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Texas Officials Are Trying To Blame A Teacher For Uvalde Shooting The Texas Department of Public Safety is apparently blaming a teacher for propping a door open before the Uvalde shooting. The timeline according to the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, “11:27, we know from video evidence, 11:27 the exterior door suspected of when we knew the shooter entered. Ramos was propped open by a teacher. 11:28 the suspect’s vehicle crashes into the ditch, as previously described. The teacher runs to room 132 to receive a phone. The teacher walked back to the exit door, and the door remains propped open. — as reported by the director, there are two males at a funeral home that when they heard the crash, they went to the crash scene.” Officials claimed that they were holding the briefing to give the facts and not assess blame, but the first thing that they did was to blame a teacher for propping a door open. Texas officials appear to be going out of their way to blame anyone and everything, but the gun laws that made it easy for the shooter to buy an assault weapon and kill 19 children and two adults. It is unbelievable that Texas officials are trying to assign any level of blame to a teacher for this horrible crime. If assault weapons were not so easy to obtain in Texas, the situation would not have been as deadly. Texas is blaming a teacher when easy access to assault weapons is the problem. Something is rotten in Texas.

Fox News Pundit Still Claims Uvalde Cops ‘Saved a Lot of Lives’ and ‘Did a Lot of Right Things’ Tom Homan also blasted reporters for having the temerity to grill Texas law enforcement about the school massacre, calling their questions a “little insensitive…

Texas cops’ claims unravel: Police didn’t "engage" Uvalde shooter — but they cuffed scared parents Texas state police on Thursday walked back key claims they repeatedly made about the Uvalde school shooting after coming under scrutiny for failing to stop the gunman until 90 minutes after he arrived outside of the school. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and spokespeople at the state's Department of Public Safety said since the attack that school police officers "engaged" the shooter before he entered the school, praising law enforcement's "quick response." But DPS regional director Victor Escalon acknowledged during a hectic news conference on Thursday that police did not engage the shooter and, in fact, there was no school police officer there at all before the gunman entered the school. "He walked in unobstructed initially," Escalon said. The official said the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, shot his grandmother and crashed her pickup truck before going to the school. "He was not confronted by anybody," Escalon said. In fact, Ramos crashed his car at around 11:28 am but did not enter the school for about 12 minutes. The gunman got out of his truck and shot at two people across the street, Escalon said, before shooting multiple times at the school building. Ramos entered the school through an unlocked side door at around 11:40 am, according to Escalon. The gunman walked into a classroom and fired more than 25 times, the official said. Officers arrived at the school at around 11:44 am and tried to engage the gunman but came under fire and backed off. The suspect was in the classroom for about an hour as police gathered outside while worried parents begged officers to enter the building and stop the gunman. Escalon claimed police during this time were evacuating other parts of the school and at some point tried to negotiate with the suspect. Eventually, a Border Patrol tactical team arrived and breached the classroom, killing the suspect in a shootout, according to Escalon. RELATED: "Go in there!": People begged police to enter Uvalde school as gunman rampaged for up to an hour It's unclear why it took so long for law enforcement to stop the gunman. Data shows that most "active shooter" attacks in the U.S. end within five minutes, according to FBI data, but the Uvalde attack lasted 20 times as long. CNN reported that there were about 100 federal agents and local police officers on the scene. "They [didn't] make entry immediately because of the gunfire they were receiving," Escalon said while dodging questions from reporters. Parents who lost their children in the attack slammed the police response and the cops' narrative following the shooting. "They said they rushed in and all that, we didn't see that," Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed while he begged police outside to let him go into the school, told the New York Times. "There were plenty of men out there armed to the teeth that could have gone in faster. This could have been over in a couple minutes." The response came under criticism from law enforcement experts. "If you've got somebody you think is actively engaged in harming people or attempting to harm people, your obligation as a police officer is to immediately stop that person and neutralize that threat," Don Alwes, a former instructor for the National Tactical Officers Association, told NBC News. "We don't expect police officers to commit suicide in doing it. But the expectation is that if someone is about to harm someone, especially children, you've got to take immediate action to make that stop." The stalled response may have cost lives. "You can't wait until patients go to a trauma center," Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at University Hospital in San Antonio, who coordinated treatment for multiple victims, told NBC. "You have to act quickly." Instead of entering the school, law enforcement officers were seen doing crowd control as terrified parents gathered outside. Some officers apparently went inside the school to retrieve their own children, according to a DPS official. A video recorded outside the school shows law enforcement officers with long guns preventing parents from entering the school to do the same as they beg the cops do something. "Shoot him or something!" a woman pleads in the video. "They're all just ******* parked outside, dude. They need to go in there," a man is heard saying. "The police were doing nothing," Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children attend second and third grade at Robb Elementary, told The Wall Street Journal. "They were just standing outside the fence. They weren't going in there or running anywhere." The response took so long that Gomez had time to drive 40 miles to the school after hearing about the shooting to plead with police to enter. Gomez and other parents urged law enforcement to go into the school before U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs and told her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation, she said. Another father was tackled and thrown to the ground by police, she said, and another parent was pepper-sprayed. Gomez said she convinced local police officers that she knew to persuade the marshals to free her. Once she was free, Gomez jumped the school fence and evacuated her children to safety. A spokesman for the Marshals Service denied that anyone was handcuffed. "Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school," he told the Journal. Desirae Garza, whose niece Amerie Jo Garza was killed in the shooting, told The Times that her brother Angel was handcuffed by a local police officer as well while trying to run into the school. "Nobody was telling him anything. He was trying to find out. He wanted to know where his daughter was," Garza said. After the shooting, Gomez said she saw police use a Taser on a father who approached a bus evacuating students to get his child. "They didn't do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That's how it felt," she told the Journal. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called out state officials for providing the public with "conflicting accounts of how the tragedy in Uvalde unfolded." Castro sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday calling for a federal investigation into the police response. "I'm calling on the @FBI to use their maximum authority," he tweeted, "to investigate and provide a full report on the timeline, the law enforcement response and how 21 Texans were killed."

