New South Wales must have similar legislation to Queensland, that protects the police but not the public.

 Thoughts for The Week.

“What you do in your lifetime will echo down through eternity”,
Marcus Aurelius.

The Police are Not Responsible for your Defence, its Your Responsibility to Defend yourself and your Families.
I have just perused the 853 pages of the Queensland Police Powers and Responsibilities Act 2000 Current as at 25 March 2022 to investigate if the Queensland Police had any responsibilities to defend members of the Queensland public. There are hundreds of references to the word Protect in this Act, but all are to Protect the Police from Criminal responsibility, or protect police information, or protect State building, but nothing for the general public, they are only to be policed. Yes, they can serve notices under the Child protection Act, Domestic Violence Act and call round and collect your firearms under the Weapons Act, but in all truth ‘you’ are responsible for your own protection and hopefully you feel responsible to protect your own families and even the other families in your community.

Why did I do this you might ask?
At present Police in Uvalde, Texas, are facing a barrage of criticism for delays in confronting the shooter who slaughtered children and teachers last week. Officials admit law enforcers screwed up; worse, they impeded parents who wanted to intervene, leaving the crime to be ended by agents who ignored police orders.
At the same time some USA politicians rush to gain prominence on Tv & Air time, dance in the entrails of the dead and wounded blaming  weak Gun legislation.

Jacob Albarado an off-duty US Customs and Border Protection agent

Jacob Albarado an off-duty US Customs and Border Protection agent, had just sat down for a haircut when he received the horrifying message from his wife, Trisha, a fourth-grade teacher at the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.
“There’s an active shooter,” she wrote. “Help,” she sent before sending a chilling: “I love you.”
He immediately leaped out of his seat, grabbed the barber’s shotgun and sped off toward the school. When he arrived at the school the local Police had been on the site for an hour.
Distressing videos have emerged in the aftermath of the massacre showing desperate parents outside the school begging with officers to storm the building while the madman remains inside with kids. Some parents were ready to take action themselves, and officers are seen in the clips holding one parent down and shoving another.
“We’re parents! Take him the f—k out!” one mother begs an officer in a video obtained by the Washington Post.
Instead of taking on the killer ‘Ramos’, local police tackled, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed parents rather than allow them to take action at which officers balked.

Angeli Rose Gomez, the police handcuffed her, but once released she jumped the fence to save her two children.

“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez who was briefly arrested for challenging official indecision. “Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,”. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”
Angeli Rose Gomez’s children gave her a personal stake, which is why she was willing to run into Robb Elementary School; other parents scuffled with police for the opportunity to do the same.
“You know that they are kids right?” one angry man yelled at cops, who appear to be standing their ground. “They’re little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves… 6-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter!”
During this time, 19 policemen were waiting for ‘back up” and the order to enter the school classrooms. Eventually, a Border Patrol team that drove 40 miles to get there were told were told by local police to wait and not enter the school. Jacob Albarado took no notice and fearlessly rushed into Robb Elementary School with his barber’s shotgun took on the killer and rescued dozens of children and his daughter. His daughter, a second-grader, was locked inside a bathroom while his wife hid under desks with her students. However, it was too late the 18-year-old crazed gunman Salvador Ramos had already murdered 19 children and two teachers.

Uvalde, Texas, Elementary school, not the perpetrators, but the students who were lucky enough to escape from the murdered and the police.

This Problem Affects People Worldwide.
Like Queensland, the Police in Uvalde, Texas, do not have any legal obligations to protect the people .”Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors,” Quote -Chief Justice William Rehnquist for the majority in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989).
That may be thought reasonable as nearly all police officers who don’t have personal stakes in the incidents to which they respond, and it’s asking a lot to expect them to put their lives on the line for strangers. Where as others would think that is was a large part of their job.

Whenever Politicians Scream Out For Even More Stupid Gun Laws.
Remember, It Could Be the Police that shoots you.
Like the Lindt Cafe siege December 2014 when a lone gunman, Man Haron Monis, held hostage ten customers and eight employees of a Lindt chocolate café. Police did nothing for 16-hour until police officers from the Tactical Operations Unit began shooting through the café door.

Lindt Cafe Sydney,When Police put themselves ‘in harms way’ is it for promotion, the weekly wage. It means a lot more when its your own family lives under threat.

