The 5-Minute Fix: 5 outstanding questions on how Uvalde happened

Here are five unanswered questions on how the worst school shooting in a decade happened.

1. How did the shooter get into the school? Texas school officials originally said a back door was left open, reports The Post’s Mark Berman. Now they say it was shut by a teacher, whose lawyer said she heard the shooting and kicked a rock out of the way and thought the door would lock. (It didn’t.) “He walked in unobstructed,” one Texas public safety official said of the killer.

2. Why did police stand by rather than enter the classroom where the shooter was? School officials knew pretty quickly there was a shooter in the school. Yet the police chief for the school district decided to wait for backup rather than enter and confront the gunman, authorities say, leaving him in a locked, fourth-grade classroom for nearly an hour while terrified children called 911 for help. The police chief decided to treat the gunman not as an active shooter but as a barricaded subject — a designation typically given when civilians aren’t in immediate danger — so they didn’t try to break down the classroom door, authorities have said.

“That was the wrong decision,” the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said. And now state investigators say the Uvalde school police chief has at least temporarily stopped answering their questions, the Texas Tribune reports. It’s still not clear how many children in that classroom survived.

3. How has law enforcement’s story changed? Authorities have revised many of their statements about the shooting over the past week — sometimes several times or with totally opposite information.

For example: Did the shooter interact with a school police officer? Initially, officials said that the suspect and an officer exchanged gunfire and that the officer was injured. Then they said an officer “engaged” the shooter, but no shots were fired. Then the account changed more dramatically: An official said that none of that happened and that an officer wasn’t even on campus when the shooter arrived, but instead drove there after hearing reports of an armed man.

Officials also initially said the gunman entered the school immediately after crashing his car, then changed the story to say there was a gap of about 12 minutes between the crash and the entry, and then revised the timeline again to say the gap was about five minutes. Authorities also said the gunman was wearing body armor, but they later said he was wearing a vest to store extra magazines. And on the crucial question of how the gunman got into the classroom, police first said they intentionally “pinned” him there but later said he barricaded himself inside. That means they changed their story from one of police being in control of the situation to one where they couldn’t reach the gunman.

4. Why has law enforcement’s story changed so many times? We don’t know, but it’s something investigators need to answer. The community, the grieving families and worried parents and schools across the country deserve clear answers — especially when conspiracy theories and other false information tend to proliferate during these kinds of tragedies, compounding the pain and confusion about how to prevent them. (The parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut are still in the midst of lawsuits against disinformation purveyor Alex Jones after he said the attack was a hoax.)

5. Were school safety measures enough? The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has singled out school safety as an area where Congress could reach bipartisan consensus. But Texas — and Uvalde specifically — had already taken measures toward this end. Texas allows schools to arm teachers, a controversial response to school shootings. And Uvalde’s school district has its own small police force — unusual for a school system of this size — plus armed guards, The Post’s Moriah Balingit reported. And there’s this: The Post’s John Woodrow Cox says the evidence doesn’t show that fortifying schools works to prevent shootings. “There is no fail-safe,” he said Tuesday. “The truth is that a person determined to get a gun inside a school can almost always do it.”

How Biden’s dealing with inflation that isn’t easing

We’ve talked about how inflation is largely a byproduct of global events that are outside President Biden’s control: the pandemic, supply chain issues, gas prices, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But it’s possible, some economists say, that Biden’s actions played a role, specifically a coronavirus stimulus bill that he signed shortly after he took office that sent checks to most Americans. At the time, he said the government needed to “go big” to ensure the economy recovered from the pandemic.

Now, there appears to be a growing consensus within the Biden administration that they missed the warning signs about how long inflation would stay as a fixture in the economy. Biden originally said inflation would be temporary, as an inflation timeline by The Post’s Mike Madden and Rachel Siegel illustrates. Instead, it’s been at a 40-year high for months, and policymakers are struggling with how to bring it down.

“I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Tuesday on CNN.

The president seems acutely focused on this, and with good reason, given Americans say in polls they’re pessimistic about the economy just months before voters choose which party they want to control Congress and state legislatures.

Now the White House has launched a new push to contain the political damage, after “Biden had complained to aides that they were not doing a good job explaining the causes of inflation and what the administration is doing about it,” report The Post’s Tyler Pager and Jeff Stein.