The failures of police responding to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, "can never be accepted," Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, told Newsmax after surveillance and police body camera video of the incident was released last week.
"How long [police] took to get in there can never be accepted," Babin told Monday's "American Agenda." "You had police officers staying around for I think it was an hour and 14 minutes. You had a total of I think it was 390 something officers. It's just stunning."
The release of the videos, as well as a preliminary Texas State House of Representatives investigative report on the incident Sunday, pointed to a number of failures that allowed the shooter to kill 19 children and two teachers in the hour before law enforcement breached the classroom to shoot and kill the gunman.
"I just saw this figure [about the number of officers on the scene] today and it took that long to go in," Babin lamented. "We had parents that were being [sprayed with mace] and tasered. We had parents that were locked in handcuffs because they wanted to go in, and they were not allowed.
"How many of those little children bled out on the floor and could have been saved had they gone to the sound of the guns, which is what they should have done."
While the Texas House investigation said it did not "find any villains," save for the shooter, it did find "systematic failures and egregiously poor decision making" by responding law enforcement and the school that contributed to the deadly outcome of the incident.
The report found the school was lax in ensuring the security of the building, and "low-quality" Internet service and mobile phone service "led to an inconsistent" receipt of lockdown notices by teachers.
"If the alert [about the shooting] reached more teachers sooner, it is likely that more could have been done to protect them and their students," according to the report. "In violation of school policy, no one had locked any of the three exterior doors to the west of Robb Elementary. As a result, the attacker had unimpeded access to enter."
The report also said an estimated 100 of the 142 rounds it is believed the shooter fired, came before any law enforcement personnel entered the building, but the officers on scene "failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving of innocent victims over their own safety."
"We've got to profit from our mistakes there; we can never allow this to happen again," Babin said. "The school district, the leadership, I think the law enforcement – there was a lot of people who fell short in doing their jobs that terrible day, and we need to profit from those mistakes and never, ever let that happen again."
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