Carrying on Campus

Guns Should Be Allowed On Campus

by
Larry Pratt

Gun free school zones have proven to be a dangerous delusion that has resulted in people being forced to be victims.

The only people guaranteed to be safe in gun free zones are criminals. They can count on the law-abiding being disarmed. In reality, gun free zones are nothing more than criminal safe zones.

Criminals have proven that they not only disrespect laws, they are willing and able to break them. The island nation of Great Britain has banned guns. In 1997 they confiscated virtually all legal guns. Yet today, the police there estimate that England has twice the number of guns in the country — illegally. The press in Manchester refer to their city as “Gunchester.”

Stricter gun control laws than those in the United States have not prevented Canada, Scotland and Germany from suffering from mass murderers striking schools in those countries.

The solution is to empower the most responsible people in America to be intermixed with potential victims so that they might have the opportunity to be the first responders to head off such attacks such as the one at Virginia Tech. We have enough people licensed to carry concealed firearms that we can now say with certainty that these are the folks who commit the fewest crimes in our society.

Concealed weapons carriers commit even fewer violent crimes than do police.

Yet our federal and state laws (with a few exceptions such as Utah and Arizona) prohibit these potential Good Samaritans from being armed on our college campuses. One concealed carry permit holder is a graduate student at Virginia Tech. After a murder at the edge of the campus last August, he wrote a letter to the editor.

In that letter, he confessed that he had not been carrying his gun on campus because he did not want to jeopardize his graduate career should he get caught. After the murders, he said, he has been considering that had he been killed, that would have jeopardized his graduate career!

We have seen that armed civilians, students and staff alike, have been able to get their guns and stop campus killers in the past — such as in Pearl, Mississippi (1997) and Grundy, Virginia (2002). But in those cases, the heroes had to run to their cars and get their guns and run back to the scene of the crime to stop the killer, losing valuable time.

Armed self-defense works. Disarmament kills.

The original article appeared on the Gun Owners of America website.

 ***Post Edit*** 02/08/08

As tragic as these stories are they both today occured in Gun Free Zones:

Husband shoots wife at school in Ohio, later kills himself.

Five Shot to Death at Mo. City Council Meeting

Texas Castle Doctrine

‘Castle law’ arms Texas homeowners with right to shoot
Does new law make them quicker to pull the trigger?

12:06 AM CST on Sunday, January 20, 2008
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG / The Dallas Morning News
myoung@dallasnews.com

The shootings came fast, a bang-bang-bang cluster of cases starting in early autumn that quickly had police, prosecutors and the media wondering about the sudden impact of Texas’ new castle law.

A business owner who lives at his West Dallas welding shop killed two men in three weeks as they tried to break in.

A 79-year-old homeowner in east Oak Cliff, awakened by his dog, struggled with an intruder before grabbing a shotgun and wounding the man.

A retired Army warrant officer managed to kill a gun-wielding robber at a Far East Dallas dry cleaners after his wife surprised the intruder and handed her husband their own 9 mm handgun.

Texas has long had a reputation as a shoot-first-ask-questions-later place, dating back to its frontier days.

But the spate of shootings begs the question: Did the castle law – which gives people the right to use whatever means necessary to protect themselves and their property without fear of civil liability – unleash a flurry of gunfire?

Perhaps just as important, has the law changed people’s perceptions about fighting back? Are they more likely to shoot first even when safe retreat may be an option?

“I think the castle law has more citizens thinking about fighting back, knowing they’re protected from being sued later,” said Dallas homeowner Dennis Baker.

He shot and killed a burglar in October after seeing the man enter the garage where he stored thousands of dollars worth of tools.

But Dr. Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, doesn’t think the castle law governs someone’s thinking when they hear a window softly opening late at night, or the crash of a door coming down in a home invasion.

“In situations in which people would be making a decision to use defensive violence, it’s very unlikely they’d be thinking about laws and penalties,” he said. “That would be the furthest thing from their mind.”

Certainly the castle law has become a high-profile addition to the Texas statutes since it took effect Sept. 1, but police and the district attorneys association argue that it brought little substantial change.

