According to Mapquest the distance from 3 Main St, the location of the police dept (a comment on their web site says they responded to the shooting) is 2.4 miles...repeat 2.4 miles from 3 main to 12 dickinson. It took 20 minutes to travel 2.4 miles. Traffic must have been awful...like in NYC, LA or Dallas - not. What is wrong with this picture?
What is wrong is your information. The Newtown police released a time line on the event and they were on the scene at first in less than 5 minutes and when backup arrived and they entered the building it was 11 minutes.
“According to Mapquest the distance from 3 Main St,the location of the police dept (a comment on their web site says they responded to the shooting) is 2.4 miles...repeat 2.4 miles from 3 main to 12 dickinson. It took 20 minutes to travel 2.4 miles. Traffic must have been awful...like in NYC,LA or Dallas - not. What is wrong with this picture?”
911 call timeline has a ten minute span between the initial call and somebody saying “we got bodies here”
Still, ten minutes is a LONG time....
What do you think caused the delay?
Indeed, what is wrong with this picture?
From a milkitary and security background point of view, it takes time to understand what is going on, who to marshall, how to respond, and what extent is the threat (to the repsonders).
The idea that a cop will roar on to the scene, enter the building and search out a solution to the unknown is FOREIGN to most law enformcent mentality. Now, if my comment are seemingly inflamatory to LE operations, they are not intended as such, but if the shoe fits... I know some departments train to respond in jsut such a manner-but there have been few or no actual responses executed so.
On the other hand, a teacher standing in the door of his/her classroom, in the moment when realization of a threat occurs, is fully vested in near perfect intelligence, the urgency of a need to respond and the morality of will to do so. Unfortunately, vainly heroically, all he/she can do is absorb bullets/knife thrusts etc in the hope that the threat will be exhausted before the innocents are consumed as well.
Now, picture this alternate reality:
Shots heard in the building, hard doors close, students moved to the inside off corner of the rooms, behind a hard barrier installed for this purpose, the teacher draws his/her sidearm and guards her charges like a sheep dog in the entrance to the sheep fold. No one comes in the door without being engaged with fire until the all clear is given by pre-arranged and duplicated signal....
Wonder why evildoers do not often attack known armed, hardened facilities and persons? Because they are not stupid. Apparaently, our schools boards, local, state and federal governments and the parents of these children are....