I have no interest in dying, but I don’t know if I could live with myself if I were one of the officers who first responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde and I did absolutely nothing, despite not just knowing the protocol for active shooters, but having the training to handle it.
As we saw in Nashville, a swift, violent response to a school shooting can save a whole lot of lives.
But in Uvalde, we saw the opposite of that.
Now, one of the first officers to respond is going to trial for his failure to act.
Nearly four years after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in a Texas elementary school, a jury is set to decide whether a police officer should be held criminally responsible in connection with one of the worst school shootings in American history.
Jury selection began Monday in the trial of former Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales, charged with allegedly placing more than two dozen children in “imminent danger” by failing to respond to the crisis as it unfolded.
After a more than 11-hour jury selection process, Judge Sid Harle finalized the jury Monday night, with opening statements scheduled for Tuesday morning.
…
Prosecutors allege that Gonzales, one of the first of nearly 400 officers to respond to the rampage, failed to engage the shooter despite knowing his location, having time to respond and being trained to handle active shooters. It ultimately took 77 minutes for law enforcement to mount a counter-assault that would kill the gunman.
Ever since the shooting tore apart Uvalde on May 24, 2022, families of the victims have been seeking accountability and answers. Many have argued their children might have been saved had police confronted the gunman more quickly. The gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, acted alone and was killed on-site at Robb Elementary School.
The trial, held in Corpus Christi, 200 miles from Uvalde, marks an exceedingly rare instance of prosecutors seeking to convict a member of law enforcement for a response to a school shooting.
Prosecutors in June 2024 charged both Gonzales and Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo — the on-site commander on the day of the shooting — with multiple counts of endangerment and abandonment of a child.
Historically, police have avoided prosecution for such things because the courts have repeatedly ruled that officers have no duty to protect individuals. The duty of the police is to protect the public as a whole, thus they can’t be held responsible for failing to protect specific individuals.
I understand this and, largely, agree with the underlying reasons for this. We can’t have police dealing with lawsuits because they failed to do something that, in hindsight, would have saved someone. For example, the cop who once pulled Jeffery Dahmer over shouldn’t be charged for failing to dig into the bag containing human remains in the back seat.
On the flip side, this is something different.
These were officers who were trained to deal with situations like this, who were on the scene and aware of what was happening at the time, knew the protocol for situations like this, and still sat on their hands for 77 minutes while an armed, deranged nutbar was killing children.
At the very least, some of those murders should be on these men’s souls.
I don’t like the idea of this case leading to “mission creep” of sorts, where cops start being prosecuted for lesser and lesser issues until they can’t do their jobs without being jackbooted thugs in every instance. However, it’s also very hard to look at this and not see the grounds for prosecution.
It’s bad enough that citizens are disarmed at schools like Robb Elementary. It’s even worse when the people we’re told will protect them in these places sit on the sidelines for over an hour while having the bad guy outnumbered and outgunned for pretty much the entire time, allowing more and more innocent lives to be ended so viciously.
I don’t know how I could live with myself if I were either of these men. The fact that they’ve managed to live with themselves tells me all I need to know about them as people.
There’s no sympathy at all for what they’re dealing with.
Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
Help us continue to report on their efforts and legislative successes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Read the full article here
