Gun Free Zone

With the talk going around about Trump banning silencers, I hear now the same assholes on “our side” who wanted the NRA ‘burned to the ground now!’ (and even went as far as to constantly repost articles from Bloomberg’s anti gun  “The Trace”) complaining about why are the Republicans not showing a bigger backbone and how come the NRA is not doing anything to stop it.

Guess what? The bovines are their way to their abode. Stop complaining, get on your suit and go to Washington D.C. to lobby the congresscritters. You guys said you did not need the NRA, right. That anybody could do a better job without compromise?

Put up or shut up.

I read Miguel’s posts on this topic and thought I would give a summary of my own take.

I agree with Miguel, the majority of this trial is for show.

The media and county went all in to protect Scott Israel and the chicken shit Scot Peterson in the days following the shooting.

A year later, after all the details and witness testimonies were made public, and the truth of the entire incompetent, ham-fisted, cluster-fuck, shit-show debacle came out, everybody who rode to the defense of the BSO had egg on their faces.

Governor Ron DeSantis scored a blow for justice by removing Scott Israel from his position.  Scott Israel was further discredited by the ruling in his appeal.

Now it is time for Broward County to clean the egg off its face, so it is going forward with this show trial.  The problem will be that this case will be dismissed and it will make everyone look even worse.

Here is the real issue in this case.

Moral culpability versus legal guilt.

Clearly, the chicken shit Scot Peterson is morally culpable.  He took a job as a school resource officer, with a moral duty to protect the children of the school he was assigned to.  We as a society trust that our police officers, armed and armored by the state, paid with tax dollars, and given special privileges and protections will do their moral duty to protect us in moments of crisis.

That is part of the fabric of good social order.

But that is not the law.  The chicken shit Scot Peterson did not have a special duty to protect those students as a matter of law or statute.  This has been the position of the courts for decades.

So while he violated society’s trust in him, and abdicate his moral responsibility, he never actually broke the law.

He is morally culpable but not legally guilty.

That tears at our hearts because we WANT moral culpability and legal guilt to overlap.  We don’t like to see a bad person get away with a bad act without consequence.  But that is what is going to happen here.

The only part of the indictment that might have any weight is the perjury part, and that feels like it is only there to get him some jail time after the rest of the charges are dismissed.  All the outrage (and rightfully so) is at his inaction, and not that he lied to cover his ass after his inaction became public.

Scot Peterson is a dickless, feckless, gutless, yellow-bellied, chicken shit fucking coward.

He deserved to be called out and publicly shamed wherever he goes.  When he dies, people should visit his grave to piss on his headstone.  The moral culpability for at least six deaths weighs on his head.

But he is not guilty of a crime according to the laws of the State of Florida.

There may be one or two positive unintended consequences of this case being dismissed:

The legislature could change the law to make there be a legal duty to protect under certain circumstances.

A better public understanding of “no duty to protect” leading to more support for armed teachers and concealed carry, i.e., “if they don’t have to protect us, we will have to protect ourselves.”

As for this case, we as a society will have to have to accept not seeing the chicken shit Scot Peterson die in prison, because moral culpability is not necessarily legal guilt, as much as we may want it to be.

I was sent this just now. It seems I was not far off the baseline:

Interesting: No mention of perjury. I wonder why.

The charges are seven counts of child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury.

According to Florida Statutes 827.03:

(e) “Neglect of a child” means:
1. A caregiver’s failure or omission to provide a child with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the child’s physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition, clothing, shelter, supervision, medicine, and medical services that a prudent person would consider essential for the well-being of the child; or
2. A caregiver’s failure to make a reasonable effort to protect a child from abuse, neglect, or exploitation by another person.

Peterson was not a caregiver. There is nothing in Florida Statutes 1006.12 – Safe-school officers at each public school,  that says a SRO is a caregiver but only a police officer allowed to be in school and enforce the law.  And remember, it is what the law says, not what we want the law to be so it makes us feel good. And even in school No Duty to Protect applies.

Now, the charges of culpable negligence if they were to stick (doubtfully) are a best a misdemeanor if found guilty.

So we end up with perjury:

837.02 Perjury in official proceedings.—(1) Except as provided in subsection (2), whoever makes a false statement, which he or she does not believe to be true, under oath in an official proceeding in regard to any material matter, commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
(2) Whoever makes a false statement, which he or she does not believe to be true, under oath in an official proceeding that relates to the prosecution of a capital felony, commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

So they are applying to Scott Peterson the same thing the FBI and other federal entities apply to minions in investigations: “I don’t have the evidence of the main evil deed we are charging you with, but this statement you made under oath does not match what really happened so screw mens rea,My take on the  you just committed Perjury. We got you by the short and curlies”

And BINGO! Scott Peterson gets a term from 5 to 15 years in prison and most everybody is happy.

This is a legal poisoning of the well. We can’t get you with our original complaint but we will make sure you are sorry you are even alive by pulling sneaky legal maneuvers.

Let this be a teaching moment: “Anything you say will be used in court” should have a very scary meaning and you should consult with a lawyer before any interrogations. Miranda is there for a reason.

Doublethink: From George Orwell’s 1984, “is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

From The New York Times:

Deputy Who Stayed Outside During Parkland School Shooting Faces Criminal Charges

As bullets ricocheted and bodies fell in the hallways and classrooms at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, Deputy Scot Peterson was outside the building. Instead of storming in after the 19-year-old gunman, he retreated to a position of safety.

