The key word here is “almost.” Why wasn’t there a mutiny?

The Border Patrol didn’t let the wishes of the police chief stop them from going in — after they waited half an hour.

Judge for yourself whether People magazine’s source is telling the truth or whether this is self-serving spin to deflect blame now that the Uvalde PD has become a national laughingstock.

“There was almost a mutiny,” the officer tells PEOPLE. “We were like, ‘There’s a f—ing gunman in the school, we hear gunshots, and we’re just going to stand here with our thumbs up our asses?’ We wanted to go in and save lives. It was the most frustrating situation of my entire career.”

“We felt like cowards,” the officer continues. “It felt cowardly to stand off and let this punk, this kid, this 18-year-old asshole just go in and do whatever he wanted to do. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of cussing, a lot of people who were saying that we should just say f— it and go in, but then what? We needed to have a plan, and the commander didn’t have a plan.”…

“Even if he had barricaded himself in, he had already shot at people,” the officer says, “so why weren’t we in there doing what we should’ve done? I remember thinking ‘this is wrong.’ But there was nothing I could do.”

A plan would have been nice. But cops are trained nowadays to confront a shooter immediately, without a plan, even if back-up hasn’t arrived yet. “The first responding officer — I don’t care if it’s the Deputy Dawg cartoon guy — he goes in and stops the shooter. That’s just part of the job,” said one expert on active shooters to WaPo. “You’ve got a ballistic vest. You know what the kids have? Crayons. You are duty-bound to do something. If someone is telling you to stay outside, you disobey that order.”

It’s true that the protocol changes once a shooter stops firing and barricades himself in a room. But the cops knew from the 911 calls that some children were still alive in there with him. Opting not to force a confrontation in that scenario, after he’s already presumably murdered multiple kids, amounts to trusting him to have suddenly lost the urge to kill.

Besides, there should have been a plan considering that the Uvalde school district’s police force had trained for an active shooter situation as recently as March of this year. As it is, according to one father whose daughter was murdered inside the school, the police didn’t even have the proper equipment: It took 15 to 20 minutes for protective tactical shields to arrive at the scene. God only knows how long the shooter would have remained alive inside the school if the Border Patrol’s tactical team hadn’t showed up.

I don’t know how this town and its police force will ever again coexist happily.

“While those babies were in there dying, they stood there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students…

Equally baffling to families is why Chief Arradondo wasn’t able to use some sort of master key to open the door of the classroom after discovering that it had been locked. McCraw told reporters on Friday that Border Patrol Agents had to secure a key from a janitor before being able to access the classrooms.

“I feel like they are setting this up to have law enforcement walk away like heroes and some of them are,” said Garza. “But the rest who didn’t do anything are nothing more than cowards. The parents were braver than that and they at least had an idea of what to do.”

Arradondo, who reportedly gave the order for officers to hang back, is nowhere to be found this week. Parents are considering their legal options but they probably don’t have any, experts say. Despite the tremendous power police enjoy, they don’t owe anyone a duty of protection in a dangerous situation. And even if their behavior is negligent, our legal system goes out of its way to hold them harmless. Only if the Uvalde police department had a formally articulated policy of not intervening during a mass shooting would they potentially be liable. A horrible spur-of-the-moment decision by the chief doesn’t cut it.

The negligence is bad enough, but some of the other police behavior at the scene is inexplicable. One father waiting outside was told by an evacuated student that his daughter had been shot; when he moved towards the school to get to her, he was reportedly … handcuffed. Residents are so angry that the Uvalde PD has quietly reached out to other law enforcement agencies in Texas about providing protection for the force’s own officers.

The police failure will be the focus of public attention for the foreseeable future but don’t let it distract you from the mounting evidence that the shooter did display some very red flags before he acted. That’ll be important to the coming debate over red-flag laws, assuming Congress and Texas muster the will to consider any. This CNN piece describes how the shooter told several girls on the social media platform Yubo that he’d rape them; another claimed that “he threatened to shoot up her school and rape and kill her and her mother during one livestream session.” Things turned more ominous when he sent one user an image of a receipt showing that he’d just bought guns. Another user says a gun was visible on his bed during one livestream.

All of these threats were reported to Yubo, the girls say, but apart from a temporary ban no action was apparently taken.

I’ll leave you with this clip, which has gone viral. If you know what “the Macdonald triad” is, you know why the revelation at the end here would be considered a significant red flag by cops and psychologists. This lunatic obviously shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a gun.

👀 pic.twitter.com/wHggyJS7At

— HOTT TV (@NisaHott) May 26, 2022