The police response to the Uvalde massacre revealed a deeply concerning contradiction in constitutional law: the state possesses the legal authority to prevent you from saving your children, yet bears no legal obligation to save them itself.

The main reason law enforcement can’t easily be sued for their abdication of duty lies at the feet of the Supreme Court. Through rulings like DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) and Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Court has established that the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It restrains the government from hurting you, but it imposes no affirmative duty on the government to protect you from private violence even when they are aware of that violence and are in a position to stop it.

While the police in Uvalde had a moral duty to save those innocent children, they (obscenely) had no constitutional duty to do so. In the eyes of the law, their inaction was a failure of courage, not a violation of the Constitution.

Simultaneously, the police utilized their broad police powers to physically restrain parents – handcuffing, tackling, tasing, and threatening them – to maintain the security of the crime scene. While parents have a natural right to defend their children, in our system this right is de facto superseded by the state’s authority to control an active investigation. Because citizens are generally prohibited from resisting law enforcement, the parents were placed in a legal bind where physically fighting past the police to rescue their children is not only a felony, but one that would in fact receive more immediate use of force than what was used to stop the killer.

Ultimately this legal framework represents a clear and obvious breach of the fundamental social contract. When the state uses its monopoly on force to restrain the rescuers but refuses to use it against the killer until well past the reasonable point, it ceases to function as a protector and effectively becomes an accessory to the killing.

The law is currently written to protect the bureaucracy, not the citizen. It prioritizes the safety of the police officer over the life of the child. It prioritizes the order of the crime scene over the outcome of the rescue.

It creates a situation where the most rational, moral action a parent can take, saving their dying child, is treated as a criminal act, while waiting in a hallway and listening to the murder of children is treated as legally sound police work. To me, and to most sane rational people, that is not just a failure of law, it’s an ethical inversion that delegitimizes the authority of the police and the government at large.

The jury got it right, and ironically, showed how meaningless that is in such a rigged system. Our government may be the worst one in the world except for all the others, but when the legally correct outcome is this one, I truly wonder if we’d be better off burning it down and starting over from scratch.