If you didn’t hear or see it the other day, Florida sheriff’s deputy acquitted of neglect, other charges in Parkland shooting.
I told you, I told you, I told you. In my March 2018 article The ‘Why’ of the 2nd Amendment Part 1. I first detailed the duty and mandate of Law Enforcement Officers. Then I made this comment. I described how the “Coward of Broward” fulfilled the legal obligations of his job:
“But they stood outside while people were being killed!!!” And.......? As I have repeatedly stated, the job of the police is not to protect individual people, it is to enforce the law. You and you alone are responsible for your personal safety. I fully expect for you not to believe me, so here is the SCOTUS ruling: South V. Maryland (1856). The sad news will come hard to any family who attempts to sue the Broward County Sheriff’s Office for failure to engage the shooter. Every lawyer will sadly inform them they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
I was talking about families who would try to sue the officer or their agency for negligence or whatever. This was the DA who criminally charged the deputy. Evidently, the DA and their minions didn’t understand the law, or thought these charges would “sneak by.”
I then went on to say in the next paragraph,
Now that I have described the legal extent of their duties, what is the extent of their moral, ethical and human duties to those in the school? Undoubtedly to rush in, singly or as a team, find, engage and stop the shooter, even at the expense of their own lives. Those duties apply to LEO and legally armed citizen alike.
For the record, no law would have changed this outcome. There was no law, proposed or active, that would have prevented the shooter from obtaining their weapons, or stopped/prevented the shooter, and if the law was changed to force a “duty to engage” on the police, this coward still would not have engaged alone. When given a choice between being in prison and being dead, there are some people who would choose prison.
In the end, if you end up in an active shooter situation, your survival is dependent only on your own actions. You can be like Suzanne Hupp, who left her firearm in the car and watched helplessly as her parents and twenty other people were murdered, or you can be Elijah Dicken, who was legally armed and ended the threat in fifteen seconds, preventing more deaths.