Friday, April 05, 2013

Lynne Fenton's (and ONLY Lynne Fenton) Conscience Should Be Clear

Alas nearly everyone else in officialdom ought to have a deeply nagging conscience, most especially the police force that took Fenton's warnings not seriously at all.  Then all the people who tried desperately to hide the fact that Holmes's potential dangerousness was handed to authorities on a silver platter.
In a revelation that may have Colorado voters rethinking their state’s push on gun control, court documents revealed that the mass shooting in Aurora that killed 12 and injured 70 more could have been prevented by law enforcement.  The psychiatrist for suspect, James Holmes, had warned campus police that Holmes was dangerous and homicidal a month before the shooting took place.  Lynne Fenton even told the police that Holmes had begun to stalk and threaten her, and yet no action was apparently taken
Read it and weep. This is negligence pure and simple.  But why should we expect the police to protect us when they are not bound to protect us?  This is the bottom line judicial stance in the seminal legal case regarding what we can expect from the police:

“… a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.”       
That is from Warren v. District of Columbia (1981).  BTW, don't ever read the details of that case over a bowl of Cheerios or any foodstuffs for that matter.  Oh, and for fun, how about another, related case.  This one is McKee v. City of Rockwall.
 There is no constitutional violation when the "most that can be said of ... state functionaries ... is that they stood by and did nothing when suspicious circumstances dictated a more active role."
How bloody clear does it have to get for Americans to see that they are on their bloody own?  The cops don't have to protect you and, as we see in the Colorado case, they probably can't or won't even if they had nearly perfect information.  And yet, our elected representatives want to restrict our ability to protect ourselves?  And not just that, people like this and this are the folks passing these laws.  So, the most corrupt, venal, idiotic douchebags among us get in office and make the rules that put us all in more danger.  We should be spitting mad as a society.  Spitting bloody mad.

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