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Police shoot man ‘aggressively trying’ to get into a locked elementary school. Protocols work.

June 10, 2022 | | Print Article

A man who “aggressively” tried to enter an Alabama elementary school failed in his endeavor thanks to the school keeping most of its doors locked and having courageous school resource officers present — the same policy prescriptions, incidentally, that leftists have ruthlessly mocked on social media.

“As best I know, there was a potential intruder. A gentleman who was coming around to several doors trying to get into the building,” Gadsden City Schools Superintendent Tony Reddick told local station WBMA.

“Our principal was alerted immediately and went around to make sure the doors were secure, which they already were,” Reddick added.

The principal of Walnut Park Elementary School in Gadsden also contacted a school resource officer and placed the school into lockdown.

The man, later identified as 32-year-old Robert Tyler White, was apparently also spotted by a bystander walking by the school.

“[A] person who was passing by the school reportedly saw White trying to get into the school and looking into cars. That citizen called the police to report White as being a suspicious person,” WBMA reported.

When authorities with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency arrived, they spotted a school resource officer trying to stop White from breaking into their cruiser.

“ALEA officials said White resisted and attempted to take the SRO’s gun. ALEA officials said additional officers from the Gadsden Police Department responded to the scene to provide assistance. White was shot and pronounced dead,” according to WBMA.

It’s not clear whether ALEA officers or the school resource officer killed White.

The events in Gadsden seem to lend credence to the theory that some school shootings, particularly mass shootings, could be nipped in the bud in part by, for starters, forcing every school to adopt a single point of entry policy and hire school resource officers. Yet these sorts of policy prescriptions have faced ruthless mockery from the left.

Indeed, just this week, after a far-left activist intent on murdering Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was arrested outside the justice’s home, far-left actor Patton Oswalt posted a tweet sarcastically suggesting that Kavanaugh should just implement a single point of entry policy for his home and arm his family.

Look:

Yet locked doors and armed security were in fact what prevented the murder of Kavanaugh, as noted at the time by critics.

Similarly, locked doors and armed officers prevented White from carrying out whatever it is that he’d sought to do at Walnut Park Elementary School.

As noted by the latter Twitter user, the key of course is that the armed security must  be properly trained and possess courage.

This matters gravely because of what happened in Uvalde, where a mass shooter succeeded in killing nearly two dozen children because local police officers lacked both proper training and courage.

Instead of rushing into the classroom inside which the shooter had barricaded himself, the officers reportedly stood outside for over an hour. During that time, 19 children and two teachers were executed.

Vivek Saxena
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