Police claimed that Hostage Tori Johnson was killed by Monis and hostage Katrina Dawson was killed by a police bullets, but many believe that both were killed by the Police. The Police succeeded in shooting Monis but shot three other hostages and one of there own police officers. Police have been criticised over their handling of the siege for not taking proactive action earlier, for the deaths of hostages at the end of the siege, and for the lack of negotiation during the siege. Hostage Marcia Mikhael called radio station 2GB during the siege and said, “They have not negotiated, they’ve done nothing. They have left us here to die.”
New South Wales must have similar legislation to Queensland, that protects the police but not the public.

Frantic parents of the children stuck in their Texas school screamed at law enforcement officers to enter the school.

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas is like must be Déjà vu to the Americans as at the Columbine School tragedy, where 15 children were killed, again police did not intervene while children were being murdered. By the time officers entered Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999, 47 minutes had passed allowing the shooters to do their worst before killing themselves. Columbine was supposed to spur changes in police policy, but that wasn’t apparent during the 2018 incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, another maniac murdered 17 people and injuring 17 others. A commission appointed by then-Governor Scott to investigate the shooting condemned the police inaction and urged school districts across the state to adopt greater measures of security. Fifteen survivors sued the county, sheriff and school officials for failing to protect them contending that the government’s inadequate response to the shooting violated their Fourteenth Amendment right to due process. This lawsuit was dismissed in December 2018, with the judge citing prior case law in ‘ruling that the government did not have a duty to protect the defendants from the actions of the shooter.’

Never Forget.
Be reminded again that it’s foolish to place our trust in authority or to surrender our ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones. When yet again, the politicians sprout disarmament, be aware, the truth is that proposals for a prison society of disarmed and surveilled subjects shepherded by public employees the police, are unworkable. The state cannot defend us from danger, it has no real intention of defending us. Policing is only to clean up afterwards and prosecute the offenders, be they innocent of guilty. Nothing obligates us to pretend otherwise. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to do it yourself.
No one should surrender our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones, on the promise of many politicians demanding disarmament, on the chance that a public employee in the Police force, with no stake in the situation and there own families waiting at home will take up the slack and defend us. No law, or hollow promise relying on the limitations of human beings in Police jobs can replace the attachments we have to our own children, our families, our friends, and our own lives.

When the Bad Guys Start Killing, The Only Cure is a Good Guy With A Gun.
USA suffered through more than 40 active shooter incidents last year, and in 18 of those attacks, the shooter was killed by a good guy with a gun, but killed, or not they do not stop until a Good Guy challenges them, by wounding them or capturing them. You cannot give them nice pills.
An unidentified lady in Charleston, West Virginia, also had skin in the game (her own) when she drew a concealed pistol and put down a man who opened fire on a crowd a day after the Uvalde massacre, preventing the death of anybody other than the attacker. The attacker was a known criminal who had a lifetime career of hurting people, yet released by the do gooder’s to continue his criminal career. The lady was not charged.
Another involved a man who began shooting up a gun store in Louisiana, drawing fire from multiple store employees. In Arkansas, a man grabbed his bolt-action rifle and dispatched a gunman who had raked 93 rounds through an apartment complex, saving “a number of lives,” police said. A fired employee who went on a shooting spree at his workplace was killed by an armed employee in Nebraska. In Colorado, a civilian ran from a store to engage and kill a shooter last June. But police, mistaking the civilian for the shooter, fatally shot him.

What is the Answer to the Problem?
Banning Guns is not the answer, The Bath School disaster, also known as the Bath School massacre, was a violent attack perpetrated by Andrew Kehoe on May 18, 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, United States. The attacks killed 38 elementary schoolchildren and 6 adults, and injured at least 58 other people. Kehoe used timed explosives detonating at the Bath Consolidated School building.  Banning firearms would have made no difference, once a killer has a mind set they will use poison, gas, vehicles, swords or a neck tie to achieve their aims.
84 people were killed, including more than 10 children, after a truck purposely slammed through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the southern French city of Nice on the 15 July 2016. We all know that guns are not needed, when a person decides to kill indiscriminately they will find the means.

Who is best to prevent Indiscriminate killings?
The then-Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble wrestled with this dilemma after a 2013 terrorist attack at the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya where four maniacs went on a rampage, killing 71 people and injuring 200 hundred more and sparking a traumatic three-day standoff. During the roughly three-and-a-half hours that the killers were loose in the mall, there was virtually no organized government response.

At first, slaughter rained from the killers on a soft target.