For more than a year after the February 2018 attack in Parkland, Fla., grieving parents have demanded that Mr. Peterson — along with the gunman who killed 17 and injured 17 — be held accountable in what would prove to be one of the nation’s worst school shootings. On Tuesday, law enforcement responded with a sweeping list of charges that resulted in Mr. Peterson’s arrest. His alleged crime: failing to protect the students.

So far, all the same coverage of the chicken shot Scot Peterson’s failures to act on that fateful day.

America’s long history of mass shootings have brought a variety of responses: Calls for tighter gun laws, civil lawsuits against companies that manufacture guns and firearm components, collective mourning. But Tuesday’s charges represented a highly unusual case of a lawman arrested for failing to save lives.

Around Parkland, whose politically engaged students helped launch a national student movement for more gun control, there was both surprise and satisfaction.

The 15-month investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that led to the charges, found that the former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, assigned as a school resource officer to Stoneman Douglas High, “did absolutely nothing to mitigate” the shooting, the department’s commissioner, Rick Swearingen, said in a statement. “There can be no excuse for his complete inaction and no question that his inaction cost lives,” he said.

Keep that bolded part in your mind.

The Department of Law Enforcement said its inquiry showed that Mr. Peterson did not investigate the source of the gunshots, retreated during the shooting while victims were still under attack and directed other law enforcement officers to remain 500 feet away from the building.

The warrant portrayed Mr. Peterson, the only armed guard on campus, as an officer with a wealth of active shooter training who knew the gunman was inside, but did not go in to try to stop him as he killed and injured students and staff. It details a series of students and faculty who remembered seeing Mr. Peterson outside

The Broward State Attorney really wants to hammer home just how much of a gutless, chicken shit coward Peterson is, and how his chicken shit nature lead to so much needless death.

Jeff Bell, the president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, expressed concern about the decision to charge Mr. Peterson, who was not a member of his organization. He argued that prosecutors had adopted a sweeping interpretation of the state’s negligence law that could put other officers at risk of charges in the future.

“I am worried that state attorneys and political officers can start to weaponize criminal charges against law enforcement if you don’t meet their threshold for what you do or should not do,” said Mr. Bell, who said he and others were still disappointed by Mr. Peterson’s response to the shooting.

And maybe that is not such a bad idea.  Remember in the Joe Lozito case, Maksim Gelman was spotted on a subway train by two NYPD officers who hid in the conductor’s cab until Gelman was tackled by Lozito after Gelman stabbed Lozito several times.  The police, armed with guns, stood on the other side of a locked door and watched Lozito get stabbed by a man there was an active manhunt for and they did nothing.

Maybe, just maybe, there should be a standard for minimal law enforcement response.

I’m a PE, a licensed professional engineer.  If I look at a drawing and see an error that is dangerous and say “fuck it, I’m not going to fix it” and people are hurt, I get to go to jail.   I volunteered for that responsibility.

Maybe part of becoming a police officer is taking the responsibility of responding to a dangerous situation and being held liable if you fail to do so.

That principle exists in military law, it is Dereliction of Duty.  That could at least be a starting point for a minimum standard for police.  But this is not something for the courts to figure out, this is something for the state legislature to codify.

Here is where this story gets interesting.

*Trigger warning: if you are prone to heart attack or stroke, take a blood thinner before reading further.

Daniel Bishop, 17, who was a sophomore when the Parkland shooting took place and was one of dozens of students who traveled to the State Capitol afterward to demand changes to state gun laws, said he was surprised by the news of the former deputy’s arrest.

“It wasn’t his fault,” said Mr. Bishop, who will be a senior in the fall. “Who am I to place blame on anyone besides the one person who should be held accountable?”

What.  The.  Actual.  Fuck.  Is.  That.  Shit!?!

Bishop was one of the student activists that motivated the Florida State Legislature to collectively punish law abiding citizens with a rash of new gun laws.

He was part of the group that called the NRA and law-abiding gun owners murderers with blood on their hands.

He held people who did absolutely nothing in or around Parkland morally culpable for the shooting because of their political views and hobbies.

BUT

The actual School Resource Officer whose job it was to protect those kids, and failed to do that by hiding behind a tree like a chicken shit, according to this kid, he (the chicken shit Scot Peterson) is not culpable.

Whoever the fuck taught this kids logic and ethics failed.  Flat fucking failed.

This is what politics as moral preening has wrought.

According to the activist, millions of NRA members who have never hurt anyone are more guilty for the deaths of 17 kids at a school shooting than the one armed man there tasked with preventing exactly that kind of situation who decided not to act instead.

This should be, for any rational person, the final nail in the coffin for any moral authority the Parkland kids might have had.

The doublethink here would make Big Brother proud.

“The only kind made by white labor”

This particular ad appeared in the Arizona Weekly Citizen on July 16, 1892.  It also appeared in Idaho, New Mexico, Montana and Utah in the same year.

I jumped one year back and found this version in the Tombstone Epitaph. Yes, that Tombstone.

I took a quick peek at 1890 and I found the ad again, so this is not a one time thing. I could not find ads for Levy’s in any other newspapers of the era that are recorded with the Library of Congress, but I only looked at three years.

The things you find when you dig through history.

I guess you can see the Ammo.com banner on the right. If you need ammo, click on the banner and it will take you to their site, get a rebate on your first purchase, plus I get credit so I can get me some ammo.

Seriously, I feel I am short on 5.56 and I could use about three hundred 9mm Hornady Critical Defense.