The Dark Undercurrents That Might Have Influenced Buffalo & Uvalde

Republished from Lydia Leitermann’s Substack

Here’s what I think is happening with this spate of recent gun violence:

• Democrats are polling terribly lately. Their policies and how they’ve handled emergencies like the baby formula shortage are not popular. Hispanics, especially, are not having it. This is incontrovertible.
• Midterms are coming up and Democrats are terrified. It’s not just that people actively dislike their policies, it’s that those who don’t dislike their policies just aren’t engaged. The recent Georgia GOP turnout put the fear of God into them. They’re probably increasingly desperate.
• Democrats desperately need to demonize right-wing figures, including painting them as potential murderers and terrorists a la the Patriot Act —or at the very least, casting guns in a bad enough light that anyone supporting gun rights will face increasingly negative public opinion on the topic. They weren’t able to turn parents into terrorists, although not for lack of trying (what they did there was turn parents into their own voting block, but that’s a separate, equally amusing, topic that requires much more research).

I always have reasons (and receipts) for what I think; here is what I have so far.

1. There is currently an investigation into the Buffalo shooter possibly having been in contact with a retired fed.

2. The Uvalde shooter had turned 18 just days before the shooting. Yet somehow, this boy, bullied for being poor, was able to acquire some very expensive guns.

3. The Uvalde police barred parents from attempting to save their children.

4. The Uvalde police stood in the hallways of the school (19 of them vs one shooter, just for reference) as gunshots were audible in the building and 911 calls were being made from the classrooms. Why? (Typing this gives me goosebumps, for the record. It feels like writing about some of the worst people in the world to ever passively allow evil to happen.)

5. The Uvalde police barred federal officers from breaching the school. A BorTac officer literally took his barber’s shotgun and helped evacuate the school before the Uvalde police did anything, reminding us, thankfully, that there are still good people in the world, and sometimes they’re courageous enough to act on it.

6. The Uvalde police waited an HOUR for SWAT backup as children were being shot and calling 911 from the classrooms.

As an errant thought before I conclude, I absolutely DO think it’s yet another weird coincidence that, given how little Hispanics care for Democrats right now, this horrific tragedy should happen in a conservative, Hispanic community like Uvalde. Also fascinating to me: Buffalo schools will now no longer allow even PARENTS to enter school grounds — a rather convenient way to prevent parents from seeing what’s being taught. Too conspiratorial? Still weird.

Even if this wasn’t “constructed” or “allowed to happen” (possible, theoretically, but difficult to believe — although if feds WERE involved in Buffalo, more investigation needs to be done), I think the Democrats really believed this could be used to make the case against the right at large and especially against GOP incumbents like Greg Abbott (see: Beto O’Rourke’s widely-panned outburst at the governor’s Uvalde press conference).

It was a bold strategy, as they say.