While it appeared to apply to each of these cases, so did a batch of other laws, along with the tradition of Texas juries giving people every benefit of the doubt when protecting themselves, their families and their property.

None of these property owners was charged. Police referred a few cases to the Dallas County grand jury, which declined to indict. In others, police determined that the shootings were justified.
Police’s take

And they see the rash of shootings as part of a normal cycle, not a trend.

Dallas police homicide investigators said they’ve yet to encounter a self-defense situation since the castle law took effect that would have been barred under previous laws.

“There may come a time when that’s not the case,” said Lt. Craig Miller. “But I would have to look at each of those under its own merits.”

Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, said he didn’t know of a single Texas case in which the castle law would have made a difference.

“The reality is Texas grand juries routinely no-billed deadly force cases under the old law, which was very lenient,” he said. “Many of the cases that you read about center on defense of property laws, which were always very, very lenient in the use of deadly force.

“That’s just how Texas is.”

Dr. Kleck said some states, including Texas, have legal systems with broad definitions of self-defense.

“There was a study of homicides in Houston sometime back,” he said, “and a huge percentage of those cases were defined as justifiable.

“But in the Northeast, another study showed that almost none of the cases there were justifiable under the law.”
Neighbor fights back

One Texas case in particular has attracted national attention, in part because of the circumstances: It was a neighbor, not the homeowner, confronting and killing a pair of burglars Nov. 14.

Joe Horn of Pasadena, Texas, was heard on a 911 tape telling Diego Ortiz and Hernando Torres, “Move, you’re dead,” before shots were fired.

And the neighbor mentioned in a 911 call that a new law gave him the right to protect himself if he confronted the burglars.

The 61-year-old Pasadena man, Joe Horn, told the police operator: “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”

“You’re going to get yourself shot,” the operator warned.

“You want to make a bet?” Mr. Horn said. “I’ll kill them. They’re getting away!”

“That’s OK. Property’s not worth killing someone over, OK?” the operator said. “Don’t go out of the house. Don’t be shooting nobody.”

The burglars emerged from the house, carrying “a bag of loot,” Mr. Horn said.

“Which way are they going?” the operator asked.

“I can’t … I’m going outside, then I’ll find out,” Mr. Horn said.

“No, I don’t want you going outside,” the operator said.

“Well, here it goes, buddy,” Mr. Horn replied.

Seconds later, Mr. Horn can be heard saying, “Move, you’re dead,” followed by two shots and then a third.

“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said in a second 911 call. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”

Was the castle law designed to cover those circumstances?

No, said the law’s author, state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio.

“You’re supposed to be able to defend your own home, your own family, in your house, your place of business or your motor vehicle,” he said – but not your neighbor’s.

But Mr. Edmonds said other property laws could provide a defense for Mr. Horn, whose case is under investigation.

“The laws governing the use of force to defend property instead of a person are very broad and very favorable to someone who wants to use that force,” Mr. Edmonds said.

Chapter 9 of the Texas Penal Code describes deadly force as justified to prevent arson, robbery, theft or criminal mischief at night, or to prevent a suspect from fleeing if the property owner “reasonably believes the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.”

“You hear someone stealing something off your front porch. You come out there with a gun, and they’re running off. It’s nighttime. The law in Texas allows you to shoot them,” said former Dallas County prosecutor Toby Shook.
Juries’ leniency

Texas grand juries have traditionally given people carte blanche to take whatever steps they need to keep their property, Mr. Edmonds said. “In the Pasadena case, as egregious as the facts may be,” he said, “the law may still excuse that person’s conduct.”

He pointed to a case near Waco in the 1990s when the owner of a car saw a group of teenagers stealing his hubcaps late one night.

“He shot at them from his apartment and killed one of them” Mr. Edmonds said. “The grand jury no-billed it.”

Jim Cornehls, an attorney and professor of urban and public affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington, said he defended a man a few years ago in similar circumstances.

The man lived in an apartment complex where kids left their bikes in a central courtyard.

“There had been a rash of bike thefts,” Dr. Cornehls said, “and when this man got home from work late one night, he saw a guy out there purloining a bike.

