Soccer mom targeted for carrying gun to game

[ArizonaRick]

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One thing not mentioned and that is that police are not obligated to protect any one person. Two Supreme Court decisions have affirmed that police are under no duty to protect you. They are to protect the public as a whole. You are the only one obligated to protect you and your family. If confronted with someone intent on harming you the first thing police will do is to minimize the danger to others and themselves and that could mean sacrificing you to protect others. As for those who carry open or concealed I would just like to know how many of them have committed a crime with that gun? You just can't rely on the police for everything, they just can't be everywhere. Just as the people in New Orleans after the hurricane and guns were confiscated and more than half the police went awol. The country does not want it's citizens to be unarmed. We are not England, Japan or Australia so accept that fact! Gun control does not work, gun education does.

 

[mombrown1]

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That would be Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales. But the police are obligated to enforce the law that is why they are called Law Enforcement Officers LEO's. That means they enforce the law equally not favoring one group or person against another and, most important, not allowingoutside influencesto affect their doing their job.

 

[WIG19]

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mombrown1 is on target. DeShaney v. Winnebago County was an interesting decision also, in the discussion of perceived obligation of the state to protect. Chief Justice Rehnquist said: ""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... it is the State's affirmative act of restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf - through incarceration, institutionalization, or other similar restraint of personal liberty - which is the "deprivation of liberty" triggering the protections of the Due Process Clause, not its failure to act to protect his liberty interests against harms inflicted by other means."

In the above, one of the reasons the case got all the way to the SC was that the aggrieved party in the case was an abused child, a minor, and unable to act on their own behalf. One could argue (successfully or not) "restraining the individual's freedom to act on his own behalf" (i.e., accept responsibility and provide for their own defense) would constitute a failure to enjoy due process.

From an ideological point of view, this is what makes objectionable to me the whole stance of restraining the armed citizen, in the midst of state admission that they have neither duty nor means to protect. Carried further it segues far too easily into the area of "we know what's best for you, and we're going to take away your means to resist our better judgement."

Court support ofisolated capricious decisions by local LE simply hurries that along, so I hope this is solved to mombrown1's view sooner rather than later.