Thursday, June 29, 2023

SRO Scot Peterson and Parkland's long shadow

"You have no idea what it's like to be a coward... See these horrors and... do nothing..."- I don't think I've ever seen any actor approach the deep sorrow and sadness Harris Yullin reached in this Star Trek: DS9 episode Duet (1993).

As the news of the Parkland school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School broke, and the news reports of what the School Resource Officer (SRO) did and did not do I was filled with a great swell of pity for the man.  Today, that SRO, Scot Peterson was found Not Guilty after being charged with child neglect for failing to confront NRA-Trained MAGA Gunman Nicholas Cruz;

A jury has acquitted on all counts the former school resource officer who stayed outside during the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – absolving him of wrongdoing in the rare trial of a law enforcement officer for his response to a mass shooting.  Scot Peterson, 60, took off his glasses and wept in court as the judge read the verdict, which found him not guilty of seven counts of felony child neglect, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury.

Look, Peterson was afraid.  He thought his last few years of Policing could be a nice day-to-day hall monitor job.  Glad handing with the teachers and talking trash with the students.Instead, Parkland joined the ever-growing list of mass shooting massacres.  I won't say unthinkable because mass shootings are a daily occurrence and fact of day-to-day life in America.  Everywhere.  At any time.

Thinking people have a sense of what they might or might not do in such a situation.  Of course, I have been a SRO and always feared such an encounter during my time.  It's never far from your mind.

Of course, after the shooting the vile bloated creature stepped in to bloviate about what his fat ass would have done if only he had been there, "I think, I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.  They weren't exactly Medal of Honor winners, alright?  They way they performed was frankly, disgusting."

That fat fucking coward.  That racist fucking Traitor.  As if a man who made sure to skip out of service when it was his time declaring his hypothetical heroics is the epitome of Republican Courage.  When've seen this type of tough-guy nonsense from Sean Hannity, from that child-raping chickenhawk coward Ted Nugent, from so many rightwing internet warriors.  This, of course, was before Trump incited an Insurrection and successfully delayed the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.  This is before Trump and his Republican con-conspirators thought to override the will of the American people by bureaucratic legerdemain so that his Russian conspiring ass could remain in office.

No one knows what they're gonna do until the bullets start flying.  And I sure would like to have a country in which we didn't need Hero Cops going into a school to confront yet another Mass Shooter.  But, we don't live in that Nation, we live in a Nation in which Gun Nuts, the NRA, the Firearms Industry, and the Republican Party have an alliance to sell as many guns as possible, to strike down as many gun laws as possible, and to ensure there are as many mass shootings as possible because Gun Violence makes them money and gives them political power.  But, to blame this one man for decades of vile NRA perfidy and Republican treachery was too much for a Jury today.

Additional:
I had forgotten that denying the reality of the Parkland School shooting gave rise (much in the same way that Alex Jones profited mightily on False Flagging Newton) to the odious Major Traitor Greene who trod on her cloven hoofs after David Hogg in Washington DC berating him for having the temerity to survive and speak out against the blood soaked vile beliefs of Gun nuts and MAGA.

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