“He whipped out his .22 and shot him. He didn’t kill him, but he wounded him, and the prosecutors let that one slide. In his case, it wasn’t even his property. It was a random bike.”
Law necessary?

But if Texas law already allowed people to defend themselves, their families and their properties against a whole array of crimes, did the state really need the castle law?

Absolutely, Mr. Wentworth said.

“I read in the newspaper a couple of years ago that Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, was signing the castle doctrine there to allow residents to defend themselves in their own homes,” the senator said. “And I thought, ‘Isn’t that silly? We in Texas have always had that right.’

“But when I checked, I discovered that through legislative and judicial action in the 1970s, we’d changed the law. Before that, there was no fear of indictment or civil suits if you defended yourself in your home. But we lost that in 1974.”Rather than using whatever means necessary to protect yourself and your family, he said, Texans “didn’t have a right to stand and defend themselves, but an obligation to retreat.”

And if that was impossible, he said, the resident had the obligation to ascertain whether the intruder was armed – and with what – and respond only with the appropriate level of force to match the threat.

“I believe you have the right to defend yourself with any means necessary without fear of being indicted or sued by the intruder or his or her survivors,” Mr. Wentworth said.
Tried every measure

Mr. Baker believes that, too.

He had lived in his modest neighborhood just north of Dallas Love Field for 15 years without a problem when burglars began stealing his equipment – five times in two months.

He stored his tools in his garage, protected behind a locked six-foot gate and next to a back yard bathed by a light so bright that a friend said it looked like the Texas Rangers’ ballpark.

It wasn’t enough to deter the thieves.

On an early October morning, Mr. Baker heard a noise – his Mexican red-headed parrot, Salvador, had squawked an emphatic “Hello,” something he does whenever someone passes by. Mr. Baker flipped on a closed-circuit monitor and saw a man walk into his garage.

Mr. Baker said he had seen the man before, on tapes of the earlier burglaries.

“If he needed a fast fix, he’d go into my garage and grab something and take it to his drug connection,” Mr. Baker said earlier this month.

That night, he decided to confront the intruder, identified as John Woodson, 46, of Dallas, who had a criminal record for various offenses, including burglary.

“I went out the front door and came through the gate, and when he started walking from the back of the garage toward me, that’s when I shot him,” Mr. Baker said.

When police arrived, a homicide detective watched the video and told Mr. Baker, “This is by the book.”

The case received international attention, largely because of Salvador, the parrot. But Dallas grand jurors treated it as Texas juries usually do: They declined to indict.

That’s one of the reasons county prosecutors argued against the castle law in committee hearings before it was approved. It really wasn’t necessary, they said, because more than a half-dozen self-defense provisions already existed in Texas law. And Texas juries almost always sided with the person protecting his own.

“In 25 years, I’ve never known a Harris County court to prosecute a homeowner or businessman for killing a burglar or robber,” Harris County Assistant District Attorney Bill Delmore told legislators. “We don’t do that.”

Jana McCown, an assistant district attorney for Williamson County, echoed that in her remarks.

“I can assure you that we don’t try to arrest homeowners or crime victims for protecting themselves against crime,” she said.

But the Legislature overwhelmingly supported Mr. Wentworth’s bill, and it was quickly signed into law.
In the courtroom

Now judges and prosecutors need to figure out how to deal with it in the courtroom.

“Prosecutors who were concerned about the law were concerned about how it will operate in court, not in the street,” said Mr. Edmonds of the district and county attorneys association.

The castle law says the use of force or deadly force is presumed to be reasonable if someone unlawfully and with force enters an occupied home, business or car. Further, if the force used against the intruder was reasonable according to the statute, the occupant is immune from civil liability for injuries or death.

For Mr. Baker and many in Texas, the right to defend family, home and property only makes sense.

But others, including Marsha McCartney of Dallas, a member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, say the law becomes a death sentence for criminals who would never face that in court.

In practical terms, Ms. McCartney said, there doesn’t even need to be an explicit threat of attack to justify a shooting over property. In several local cases, she said, property owners didn’t appear to be in any danger, yet shot and killed unarmed intruders.