The roots of this violence are many and run deep in American society. I believe that the greatest contributor to this is the "I'm alright, screw you" attitude there. There is no sense that they are anything like a cohesive society that cares for each other. This is a stratified society which claims to be a melting pot but shuns and marginalizes anyone without money or power. If my concern is only for myself and my status and possessions, then anything or anyone that threatens my position is a threat and must be suppressed with all the tools at my disposal. As one American put it, "It is not enough that I win, it is only enough if I see you reduced by losing".

Sexual predators rarely have more than one incident. I suspect that police in Hamilton and surrounding areas as well as the place Saunders was living are going to look at unsolved incidents to see if he fits any of them. These things are like pulling on a thread on a sweater- you don't know where you are going to wind up.

In the Uvalde incident, they seemed to feel that their value was largely decorative.

Police Slow To Engage Uvalde Gunman Because They 'Could’ve Been Shot,' Official Says "They could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school," a spokesman said. Police officers were slow to enter Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to confront a gunman because “they could’ve been shot,” a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety said Thursday. Lt. Chris Olivarez spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to describe the law enforcement response after an 18-year-old gunman entered the school on Tuesday, killing 19 young children and two teachers. Olivarez said officers responded quickly that day amid reports there was a gunman at the school, but waited for a tactical team to fully confront the man, identified as Salvador Ramos, and kill him. Police have offered changing explanations of the timeline after they arrived at the school, and varying accounts say the gunman was left inside a classroom with children and teachers for 40 minutes to an hour before he was killed.

Well, that answers the question. He's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but if so. give him the max.

The survivalists will probably be the ones who will ride out the looming crisis the best, and that, if you think about it, is very very frightening.

'Goodfellas' Actor Ray Liotta Dead At 67 Actor Ray Liotta, best known for his roles in “Field of Dreams” and “Goodfellas,” has died at the age of 67, according to reports Thursday. The actor was filming a movie called “Dangerous Waters” in the Dominican Republic when he died in his sleep. No foul play is suspected, Deadline and TMZ first reported.

