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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. § 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.
The job of a police officer is not to protect people. Their job is to enforce the laws of their jurisdiction. It's the ugly truth.
Plenty of good police officers have the instinct and desire to protect others, like the Nashville officers. But it is not in fact their job, and they have repeatedly been found not guilty for failing to protect people. This is not the first time a police officer or police department has been sued for not protecting someone. Even under the most unsympathetic circumstances for the officers they get found not guilty.
This should be an ugly reminder for people. Self defense is a personal right, but the government will not help you secure that right. They won't even help children who are incapable of responsible self defense secure that right.
I wonder how gun control advocates have responded to the fact that police have no obligation to protect anyone, if they have even addressed that at all. It's already bad enough that in the best case scenario, the police are only minutes away when seconds matter. But the fact that police can and have done nothing at all? I would be interested in seeing their counterargument for why people shouldn't arm themselves and have the ability to be their own first responder.
I'm not a gun control guy, but my justification for opposing it isn't this particular self defense line. I think a gun control advocate would say that guns don't really protect you either in the sense you're looking for. Both guns and police are post crime tools. They can be used to punish/kill criminals but by the time you're using one you're already in a situation where you've been aggressed upon. Yes, there are high profile weird cases like rittenhouse or the few times a lady shoots her night time assailant, there are definitely some situations where a gun will help, but it's not a talisman and mostly it helps by making possible aggressors afraid on consequences, which is also how the police function.
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Even given SCOTUS precedent in Castle Rock, "This decision affirmed the controversial principle that state and local government officials have no affirmative duty to protect the public from harm it did not create" (WP), I think there are legal workarounds. My parsing of that sentence is that they have no implied legal duty. You could just add a law to the books that a police officer who fails to stop a victim from getting hurt because he deviates from standard police protocol without sufficient excuse will get punished. We do punish air traffic controllers who fail to prevent planes from colliding (even if they did not set the planes on a collision path), or teachers who fail to report sexual abuse of kids.
Even if the ruling applied more broadly, e.g. that no official could ever be held responsible for stopping a harm they did not create, and any law to such an effect was void (which would severely limit what tasks we could trust officials with, e.g. an EPA chemist might decide to just affirm that all measurements are below thresholds instead of actually running his measurements -- he did not create the harm, after all), I think there would be some workarounds.
A city could only hire cops who are also willing to work as civilian guards concurrently, and give them the obligation to protect people in their capacity as civilian contractors. Or you could try some legal trickery to make them national guards and place them under the UCMJ (or state level equivalent), then issue them a general order to follow standard procedures to keep civilians safe. § 892 is very broad in what punishments you can get, after all.
But also, the fact that there is no affirmative duty for cops to protect you is not in itself very relevant. The relevant question is, when you call 911 to report an intruder in your home, what is the probability that the cops will respond "not now, baseball is on"? Them getting in trouble over failing to act will not resurrect you.
If the probability of a grossly unprofessional response is high, then that is indeed a reason to rely more on self-defense. Just the fact that it would be legal (but still involve professional repercussions, the Uvalde officers will probably not find a PD willing to employ them again) is not particularly relevant.
For example, I do not know if an EMT who decided they can make a quick detour to McDonald's while responding to a medical emergency would face criminal charges. Knowing the answer to that question is not very relevant to the amount of first aid I would want to learn. OTOH, if I knew that ambulances were notoriously unreliable, that would certainly motivate me to learn more first aid and keep more supplies ready.
In the end, it is a numbers game. You have to weigh the probability that you will use a handgun to defend yourself (which is certainly related to the competence of your local PD) against the probability that it is used to kill an innocent, either because your toddler finds it, a tinder date who is a lot crazier than you thought finds it, you use it recklessly while dead drunk, etc. Looking at statistics, gun deaths from accidents and civilian self-defense are actually quite rare, and the likeliest use a non-criminal will find for a gun is suicide. (Which might be an argument for or against gun ownership depending on your other beliefs.)
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When they address it, it’s usually some variation of ‘guns don’t help’ with true but misleading statistics about running away saving lives in confrontations or dogs deterring burglars well.
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Mostly they ignore it. Warren v. DC comes up all the time in online Second Amendment discussions, but since the anti-gunners and the mainstream media are on the same side, they don't have to address it in public.