“I find that shocking – killing people over things,” she said. “The question you have to ask is: Does the punishment fit the crime?

“People don’t get the death penalty for breaking and entering. Defending your family, defending yourself against someone who is armed is one thing. But now it’s like we don’t need to call the police anymore.”

Steven Jansen of the American Prosecutors Research Institute in Alexandria, Va., said the so-called “no-retreat” castle laws largely take away discretion from local district attorneys, even in cases with questionable circumstances.

“The law always was that you had a right to defend your home and your person, and the prosecutor had discretion at that point to look at the facts and decide what a prudent person would do,” said Mr. Jansen, a former prosecutor in Detroit.

“But the castle doctrine laws extend that right to self-defense to places outside the home – almost anywhere a person has a legal right to be – and providing for criminal and civil immunity for the person using the lethal force.

“That isn’t even extended to police officers who use their guns in the line of duty.”
Emotional backlash

Still, there can be a price to pay for taking the life of another.

Dr. Heidi Vermette, medical director for mental health at the Veterans Administration in Dallas and an assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said a person who shoots another human could suffer from acute stress disorder, or even post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Acute stress disorder lasts for a few days to four weeks or so,” she said, “and people with it tell you they feel numb as they recall the event. They say things like, ‘I was in a daze,’ or ‘It was as if time was standing still.’

“And afterward they might not be able to remember the event. Or they re-experience the event. Nightmares are common and feeling distressed.”

Mr. Baker said a friend, a child psychologist, called him after the shooting at his house.

“She talked with me for hours, and she said, ‘When this is over, when the attention is gone, this will work on you mentally,’ ” he said.

“But then another friend of mine told me that every occupation has an occupational hazard. A fireman can die in a fire. A coal miner can die in a mining accident. And a burglar can die in someone’s garage in the dark of night.

“I guess I was his occupational hazard.”

But a few minutes later, he sat quietly in an office chair, looking down.

“It’s hard to look at some things because he was a human being,” Mr. Baker said. “But he had a drug problem.

“The people closest to him should have gotten him some help.”

Staff writer Steve Thompson contributed to this report.

RIGHTS UNDER NEW LAW

Major provisions of Texas’ Castle Law:

• Presumes you are reasonable in using force if someone – illegally and with force – enters or is attempting to enter your occupied home, car or workplace. You are not given this presumption if you provoked the person or are engaged in a crime.

• Removes your obligation to retreat if possible before using deadly force if you are anywhere you have a right to be. The previous law obliged you to retreat if a “reasonable person” would have, except in a situation where someone unlawfully entered your home.

• Gives you added protection from lawsuits by injured attackers or their families. Previous law granted this protection if someone illegally entered your home, but not in other situations.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

Cool poem

I ran across another item worth your reading. It’s a cool poem by Joe Sledge:

 The Walking Rifleman
By Joe Sledge

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’
it adds not a bit to his load.
It makes him in fact somewhat lighter,
for he walks as a free man, unbowed.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’,
he’s master of all he can see.
A good man won’t abuse the position,
for a master’s a fine thing to be.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’,
he’ll keep his eye sharp, his wits keen.
That’s not just a tart he’s escortin’.
No, that lady beside him’s a queen.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’,
its condition doesn’t matter to me.
He can load it however he chooses
so long as he lives by Rule Three.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’
and he needs a second shot quick,
he’ll be glad of the time spent on homework, that he mastered reflexive bolt-flick.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’
and he’s hunting, to feed him and his,
well, he’s living the way God intended,
and that’s just the way that it is.

When a man takes his rifle a walkin’,
as some say he should not be allowed,
well, they’d better be saying it softly, for a man with a rifle is proud.

So if you take your rifle a walkin’,
realize what you’re saying, my friend.
You’re saying that you are a free man
and woe be to him who butts in.

So let’s take our rifles a walkin’,
with pride - defiance if need.
If we don’t want to be the last riflemen we’ve got to re-sow freedom’s seed.

Yes, let’s take our rifles a walkin’,
and we’ll walk in the light, so they’ll see.
And if they come to tell us we cannot,
then we’ll water the Liberty Tree.

