My friend, I'm not sure how to answer this question without it sounding "off" in some way. Either I run the risk of sounding potentially arrogant, or I run the risk of sounding totally out there. I've seen God do a number of things in terms of protecting and providing, most of which are things which are so astronomically improbable if not impossible that He is the only explanation. I've known Him deeply in a way that is hard to put into words. I've seen what He does, and only later understood why He does it or doesn't do it, because I could not have truly understood in the moment.
I didn't understand why, at one point in time, He allowed our family to have only beans to eat for weeks, and then only peas we had gleaned from a field until they ran out, and only then did He provide the money for us to go and get food from the store. I wouldn't understand the reason for almost ten years. As it turned out, that bout of forced fasting probably saved Heidi's life and forced her first M.S. flare into remission. But we didn't know that at the time.
It is true, God won't violate the free will of anyone, because to do that would take away the person and replace him or her with an automaton, effectively destroying the person. Murdering their soul, if you will.
There are times God will and does protect a person from being harmed in all the ways you mentioned. He kept us from going off the side of a cliff when three of our four tires were over open air on an iced road during the winter. We should have died. He shielded us from the tornado that went through here. And when I say it went through here, I mean it passed over our house and then broke apart. None of us or our animals were lost, and neither were our buildings damaged. Does that mean He's protected us from every misfortune,? No. Clearly not. But that wouldn't be realistic either, nor would it be beneficial to us or to anyone else.
God allows human beings to suffer the consequences of their individual actions, and their collective actions. He will do damage control to keep it from getting as bad as it could, but He won't stop it completely, otherwise, we would keep doing those things which are harmful to ourselves and others. He could fix climate change instantly, for example, but we would keep doing what we're doing to cause it. Ultimately, at least according to Scripture, there will come a time when human beings have made such a mess of things and brought ourselves and this planet close enough to total destruction that He will step in and impose direct military and political occupation on Earth. This is the last resort, and a step He has been putting off for a very long time.
You brought up the mass shooting at Uvalde. Let's look at that for a minute. It was not God who decided to walk into a school and murder children. It was a human being. It was not God who bought the gun. It was a human being. It was not God who chose to pull the trigger again, and again, and again. It was a human being. It was also not God who encouraged a culture where such weapons are easily obtainable. It was not God who harassed and bullied the kid who became the shooter, but human beings. It was not God who waited in the school hallway for an hour before moving into the classroom to confront the shooter, but human beings.
The argument is frequently made, "But why didn't God stop the shooting if He is omnipotent?" More to the point, why doesn't God stop every shooting, theft, rape, and offense which occurs? Can He? Yes. If He chose to, He could render every particle of matter in existence back into its raw energy state with less than a thought. Or He could render the energy of His own Being into any particle or combination of particles He so chose. Matter, energy, time, space, dimensionality, it all moves through Him, and He is the infinite foundation of it all.
He could stop every negative action, word, or thought, but then this goes back to the violation of free will, and murdering the person in the process. He would have that same person turn away from the harm they are causing on their own accord. He would have them come to their senses, and allow them to suffer the consequences of their actions in order to accomplish this.
The Uvalde shooter and every shooter, one way or the other, is a product of our human society as a whole. He is a symptom of a much more systemic disease which we can only hide for so long before it becomes manifest to everyone. The same is true of the rise of fascism, racism, famine, super diseases, and so on. These are symptoms of a core disease much like coughing, sneezing, fever, and a runny nose are symptoms of a cold. It is not God's fault that we have reached this point. He's done damage control throughout the millennia, but He won't fully remove the consequences of our actions as a species.
There is nothing which God "can't" do. But there is a lot that He "won't" do, because doing it would be worse for everyone in the long run and wouldn't result in the best possible outcome for everyone. It is an old truism that the child who gets too close to the fire should be allowed to burn himself just once in order to learn to never do it again. God's discipline is always about the natural consequences of actions. And what affects one person always affects every person around them, and every person around those people individually, and so on. What we are seeing now are the natural consequences of the actions of our species being played out.