Until an ex-SAS man, and a former member of (ARW) Irish Army Ranger Wing Major Dominic Troulan helped to save lives. They were working as security consultants for an oil company, and had there carry handguns they raced to the Westgate mall. In their first efforts to get into mall via basement delivery ramp in the parking garage, they ran into a hail of bullets and were forced to double back. On their way back, they ran into 100 people cowering behind an armored car. They rallied the civilians and helped guide them to the safety of the main road in front of the mall. As they exited, they could see bloody hands waving for help as shots were fired on the roof of the car park. The hand disappeared into a mall coffee shop. The pair came under fire from the top of a fire escape the SAS veteran attacked the fire escape while the Irish Ranger went for the coffee shop, he found 20 dead and 100 more sheltered in place. As the SAS man had cleared the fire escape one of them watched the stairs, the other persuaded the shoppers to climb down the fire escape. There was a “bloodbath” in the adjacent car park rooftop. As the civilians went down the fire escape, the SAS veteran and the Irish Ranger split up. The SAS operator went out onto the rooftop as the Ranger continued on toward the sushi restaurant where his Oil company staff were hiding.

This resistance from the two retired soldiers allowed people to escape. If you look carefully at this mans waistband we can see that this man had a crucial advantage.

The SAS paired injured people with the uninjured to hasten their retreat and covered the bodies of the dead. Meanwhile, the Irish Ranger had come under fire from the militants, and returned fire. He bolted toward the restaurant, where he found more of the oil company staff hiding in a storeroom, then convinced them to race back to the coffee shop while he returned fire to the terrorists. The two men reconnected in the cargo area, hustling the oil company’s staff into a company car. With their charges safe, they pleaded for the Kenyan police to assault the car park, but were rebuffed. The police were waiting on a SWAT team and would not advance without them.

Why Does the Media Not Report The Part that Hero’s With Guns Play?
The Brit and the Irishman couldn’t wait. With the help of a Sikh civilian who had already escaped the mall, they went back into the fray. They found a Red Cross ambulance that was struggling to remove the dead and wounded people from the roof of the car park. The men worked for an hour with the emergency medical personnel before doctors could arrive. They were about to leave when they got a text from another friend inside the mall.

Two hero’s helping the Red Cross evacuate the wounded.

They went in to retrieve him, too. The three remaining men exited via the trusted route of the fire escape just three hours after the terror attack began. The two men rescued all of their personnel and friends, along with hundreds of trapped civilians, aided in the triage of the wounded, and exited the danger zone without any injury to themselves. By the time they left the mall, the police had still not cordoned off the local area. Under fire these veterans technical civilians, organised the rescue of hundreds of terrified shoppers. There are several similarities between this rescue by civilians and the rescue at Nairobi DusitD2 Hotel complex attack.

Again a single off duty British SAS operative goes into the siege, eliminates the terrorists and is seen here assisting one of the hostages to safety. Where are the Police?

The attack itself only lasted in the Westgate Mall lasted for few hours, all of it taking place before the three days stand off by the Kenyan security forces who waited to enter the building. When they finally did, it was only to shoot at one another before going on an armed looting spree that resulted in the collapse of the rear of the building, destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble, said, “there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called ‘soft targets’ are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves,” ABC News critically reported at the time. “Noble seemed to favour armed civilians since that allows for dynamic responses to unpredictable situations”. Assuming that police don’t shoot the civilian protectors.

Armed Parents volunteer to defend their children’s schools on a shift basis,

Addendum
Following the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, schools in the neighboring city of Seminole posted signs outside their doors to announce that their staff are armed. “Attention. Please be aware that Seminole ISD is a guardian school,” one sign reads. “Staff are armed and will use whatever force necessary to protect our students and employees.” Various pictures of the sign have circulated on social media. Some parents post the photos as a show of gratitude that their child’s school is stepping up. At least these schools have made the correct decision.
The defence of life is a recognisable primary right of the human species. To implement that right of self defence he or she must have the means, tools, guns, what ever is suitable for that person at their disposal. To deny humans that right is to deny the individual to the right to life.
Is there any worse crime against the laws of human rights than that? Move over Hitler, Stalin and Eichmann, Joe Biden is gunning for your reputation.

There is no Spring without Winter, without Mistakes there is no Learning. There is no Life without Death, without Doubts there is no Faith. There is no Peace without War, without Fear there is no Courage. For without Mistakes, Doubts and Fears there are no pathways to Wisdom.
Ron Owen