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Ex-Uvalde Officer Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting (NYT link, worked for me without an account)
My immediate thought, having read about prosecutions of police officers before, was that they found the special prosecutor version of Ralph Wiggums to ensure an acquittal. However, Bill Turner appears to have been the elected DA for Brazos County from 1983-2013, so it's hard to say. Many elected DAs have little trial experience and can be ineffective compared to a regular assistant DA who grinds 4-10+ trials per year, but maybe he's been getting some trial experience since 2013.
It's an interesting disparity that many people have commented on before: officers receive all kinds of "training and experience" (as they will brag about ad nauseum when testifying or in a pre-trial interview), but when it really counts and they fail to make effective use of that training and experience, it won't be held against them. They will instead be given infinite benefit of the doubt, as can be seen when officers are sued under 42 U.S.C. ยง 1983 lawsuits (heavily slanted law review article, but it correctly describes the reality of trying to sue for excessive force violations).
It takes a few minutes, but it's not hard to find examples of people with no training or experience engaging a mass shooter. Or officers who did so when they were off-duty: example 1, example 2.[1]
It seems to be one more piece of the overall modern American problem of failing to hold people accountable for high-profile failures because they had the correct credentials and merit badges. It's the brain on bureaucracy that 100ProofTollBooth notes below. "So-and-so had the correct credentials and followed the correct procedures, therefore no one is to blame for this terrible outcome." And then they might not even be held accountable when they don't follow those procedures, like here.
If
the rule you followedall the training and experience brought you to this, of what use was all that training?[1]Incidentally, this one is a fine example of wikipedia's slant on defensive use of arms. If you track down the shooter's post-arrest interview, he says he dropped his gun because he saw armed people approaching him, but wiki presents some witness statements to try to make it sound like he dropped his guns and the guys approaching with guns played no role in stopping the shooting.
Shout-out to the Nashville officers- Sergeant Jeffrey Mathes, Officer Rex Engelbert, and Detectives Michael Collazo, Ryan Cagle, and Zachary Plese - who were true heroes. They went in without hesitation, clearly ready to stop the shooter or die trying, and they earned the Medal of Valor for it. The body-cam footage is amazing. The way Mathes enters is exactly the kind of bravery all men should aspire to. But that's kind of the thing, isn't it? Is the binary really criminal or national hero?
That doesn't seem quite right to me. When someone is given the chance to be a hero and doesn't take it, they should feel deep shame. If it's part of their job, they should be removed from positions that expose them to situations requiring valor, or they should lose their job altogether. But convicting them of a crime seems too far. With this though, if being a hero is not the expectation you are not treated as a hero for just having the job. I have similar feelings about "public-servants".
At the same time, we have a draft. It's not foreign to our country to have a concept of, "We will force you, at the penalty of a worse fate, to do something dangerous and heroic for the benefit of society."
To be a devil's advocate (I don't morally agree with Gonzales' acquittal), we have the draft because it matters quite a lot to the continued existence of our country. Some kids dying in mass shootings is tragic, but rare, even when compared to other gun deaths, and it's not a threat to the nation as a whole. An invasion from a foreign power has much more serious consequences.
Now I'm just saying that's the platonic ideal of the draft. Whether in practice the military actually wages wars that are necessary for the survival of the US, that's an entirely different matter.
The only war that was existential for the US that I can think of is the Civil War.
The revolutionary war, a good chunk of the Indian wars, and the pacific theater of WWII surely qualify.
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The war of 1812 felt existential at the time (once it became clear to the Americans that the British would actually fight back - something Madison had assumed they wouldn't), even if modern historians with access to British archives think it wasn't.
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