I wish I lived in this America…

While I’ll be the first to admit that guns on an airplane are a little dangerous (one hole through the fuselage = air pressure drops, etc.), I wish I still lived in THIS America:

An article worth reading

I came across this article tonight and thought it would be worth sharing it with you.

COLUMN: Carrying guns will stop violent crimes

By: Brian Ridley / Daily Toreador (Texas Tech)

Posted: 1/25/08

LUBBOCK, Texas (U-WIRE) - Are all of the amendments in the Bill of Rights equally important? Should we uphold some while not upholding others? That seems to be the trend we are increasingly seeing in our society.

The Supreme Court has been making its living these days by overstepping the boundaries of the 10th Amendment.

States are losing their rights of self-governance on a daily basis. The First Amendment often is set aside when someone is persecuted for making a comment that doesn’t fit the politically correct mold.

Even on Texas Tech’s campus, free speech is limited to special “free speech areas” designated by the school. Moreover, there is an ongoing battle on how the Second Amendment can be whittled away.

Anti-gun groups constantly are fighting to remove guns from our society, regardless of our constitutional right to bear them.

What possible good would it do to remove guns from society? Well, groups who espouse “gun control” — or should I say anti-gun groups — say if we outlaw guns, then crimes committed with guns will go away.

That sounds nice; who wouldn’t love for crime to go away? But when forced to deal with reality, these anti-gun ideas don’t hold true. In fact, they don’t even lower the number of crimes committed. Studies show more restrictions on citizens owning guns causes the crime rate to increase.

According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, New Jersey adopted one of the most stringent gun laws in the nation in 1966. Two years later the murder rate was up 46 percent, and the robbery rate nearly had doubled.

After implementing a series of harsh anti-gun laws, Hawaii’s murder rate tripled from 1968 to 1977. Washington, D.C., imposed one of the most restrictive gun-control laws in the nation in 1976. In the time since, the city’s murder rate has grown 134 percent.

In that time, the national average actually has dropped 2 percent. Luckily for the citizens of D.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in 2007 that the legislation there restricting personal gun carrying was unconstitutional.

Ten out of the top 15 states for the highest homicide rates have laws that are restrictive to gun ownership. Of all the homicides committed in the United States, 20 percent of them are committed in just four cities: New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

Each of these cities has gun laws in place that make it almost impossible for private citizens to own handguns. This just goes to show when law-abiding citizens are denied the right to protection, criminals have the ability to do as they please.

In countries where outright gun banning has taken place, the same thing is happening. England banned private ownership of handguns in 1997; since then the number of people injured by firearms has more than doubled.

In 1996, Australia banned all semi-automatic guns and pump shotguns. After only 12 months, homicides had risen 3.2 percent, armed robbery was up 44 percent, and assaults were up 8.6 percent. Prior to these new dictatorial gun-banning laws, these statistics had been dropping.

According to the National Rifle Association, handguns are used 2 million times per year for defense against criminals. This is five times more often than they are used to commit crimes.

Outlawing Americans from owning guns only will even up these statistics. People who use guns to defend themselves are less likely to be injured than people who use other forms of protection.

Those using a gun are shown to have a 17.4 percent chance of being injured versus 40.3 percent with a knife, 22 percent with other weapons, 50.8 percent with physical force, 48.9 percent by trying to get help or frighten the offender, 30.7 percent with non-violent resistance including evasion and 26.5 percent with various other techniques.

All of these statistics make sense when you think of citizens owning guns as a possible deterrent for criminals. A criminal is more willing to commit a crime if he knows his victim is unarmed. This is exactly what banning guns will do.

While quoting Cesare Beccaria, Thomas Jefferson stated, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarms only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater … confidence than an armed man.”

Molon labe

I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write but honestly, I’m not consistent enough to make a decent showing. In spite of all this I’ve decided that I’ve had enough. Society as a whole is in a downward spiral that isn’t slowing anytime soon. This blog will primarily be a soapbox for my thoughts on the second amendment, right to keep and bear arms, concealed carry, and other gun-related issues. While other hot topics may surface now and again, it’s focus will be on guns.