Canadian National Security Begins Preparations for the Threat of American Instability Conservative commentator George Will once said that Canada is internationally known for its “exceptional” common sense. So it should be no surprise that at the same time many of us are nervously looking around at each other, sensing an increasingly hostile and volatile country, Canada is beginning to plan ahead to protect itself… from us, or – more accurately, the threats that arise out of our situation. A brief summary from CBC News: “The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability,” says a newly published report written by a task force of former national security advisers, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) directors, ex-deputy ministers, former ambassadors and academics. Members of the group have advised both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former prime minister Stephen Harper. And, of course, the Canadians didn’t feel any need to “both sides” this despite the fact that Canada itself has a relatively small far-right movement itself, pointing fingers directly at Trump, Fox News, and the lack of faith in democratic institutions. Indeed, cooperation between Canada’s small but increasingly hostile far-Right and the more established, mature, and powerful American movement is one of the very top concerns. If the far-Right (which is increasingly just “the Right”) begins organizing violent campaigns in the U.S., the Canadian report believes there will be spillover to Canada. The Canadian security experts pointed at the trucker convoy as a tangible example of a foreign threat, though non-traditional in that it didn’t spring from government action: “This may not have represented foreign interference in the conventional sense, since it was not the result of actions of a foreign government. But it did represent, arguably, a greater threat to Canadian democracy than the actions of any state other than the United States,” the report says. “It will be a significant challenge for our national security and intelligence agencies to monitor this threat, since it emanates from the same country that is by far our greatest source of intelligence.” Their report also notes that it is damned hard to coordinate with the U.S. government when the United States’ polarization is so strong that the American security official on the other end of the line may be sympathetic to the Right’s campaign. Additionally, given that the two countries share a lot of infrastructure (electric grids, water systems, etc.) there are worries that a purely American attack will necessarily spill over, impacting Canada. Notably absent from the report? What to do if the border becomes flooded with Americans seeking refuge start crossing the border, legally or illegally. How can we know it’s a concern if it’s not in the report? Because many of us with dual citizenship already have our plans set for the first time we run into a giant intersection taken over by vigilante neighborhood “security patrols,” we’re taking our loved ones and rushing back to a relatively sane and sustainable democracy. And plenty of Americans will remember a vacation or business done in Canada and the different social environment. If we’ve thought about it, they’ve thought about it. But, they’re damn sure not going to lay out any hint as to what they’re planning or even acknowledge they’re planning for a potential crisis to an international public that may be the very people they’ll need to sort out, people returning home versus people wanting to join forces. They are, after all, internationally renowned for common sense.

Sooooo... we have to equip our receivers with big rubber buckets and get them to stand still during the plays?

Truth is, time stalks us all, and as we age, we are not only more susceptible to injury, we take longer to heal.

Americans are much more Catholic in their hatred- they hate blacks, browns, Asians, progressives, gays, transgendereds, environmentalists, uppity women and civil servants to name but a few.

Rep. Paul Gosar Spreads Lie About Texas Shooter In Hateful Since-Deleted Tweet Extremist Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) deleted a disturbing and offensive tweet Tuesday that falsely claimed the gunman who killed more than 20 people at a Texas school was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” The lawmaker wrote the message in response to a Twitter user who wondered if the shooter was a member of the far-right, “the kind of trash that” Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Gosar “travel to speak to?” before deleting their tweet.

Yes, but that is ignored because it does not fit with the American myth.

It is a cultural/attitudinal problem that began with the American revolution when the country was born in violence. The colonists were afraid, rightly or wrongly, of a British re-invasion and encouraged all male adults to have firearms and be prepared to use them on short notice. There is good evidence that the colonists were more afraid of losing their slaves than unfair taxation, and that attitude warped public attitudes. The framers of the American constitution placed the primacy of the individual over the common good and when you mix those two values along with a multitude of firearms, it leads to the Munroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. Americans are driven by fear of each other and a mythological government overreach. The gun culture is extolled in the male supremacy myth and "might makes right" thinking. They are not "all in this together"- they see themselves as being in a zero-sum game. In order for one to gain, someone or everyone else must lose. If you as an American feel aggrieved, you have the God-given right to avenge yourself by whatever means you choose.