Teacher stops potential school shooting, gets suspended. This fucking country, I swear...
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/teacher-suspended-restraining-armed-student-164158446.html
Wow. I was confused by the title but even more so after reading the details. WTF?
It's a little more complicated than it sounds, but yeah, it IS nuts. The fault is our lawsuit-happy society. Teachers and administrators are very much forbidden to manhandle or restrain students, and violating those policies will get swift termination. Even if a student assaults a teacher, the teacher is expected to evade and seek safety, and NOT to grapple with the student unless there is an imminent threat of injury or death and evasion is not an option.
So in this case, the school district is alleging that the coach should have allowed the resource officer and administrator that were present to pursue the efforts to locate the firearms. It would have been one thing if the student had been holding the firearm, or the coach could see some evidence that the student had the firearm on their person. But that wasn't the case. The firearm was located later in a book-bag.
So...it's complicated. I can see both sides of this.
However - as a serious student of self-defense, both armed and unarmed, and its legal ramifications, my opinion is that the coach fucked up. He lost his temper when the student threw a stapler, grabbed the student by the shirt, shoved him against the wall and held him there. Even if we take all the education system rules about restraint out of this discussion, and just make it a self-defense situation, it was stupid. A weapon had not been presented, and there were other people in the room, so there's no imminent threat of death or serious injury. At that point, you want to maintain enough distance to adequately respond to any threatening movements. You do NOT want to grapple unless there is no other choice - like if the miscreant grabs you. In a self-defense situation, you want to strike hard and fast, mitigate the threat, and disengage quickly. If you grab them by the shirt and shove them against the wall, you can't see what their hands are doing and they could easily split your gut with a knife, or fish out a concealed gun and shoot you. This coach should have been de-escalating, with eyes on every movement the student made, not suddenly going Rambo on the punk. So it was a dumb move from a self-defense perspective. The teacher lost his cool, and losing your cool in a potentially dangerous situation leads to stupid things.
Self-defense is really complicated.
Too bad this wasn't in FL, they have very ...let's say loose... self-defense laws.
No, Florida doesn't, actually. It's a stand-your-ground state, but use of force is subject to the same legal doctrines in all fifty states.
There are five elements to a successful defense of use of potentially deadly force. They are:
Innocence - you can't have provoked the confrontation.
Imminence - there must be an immediate and apparent threat of death or serious bodily injury.
Reasonableness - a reasonable person would assess the threat and respond the same way
Proportionality - the response must be proportional to the threat, and involve only action needed to end the threat. You don't get to shoot someone who is running away, or administer a headshot to finish an attacker who is laying on the ground bleeding from the bullets you already administered.
Avoidance - Reasonable effort should have been made to avoid or evade the confrontation. In stand-your-ground states avoidance may be diluted some, but in NO state is it completely obviated.
Of these, the most important is always Reasonableness.
Now, the coach in Georgia didn't use lethal force, but he used force that could have led to injury. So, if we apply these principles to the coach, in my opinion he fails, at least in part, on Imminence, Proportionality, and Reasonableness, and I'm betting that these are exactly what the school district is basing its response on.
Law enforcement officers have some protection under limited-immunity doctrines, but that is not complete protection, as we've seen in the Floyd and Wright cases, so police are still subject to these five doctrines to a significant degree. In both cases, officers were faulted, essentially, on Reasonableness, Proportionality, and Imminence.
Civilians, including teachers, coaches, and school administrators, do not get limited immunity.
In the Arbury case, the defendants failed on all five, which is why life sentences were handed down. Those were some dumbass motherfuckers.
