The hits just keep on coming – I’m betting that the Parkland kiddies that brought a lawsuit to the contrary are stomping all over their self-esteem trophies and are upset that a mean old judge just trampled all over their “right to feel safe” (thank you, teachers, for teaching them the wrong things). We’ve talked about this before; that police have no legal responsibility to protect any particular individual at any time or any place contrary to what anyone believes. Certainly not a group of Parkland students that brought a lawsuit against their local law enforcement folks for not protecting them. Surprise (reformatted, emphasis mine)!
Cops and schools had no duty to shield students in Parkland shooting, says judge who tossed lawsuit
Note that headline; we knew about the police and now THEIR SCHOOL isn’t responsible for their safety. Wowza – that’s gonna leave a mark ALL OVER the place!
A federal judge says Broward schools and the Sheriff’s Office had no legal duty to protect students during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a suit filed by 15 students who claimed they were traumatized by the crisis in February. The suit named six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina.
Bloom ruled that the two agencies had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody. “The claim arises from the actions of [shooter Nikolas] Cruz, a third party, and not a state actor,” she wrote in a ruling Dec. 12. “Thus, the critical question the Court analyzes is whether defendants had a constitutional duty to protect plaintiffs from the actions of Cruz. “As previously stated, for such a duty to exist on the part of defendants, plaintiffs would have to be considered to be in custody” — for example, as prisoners or patients of a mental hospital, she wrote.
And this next part is why people hate lawyers:
…The lawsuit argued that the Sheriff’s Office and School Board “either have a policy that allows killers to walk through a school killing people without being stopped. Alternatively, they have such inadequate training that the individuals tasked with carrying out the policies … lack the basic fundamental understandings of what those policies are such that they are incapable of carrying them out.”
The suit should have added “and lacked the stones to carry out their mission” as we have seen in the videos, law enforcement hiding in cover instead of going into the school building but that’s beside the point. Serious, this ambulance chaser (literally? figuratively?) put forth such an argument that both the schools and the Sheriff’s Office had official policies to get people killed? And he didn’t already know about the SCOTUS decision that already made this clear for police (yeah, the School District is a new twist on this)?
Kristoffer R. Budhram of Jacksonville, who represented the students, said in an emailed statement: “We respectfully disagree with Judge Bloom’s decision to dismiss our clients’ case. This case is about protecting the Constitutional rights of individuals who were the victims of one of the worst mass shootings in this country’s history.
And what Constitutional rights were those? If there were any, wouldn’t that previous SCOTUS decision have picked up on it? I’m no lawyer but I’m going to ask new Grokster Norm Silber who is part of both the NH and Florida BAR Association to weigh in on this.
As both the Parkland Investigation Panel and the Trump Commission found, good guys with guns are needed. Will they stop all massacres of this same type? Absolutely not – but there would be more of a deterrence effect and a higher level of mitigation as well. I know that as a lecturer, and having an active shooter situation brought up during orientation in a “gun free” environment, I would have felt much safer knowing that I could have carried or at least had my firearm locked in my vehicle.
After all, if the police and the school (even the security folks where I was were denied carry privileges) can’t protect me, it goes back to not just a Right but a Responsibility to be able to protect oneself. I knew that several of the students owned firearms and one had military training. Sure, I war-gamed several situations just in case but there weren’t a lot of options without being able to fight back if needed (hockey pucks just don’t make it).
(H/T: Orlando Sentinel)
