“Why do you think you need a gun? If you’re threatened, just call the police.”
How many times have you heard that or something like it? The idea among many anti-gunners is that the police will swoop in to save your life, ironically, as they also try to claim the police are racist, evil fascists who are just looking for an opportunity to murder people. No, they don’t see the disconnect.
Still, they make the claim that we should just call the police instead of defending ourselves pretty regularly.
Yet look at Uvalde. The police waited for more than an hour before going after the killer, and now the first officer on the scene has been acquitted for his failure to act.
Former Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales should have known all this.
You’ll remember Gonzales from one of the school’s heartbreaking security videos, which was taken during the 2022 mass murder. He waited for more than three minutes outside the school as the maniac inside shot and killed 19 students, two teachers and wounded many more.
To be clear, Gonzales was there long before any other police officer arrived. The school was his responsibility. Any action he took could have saved lives. Instead, he waited outside, before entering while the maniac inside was murdering children.
Texas recently tried to hold him somewhat accountable for his misdeeds. Gonzales was charged with 29 counts of child abandonment or endangerment. The charges were for the 21 Texans who were murdered and the others who survived their wounds. Gonzales pleaded not guilty to every single charge.
Prosecutor took no pity on him during his two-week trial, which ended last week.
“If you have a duty to act, you can’t stand by while the child is in imminent danger. If you have a duty to protect the child, you can’t stand by and allow it to happen,” special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during his closing argument.
After deliberating for only seven hours, the jury found Gonzales not guilty of all charges. He hugged his lawyers and left the courtroom a free man.
The former Uvalde police chief is also facing trial. He’s the one who called the SWAT team in and who ordered everyone to hold position for 77 minutes while children were being murdered.
However, I suspect that trial will end up the same way.
Why?
Because police have no duty to protect anyone. While I believe most police officers want to protect people, there’s no inherent duty for them to do so. This lack of a duty to protect individuals makes sense in a lot of circumstances, such as claiming that the police should be held responsible because they didn’t intuit something that might have prevented a homicide later, or that they weren’t patrolling in a given neighborhood as often as a victim or their family thinks they should have.
I disagree with it in a case like this, though.
Under the law in Texas, no one in that school was legally armed. No one in that school could be legally armed. They were denied the means for them to protect themselves or others by the power of the state. When the state does that, it should be understood that the state itself assumes responsibility for protecting as many lives as possible.
Sure, not everyone who gets hurt in a school should be able to sue law enforcement for that, but when it’s clear that officers arrived and failed to respond according to the accepted protocols, and that failure results in people being murdered, someone should be held responsible.
There’s something very wrong with saying that the police have no duty to protect us, even when they’re in a position to do so, but we shouldn’t be able to protect ourselves, either. It’s basically just saying that we’re fair game and there’s nothing anyone will do about it.
I support the police as a general thing, but this will never sit right with me. Sitting outside while kids are being killed is just wrong. I said the same thing after Parkland, too, because it was just as wrong then.
They’re children, for crying out loud. How can anyone just sit there, hearing gunshots, knowing that those aren’t misses and aren’t directed at them, and just wait?
How?
There are some questions I’ll never know the answer to. This might be a case where I don’t know that I want to know the answer, because then any remaining faith in humanity might evaporate in an instant.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights, including capitalizing on police failures and making them a gun issue.
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