We may have been shocked to see the Uvalde cops protecting a school shooter from parents (and that is what they were doing) but we shouldn’t be surprised: It will always be easier, when you have a gun, to point it at someone who doesn’t have a gun. That goes for school shooters, policemen, and everyone else—including the government.
That’s point number one.
Point number two is that no one will fight as hard for your life, your family, or your property as you will. Jacob Albarado is the off-duty border patrol agent who grabbed a shotgun and rushed into the school. His being an agent meant the police recognized him and let him pass their cordons, but it had nothing whatever to do with the self-sacrificing impulses that took him to the school: Albarado’s wife and daughter were in the building. He was there as a father and a husband, not as a Border Patrol agent. It was the heroic act of a family-man, not of a government employee. The media has chosen to ignore this fundamental fact entirely and instead pursues the ridiculous contention that Border Patrol agents are somehow inherently braver than policemen.
The other parents at Uvalde must have felt the same desperate impulses that drove Albarado, but they lacked the official imprimatur (and the firepower) to act. Meanwhile, the police who were on the scene only as government employees and not as parents behaved differently: After all, they had lives of their own to consider—and perhaps families of their own as well. In the end they considered them so much that they chose their own lives and families over the lives of the children they were sworn to protect.
It is a virtual certainty that fewer children would have been killed at Uvalde had the police not responded at all. It is likely more parents would have been killed saving their children, but I doubt there is a single bereaved parent who would not take the place of his child if he could.
The tragic lesson we derive from this shooting is not a failure of gun control but a failure of government, for reasons of fundamental human behavior. Never rely on the government to protect your life or your property. When you most need them, they’ll be right there—on the other side.
What the government is supposed to bring to bear in emergencies are the resources of the community. But resources decoupled from human relationships are worse than worthless—they become an instrument of evil. They become guns pointed in the wrong direction.
They become the police at Uvalde.
Severing human connections—for instance, by locking people in their apartments alone for a year—is one means of rendering people weak and helpless. Disarming them is another. The government doesn’t want to face off against you and your friends, much less if you can put up a fight. Remember that you are the human-battery that powers government: The only limit to how much energy the government can extract from you is your willingness to work, and their ability to compel you to work. The only limit to their ability to compel you is your and your community’s ability to defend yourselves from them. No individual criminal can ever be as dangerous, steal as much, or murder as many people as the government can—and does.
So think twice before you surrender the smallest sliver of freedom, no matter what the pressures or the inducements may be. Safety in exchange for freedom is the government’s oldest con game. And that is why the 10 Republican senators who have signed on for “compromise” gun legislation may be the 10 most disgusting people in America today.