Former Green Beret says ‘defund the police’ led to Uvalde shooting

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As the finger pointing in the Uvalde mass shooting tragedy continues, a former Green Beret and MMA fighter says the “defund the police” movement is partially to blame, reports the Daily Mail.

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Tim Kennedy told The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that the movement, which came after the police-related deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, has resulted in officers “not ready to do the right thing.”

“We have been weakening them and we have been making them ill-equipped to respond to that,” said Kennedy.

“And then I think Uvalde is a great example of not properly trained with broken systems that are not ready to do the right thing. We will have more of that unless we get them the right training and we get our schools to become hard targets. And then we go upstream to the origin, the Genesis of these problems, which is mental health with the individual.”

Kennedy, who was promoting his book, Scars and Stripes, on Rogan’s show, also accused society of “emasculating” law enforcement.

“You know, we want a kinder, softer, gentler — I get, they’re dealing with mental health and we can have specialists that can come in and deal with somebody having a mental health crisis, but we still need men and women that will run towards the sound of gunfire and know what to do,” he said.

“If we don’t do those things, then it’s never gonna be fixed.”

The Robb Elementary School shooting saw 19 children and two teachers killed by a single gunman in Uvalde in May and the police department has been accused of “abject failure” after officers waited for over an hour before entering classrooms.