The only shootings like this we see are the ones He doesn't stop. For every shooting which makes the news, there are a hundred potential shootings which He brings to nothing. You never pay attention to the person keeping things clean, taking out the trash, and so on until they don't. He could stop every shooting, every murder, every rape, every violation. But no, He doesn't because to stop every violation of human beings would require that He turn every human being into an automaton, including you and me. We are the ones with the malfunction.
Making the argument you're making is like the World of Warcraft Horde players I once saw on Youtube who kited Jaina Proudmore all the way from Theramore to Orgrimmar where she randomly started killing everyone in the city and the bodies started piling up. The players then messaged Blizzard's help center telling them what was going on and asked, "How could you let us do this? She's killing everybody!"
We are the cause of these problems, not Him. He has already given us the Way, the solution to keep from causing them and we refuse to take it.
As I said before, God does damage control, but He does not stop everything. He will not contribute to our collective and increasing delusion that we can keep doing what we're doing and somehow we're going to be just fine and get better. That's not how this works. Our malfunction will eventually destroy both our species and the surface of this planet, but we have to understand and admit that, and we are so in our own little worlds that we can't see it and blame Him for our behaviors.
This whole planet is functionally an asylum for a species that has become inherently deranged and delusional. How would you respond to a patient who refuses to do what you prescribe or listen to you any longer? How would you respond to a patient who refuses to believe you are who you are, and instead makes up another therapist and begins quoting this figment of their imagination instead?
The god you describe isn't omnipotent, he's impotent. He's a god you can live with because he satisfies your ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, what pleases you and what displeases you. He's a god you can stuff in a box and call a "good boy."
But the Foundation of all existence can't be stuffed in a box, and isn't subject to our ideas of who He is and isn't. He's not subject to individual human ideas about morality, nor does He bow to what makes us happy and what doesn't. His concerns are rescuing as many of us as possible, and all things are possible for Him, from our own insanity and my point in the original post and in my other arguments on this thread was that He does not need us physically alive to do just that, and is perfectly capable of resurrecting all those who have died into physical bodies once more, as the Scriptures say.
Those children who died in Uvalde went immediately into His presence, as Jesus said, "their angels always see the face of My father." They will be among the resurrected. They suffered for minutes, but they are fully surrounded by and are engulfed in His eternal presence and love for them right now. Those who die in this world are not destroyed, not to Him, but He preserves every single human soul because they are all precious to Him. More precious to Him than they are to us. God is Good and fully and infinitely omnipotent, but He plays the longest game for all of us, and He is playing to win.
A police officer would stop every shooting within their power to stop because that is their charge and responsibility. A police officer is a being bound by four dimensions and only truly capable of dealing with what is happening right in front of them in that moment. That police officer has no idea of the repercussions of his actions, or how they might affect those a thousand miles away or a hundred years in the future.
God considers the best good for every single creature that has ever existed or will ever exist because all of those existences are right in front of Him. Were He to engage in what you suggest, stopping every single harm that every single human being commits, He would have to end the human race as we know it, one way or the other. It would be functional and total genocide.
You and others are upset about Uvalde, about the Holocaust, about every atrocity a human being has committed since before history began. Like the previously mentioned WoW players, this is still, "Why does God let us do these horrible, atrocious things to each other?" Really, the question is or should be, "Why do we do these horrible atrocious things to one another?"
The answer is that we do these horrible atrocious things to one another because all human beings have an inherited neurological problem without limbic system, sending it into overdrive, and which sees everything we individually like as necessary to survival ("good") and everything we individually dislike as a threat to survival ("evil"), and we respond accordingly by trying to hoard what we like and destroy what we dislike. And more to the point, without this problem being shown to us in stark and sometimes painful detail, we can't think or reason apart from this flaw. Only what we agree with is considered "Good" and everything else is considered "Bad."
God did do something about this, and human beings on the whole rejected His solution, perverted it, watered it down, and twisted it into something which resonates with their malfunctioning mind instead. Had humanity as a whole followed and kept the treatment plan He prescribed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they didn't.
Your argument is only logical if you don't consider all factors at play. But when you begin to consider all the factors, including the inherited problem all human beings have (which I know you reject), then the picture looks a lot different, and God is both Good and totally Omnipotent, omnipresent (in all points of time, space, and every dimension, as well as beyond the boundaries of all of these), omniscient, and working for the best possible outcome for all of us without destroying who each one of us is individually.
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