I imagine it's not a conversation they enjoy, since inevitably it would force them to address the fact that unless we increase the amount of cops by orders of magnitude, they simply cannot be there to protect people in many or most cases. Not that their policy choice cannot be defended despite this, after all the optimal number of children drowning in pools is not zero. But the gun control side puts a lot of effort in thinking around this, as it feels wrong in a primal way, especially for men (and blue tribe men are still men, they do feel the macho impulse to be providers and protectors), that they are not trusted with the tools to defend their family or themselves and need to rely on people who are not likely to be present when it counts. It's not great to have to go and acknowledge "Yeah, some people are going to die helpless without means to defend themselves, but such is the price of safety", the same way the opposite side doesn't enjoy acknowledging that "some people are going to get shot with guns being legal but such is the price of freedom and self-reliance".
We've already had cases where police were present and watching things unfold and did not intervene until the civilian in question had subdued the attacker.
So even if you increase the number of law enforcement in the field to a stratospheric number, that still doesn't mean they have to do jack all.
Yeah, but what we're talking here is an hypothetical scenario where we were addressing the fact that they don't have to do anything. My point was that the gun control side doesn't want to get into this discussion because discussing this gets to close to discussing how even if they were forced to defend the population, you'd need even more police than in the worst police states for them to actually be close enough to stop most violent crimes in time.
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It was New York City, that guy should count himself lucky they didn't arrest him after all was said and done.
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Most of them are fine with only the police having guns. They will generally argue something about stricter gun control making school shootings less frequent because the shooter wouldn't be able to get a gun in the first place. Yes, you can readily pick at this, but you aren't going to cause them to segfault by proposing a dilemma like "police don't have to protect you, but school shootings happen."
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The fact that (American) cops are under no obligation to protect anyone isn't a law of nature.
Just like a gun control advocate can advocate for changing the laws with regards to who can own which gun, he can obviously also advocate for actually forcing the cops to protect people.
You can probably count the actual people who hold the implied opinion "nobody should be allowed to defend themself, and cops shouldn't protect anyone" on the fingers of one hand.
I mean, he can. Does he? Could be my own ignorance talking here, but I don't think I've ever heard this point from gun control advocates. It ought to be a lot easier to get passed than gun control, since the committed opposition is... the police union, I guess? Not half the country; you can see the rightists in this thread agree cops should have that duty. And by doing so first they'd make gun control more likely by neutering this argument against it. So where is the advocacy?
The gun control side doesn't want to discuss self-defense and protection, it's not a productive topic for their side. Having to rely on the police for your protection is something they want to steer the conversation away from, because even if you did neuter the anti control argument that the police don't have to protect by making it that yes the police does have to protect people, they are still not likely to be present when it matters, and neutering that argument is not really possible.
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OK, but which one actually gets done? WA is passing a law to handicap 3d printers (and cnc lates and end mills, because they're idiots) in order to stop ghost guns. Have they done anything to require police to protect people?
No. Instead, and you'll never believe this, they vote to protect criminals instead.
Maybe they're just communists who want to take away all the guns, let loose all the criminals, and steal all my wealth through taxation. And maybe if the gun-grabbers didn't want me to think they're nothing but communists, they wouldn't always be on the side of criminals and taxes.
But the typical self-defense gun owner does not 3d print a ghost gun- in fact very few people do. They buy their guns at a regular gun store.
Now I don’t really think there is much of a reason for passing this law, but it’s not ipso facto an attack on self defense. It is merely an attempt to address a non-problem.
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Or maybe laws are made by voting among a body of legislators, and are differentiated in regard to the ease with which they are passed.
You'll also note that making it harder to create your own guns is orthogonal to whether guns are allowed in the first place; it is perfectly cromulent to have legal recreational McNukes (for example), but where the government wants to know who happens to own WMDs.
This is flatly not true and it's laughable on its face, especially in light of the comment you're responding to. The same people making it harder to make are the ones making it harder to own, and they're doing both for the same reasons. There's nothing orthogonal about it, these are highly correlated events.
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There is a fundamental tension between protecting people and enforcing the law.
There are plenty of "victimless crimes" on the books. And way more laws where the act of arresting and imprisoning a person is way more dangerous and harmful than what you are trying to prevent.
It's why "police" didn't really exist until the 1800s. Prior to that time the roles were more split up and dispersed. Sheriff's would form a posse to go catch criminals. Standing armies were typically the way governments enforced their edicts and laws. Towns and cities sometimes had proto-police forces called a town watch, but usually they were more oriented towards protecting the rich and politically powerful.
Town watches were most frequently militia organizations oriented towards external defense.
England and Philadelphia had proto police town watch.
Most != All
And I'm talking about history of police so context clues should lead you to think about the proto police town watches not the defense force town watches.
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It appears to be the actual position of multiple major governments, however. I think for iron law reasons we can just kind of assume that that’s the equilibrium we’ll wind up at if self defense is more restricted.
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