Congressman From Texas Demands Compensation For Uvalde And Other Shooting Victims
Protecting Our Students has learned that Roland Gutierrez, a state senator from Texas, introduced two bills on Tuesday to address gun violence in schools, citing the Uvalde school shooting as an example.
Senate Bill 574 stipulates that school shooting victims and their families would begin receiving compensation in January 2018. The amount of payment for each victim of gun violence in a Texas public school would be $1 million, $250,000 for each victim who was “seriously physically harmed,” $100,000 for each person who had a mental or emotional disability, and $50,000 for each victim who was physically hurt.
According to Senate Bill 574, a police officer can be held accountable for violating someone’s rights. This measure would penalize school police employed by local governments who fail to put an end to shootings.
This needs to be a session where we do something; it can not be the session where we have roundtables; it cannot be the session where we have conversations, Gutierrez said at a press conference after the bill was introduced.
In November, Gutierrez said he would pursue compensation for the Uvalde victims, but at far higher sums. Gutierrez gave up to $2.1 million for injured victims, and for those who lost a family member, he offered up to $7.7 million. Additionally, $250,000 from that fund would have been given to anyone on campus who suffered from trauma on the day of the massacre.
Gutierrez pronounced that these families were broken. Nobody, not one single person, can do anything there that will bring their children back. But we must never allow their children’s deaths to go in vain.
According to Gutierrez, the plan introduced on Tuesday would pay for the compensation for families by imposing a 5-cent fee on each bullet purchased in the state instead of utilizing a sales tax. He asserted that every billion rounds sold would bring about $50 million.
Due to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary on May 24, numerous lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages have been filed in Texas against the school district, politicians, and law enforcement. One such class action complaint, filed for $27 billion, claimed that the victims’ survivors’ and families’ civil and parental rights had been violated.
Historically, the outcomes of such cases have had mixed impacts on the legal obligations of schools and police enforcement.
In a lawsuit involving the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a judge determined in May 2018 that administration and employees had to make on-the-spot recommendations and that subjecting their decisions to scrutiny would not serve the public interest than subjecting a law enforcement’s discretionary decisions to second-guessing.
In that case, school officials were given liability protections like those for law enforcement.
Nonetheless, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, the lawsuits that followed it, and the general rise in school gun violence, politicians and the general public are expressing concerns about the potential accountability of school administrators and law enforcement.