Here’s a quote I really enjoy: “[T]he simple truth—born of experience—is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.” - US Federal Appeals Judge for the Ninth Circuit Alex Kozinski, in a dissent written over the court’s refusal to hear a challenge of the California Assault Weapons ban in 2003

While fear of the government is pretty far down on my list of reasons to carry I still think it’s nice that voices like this exist in America, especially voices of power.

So why guns? I like guns. I enjoy shooting guns for fun, I enjoy hunting, and I maintain a concealed carry permit which allows me to protect myself and my loved ones. I carry on a daily basis and do so because I believe that the responsibility to protect myself lies with me. As a society today we have a sense of entitlement. We’re entitled to this or that.

Unfortunately, police have no duty to protect you.

Warren v. District of Columbia is one of the leading cases that reminds us of this. Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate’s screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: “For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers.”

The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.’s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” There are many similar cases with results to the same effect.

In the Warren case the injured parties sued the District of Columbia under its own laws for failing to protect them. Most often such cases are brought in state (or, in the case of Warren, D.C.) courts for violation of state statutes, because federal law pertaining to these matters is even more onerous. But when someone does sue under federal law, it is nearly always for violation of 42 U.S.C. 1983 (often inaccurately referred to as “the civil rights act”). Section 1983 claims are brought against government officials for allegedly violating the injured parties’ federal statutory or Constitutional rights.

The seminal case establishing the general rule that police have no duty under federal law to protect citizens is DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services. Frequently these cases are based on an alleged “special relationship” between the injured party and the police. In DeShaney the injured party was a boy who was beaten and permanently injured by his father. He claimed a special relationship existed because local officials knew he was being abused, indeed they had “specifically proclaimed by word and deed [their] intention to protect him against that danger,” but failed to remove him from his father’s custody.

The Court in DeShaney held that no duty arose because of a “special relationship,” concluding that Constitutional duties of care and protection only exist as to certain individuals, such as incarcerated prisoners, involuntarily committed mental patients and others restrained against their will and therefore unable to protect themselves. “The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State’s knowledge of the individual’s predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.”

About a year later, the United States Court of Appeals interpreted DeShaney in the California case of Balistreri v. Pacifica Police Department. Ms. Balistreri, beaten and harassed by her estranged husband, alleged a “special relationship” existed between her and the Pacifica Police Department, to wit, they were duty-bound to protect her because there was a restraining order against her husband. The Court of Appeals, however, concluded that DeShaney limited the circumstances that would give rise to a “special relationship” to instances of custody. Because no such custody existed in Balistreri, the Pacifica Police had no duty to protect her, so when they failed to do so and she was injured they were not liable. A citizen injured because the police failed to protect her can only sue the State or local government in federal court if one of their officials violated a federal statutory or Constitutional right, and can only win such a suit if a “special relationship” can be shown to have existed, which DeShaney and its progeny make it very difficult to do. Moreover, Zinermon v. Burch very likely precludes Section 1983 liability for police agencies in these types of cases if there is a potential remedy via a State tort action.

Many states, however, have specifically precluded such claims, barring lawsuits against State or local officials for failure to protect, by enacting statutes such as California’s Government Code, Sections 821, 845, and 846 which state, in part: “Neither a public entity or a public employee [may be sued] for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals.”

I don’t blame police though. Police officers are by and large great men and women who stick their necks out day and night to keep slime off the street and help us. They are grossly underpaid and in many locales somewhat underresourced. If every cop in America could patrol every “beat” 24/7 they would still be out numbered. Here’s where you and I come in. Pay attention to the news and you’ll see that everyday citizens are tired of being victims. They’re taking back their rights and taking back their piece of mind. I read story after story in papers across the nation of citizens shooting would be assailants or robbers. People are tired of it and they’re not going to take things laying down. I’m the same way. If someone wants to harm me or my family it will cost them. My home is my castle and when you enter that domain unlawfully and uninvited, consequences will ensue.

I don’t expect anyone to protect me and my family but me if trouble comes knocking, rest assured, I’ll be packing. Molon labe.