools are. In them you have an entire population of completely unarmed people, a fact know and advertised to the population at large. There are usually one or two police on site and more typically arrive within minutes of an emergency call. So, what happens when the people are disarmed and are dependent on the government for protection?
Uvalde happens.
There defenseless men and women, defenseless children, were slaughtered by a madman while armed government police agents did nothing. The police in fact did worse than nothing. They actively prevented people from trying to stop the killer. And this isn’t the first time this has happened either, nor will it be the last.
From this and the other cases like it we can see that gun control is a lie. Every school shooting is proof that gun control is a delusion, that the unarmed masses will not be protected from armed thugs by armed government police. It doesn’t work in Mexico where gun control allows the drug cartels to slaughter unarmed Mexicans with impunity and it doesn’t work here. Defenseless people will not be protected by the government. The police will not keep you safe. The police do not exist to protect you or your loved ones. They will not rescue you when you are in danger.
And why? Because, as Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Lieutenant Chris Olivarez so bluntly put it when explaining why the police in Uvalde didn’t do more, “if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot.”
There you have it. The police will not risk their lives for you or your family because it could endanger the lives of the cops in question and they do not exist to protect you. If you thought it was the job of the police to risk their lives to protect you then you’ve been fooled.
The police will stand by as madmen slaughter your children. The police will beat you, pepper spray you, and taser you when you do try to do something to save your children. The police will strangle you for selling cigarettes. The police will shoot you for reaching for your license and registration, in front of your 4 year old daughter. The police will shoot you for answering the door to your home. They will break into your home and shoot you in the middle of the night. The police will strangle you to death in broad daylight for falling over. They will not protect you. They will not protect your children. And they will not risk their lives for yours. The police exist solely to use violence to enforce the orders of those in power. Nothing more.
These are simple facts, facts which disprove the entire argument for gun control even before we include the fact that the United States government has a long history of slaughtering civilians by the millions, including American children. Trusting it is handing a mass murderer a gun and expecting him to do anything other than kill you with it. Anyone who truly believes in gun control in order to protect innocent lives would start by taking guns form the most dangerous, most violent, most destructive group in society, the one that has beaten, tortured, oppressed, and killed more people than any other – the government. Want to save lives? Disarm the State, not the people.
History and logic makes it clear. Whatever the dangers of private gun ownership, the dangers created by gun control are far worse.
The safest hands are still, and ever will be, our own.