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Just Three Minutes in Uvalde, Texas.
That’s how long it should have taken for the shooter to be stopped.
Since the slaughter of nineteen ten-year-olds and their two school teachers in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, not a detail has emerged about the shooting that wasn’t worse than the last one. As often as the families of the victims and their stories of their unimaginable, horrific pain crosses my mind, I can’t help thinking of parents in general. Mothers who are watching the same details emerge as I am, looking at the testimonies and faces of the parents in Texas and thinking they have no idea how they themselves could get through it if it happened to them.
Mothers who, at this very moment, have absolutely no idea that in this nation where guns are valued more than the lives of their children, they will experience that incomparable pain as well.
But as the small Texas town of Uvalde still reels in the wake of that indescribable trauma and loss, every day it seems we learn new details of all the ways these children, their teachers, and families were failed. Failed by a police department and a school district police chief in particular that is more concerned about covering their tracks than the deaths caused by their inaction.
Three minutes.
