There were many failures leading to the tragic mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that took the lives of 19 children and two teachers.
A new report suggested President Joe Biden’s border crisis may be one of those contributing failures.
According to the New York Post, state lawmakers who investigated the mass shooting found the influx of illegal immigrants into the Uvalde area contributed to a “relaxed vigilance” at Robb Elementary.
Specifically, the report cited repeated incidents where the school locked down due to reports of suspicious persons, only to find the person was not a threat.
The report said authorities in the area often attempt to pull over vehicles that they suspect contain illegal immigrants, but many of them drive away without stopping. This has led to crashes or other incidents in which the occupants abandon the car in a practice known as “bailing out.”
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Each time a “bailout” occurs near a school like Robb Elementary, the school gets a security alert and usually locks down as a precaution to protect the children. But because these “bailouts” do not typically present a threat to the school, they came to be treated “a little like the boy who cried wolf,” as the Post put it.
“The frequency of these ‘bailout’-related alarms — around 50 of them between February and May of 2022 — contributed to a diminished sense of vigilance about responding to security alerts,” the lawmakers’ report said, according to the Post.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin had also detailed the problem of “bailouts” to the Post just two months before the shooting, the outlet said.
“Forty-eight times last year we had to lock down the public schools because of bailouts in our community — 48 times, but you don’t hear that on the news,” McLaughlin said.
Did the border crisis play a role in this massacre?
The events leading up to the massacre also bore some resemblance to a typical “bailout” incident.
Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman accused of carrying out the mass shooting, allegedly began his rampage by shooting his grandmother and stealing her truck.
He did not have a driver’s license, and he crashed the truck near Robb Elementary before getting out, shooting at the school and eventually entering it with ease, the Post reported.
In the report, lawmakers said some authorities felt police response may have been slowed because officers assumed Ramos’ crash was nothing more than another “bailout” incident.
To be clear, this does not excuse the complete lack of decisive action from the nearly 400 officers who eventually gathered at the crime scene. The officers clearly failed to do their jobs and stop the shooter, and they should face the consequences.
“At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety,” the report said according to the Post.
“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon.’’
With all that said, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the frequent “bailout” incidents played a part in the delayed response from law enforcement, as the report suggested was a possibility.
It would be irresponsible to blame the Uvalde tragedy completely on the border crisis, but it very well may have contributed to the severity. If so, it would represent another deadly consequence of Biden’s inability to secure the southern border.
