An article on the Texas Tribune website has taken another look at the Uvalde massacre and come to the interesting conclusion that the cops - who famously stood around with their collective thumb up their collective ass whilst children were slaughtered in the school that they'd been called to - might have a reasonable excuse after all.
The police, apparently, were more than willing to enter the school and tackle the deranged gunman until they learned that he had an AR-15.
How exactly the police had ascertained the gunman's weapon from their vantagepoint a long, long way from the scene of the crime is presumably unanswered. Maybe he put a polite notice on the classroom door saying "Please Be Careful, Children Being Murdered With An AR-15 Inside." I don't know. I didn't bother reading the article, because I had important research to do.
I was intrigued by what magical powers the AR-15 has that make such competent, brave men as the Uvalde police doubtlessly believe themselves to be, shrink in fear. I contacted the marketing department at Smith & Wesson for comment.
"What many mere humans don't realise about the AR-15 is that it can project a forcefield of impenetrability," says Belzar the Mage, a wizard employed in R&D for the Smith & Wesson rifle department.
I'd told Belzar that I was a schoolteacher interested in educating my class of six year olds about ballistics, so that they'd have a better chance of knowing which way to run or duck the next time someone opened fire on them. Again.
Belzar was only too happy to invite me to the mountain top from which he practices his dark arts, and show me around his alchemy lab and rifling workshop. He also dabbles in crypto.
"So you're saying that AR-15s give the carriers unnatural powers?" I asked.
"Yesss..." Belzar rumbled, his thick, white eyebrows drawing together under the brim of his pointy hat. "Such a weapon can make the wielder powerful indeed, and protected from all harm that can be inflicted by mortal hands!"
"What if someone were to attack an AR-15 user with some other sort of firearm?"
"FOOLS! MWAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!" boomed the wizard, as a howling gale assaulted his lair and an angry flare of lightning split the sky with a crash. "Such puny weapons cannot harm the cloak of impenetrability produced by our mighty works!"
He let the sound of the lightning die away before continuing. "If you like you can ask a friend of mine at Ruger. I think I have his email on a stone tablet around here somewhere..."
"Belzar is absolutely right," nods Torvald the Terrible, a seven foot viking built like a mannequin assembled from bowling balls. He spoke to me via Zoom whilst lounging atop a throne made from the skulls of his vanquished enemies.
"Whilst each company makes a slightly different variation of the AR-15, they all have supernatural abilities. Here at Ruger, our assault rifles will magically drain the strength from your enemies once they come within a certain radius. Next year we're rolling out our Aortic Devourer, a mystical attachment that will allow the user's bullets to literally consume the hearts of the people they kill and transplant the courage stored within directly to the shooter."
"Jesus Christ," I said.
"Oh, no, he was a carpenter and all about forgiveness," Torvald chuckled, sipping wine from a goblet with a stem that appeared to be made from a human femur. "Like all manufacturers of AR-15s, we are strictly in league with Ogun, the ancient god of iron and bloodshed. Although I believe some of the guys at Remington have been experimenting by sacrificing livestock to Kurd-Alagon, a minor blacksmithing deity who shoes the dead horses that carry our spirits to the other side. I can put you in touch with them if you like?"
"I'm probably alright," I demurred. I thanked Torvald for his time and disconnected the call.
I'd learned a lot from a day's worth of interviews. I'd learned that there was a lot more wizardry in the arms trade than a layman would expect, but most importantly I'd confirmed that the Uvalde shooter could never have been stopped by mortal men, even if they'd tried, which they categorically did not.
So it's not that the police in Uvalde were a gaggle of flabby, useless cowards whose selfish willingness to allow innocents to suffer made a mockery of the values their badges claim to represent.
It's not that Uvalde police are a bunch of snivelling incompetents who showed less bravery in the face of danger than the literal children they were meant to protect.
Despite appearances to the contrary, it's not that whilst school children cowered in fear and hoped that a grown-up would come to rescue them, the Uvalde police were stood around outside hoping the exact same thing.
Because the Uvalde police, who were themselves armed "professionals" and who outnumbered the (teenaged) shooter by at least nineteen-to-one (some U.S. Marshalls were also present and doing nothing), couldn't possibly have done anything to stop the shooter. Because he had an AR-15.
When some off-duty Border Patrol agents forced their way into the classroom, the killer opened fire on them with that same AR-15. The border patrol agents returned fire and killed him without sustaining any injuries themselves, but at the time of writing I have been unable to learn what kind of spells or enchantments they were using. Maybe someone at the Texas Tribune can figure it out when they're finished publishing cringing apologist nonsense attempting to re-write history to favour a bunch of cowards.
Sesame Screed.
A friend messaged me to say that he'd ended up researching Sesame Street, the other day.
You can probably see why I'd be the sort of person people come to with this stuff.
According to his findings, Big Bird is canonically six years old. Further, the Count could be over six million years old and Bert and Ernie have no age.
I found this troubling.
The Bert & Ernie thing is weird in a couple of ways. Clearly, they can't be immortal, because the Count has been around for six million years and they're okay about stating that specifically. So Bert and Ernie... Exist outside of time? It's unclear.
It's not that this is me being overly literal, by the way. Because we live in the stupidest timeline, there was some muttering from the usual quarters a few years back that Bert and Ernie might not be suitable for children as they could well be two gay men who live together.
Sesame Street, as an entity, took the logical high road when asked if Bert and Ernie were gay by replying that Bert and Ernie don't actually have sexual orientations because they're puppets.
So that makes sense. They're not sexual. But they also don't have ages. And other characters do.
There's a subtle, logical implication here that Bert and Ernie are puppets, but that other members of the Sesame Street cast might not be. They have ages and presumably, by extension, sexual preferences. Bert and Ernie don't have sexuality, but I now have to assume Elmo is into the tickling thing and Oscar the Grouch likes to watch.
It gets more concerning when we turn to the Count. If he is six million years old (and who would be better at keeping score?!) then the Count pre-dates, as well as predates, the human race.
This could potentially mean that the Count has been slowly changing over eons, morphing from a purple, bat like creature into something capable of speech and now calculus.
The more worrying implication is that humans are a subset of a largely extinct species of vampires that came before us, and that the Count is the last of our distant, blood sucking ancestors. Which might actually explain a few things about human nature.