If you, as a civilian, leave a loaded weapon in your car in California . . .
Oh: wait. Don’t!
Feds Not Liable for Ranger’s Stolen Gun Used in Pier Shooting (Kate Steinle)
CourtHouse News Service | 08/24/2021 | Nicholas IovinoThe U.S. government can’t be held liable for the death of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier based on a federal ranger’s negligent storage of a gun that was stolen and used to shoot her, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled Tuesday.
Steinle was killed by a bullet that ricocheted off a concrete walkway and struck her in the back on Pier 14 in San Francisco on July 1, 2015. . . .
In arguments before a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel last month, a lawyer for Steinle’s parents argued U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger John Woychowski had a duty under California law to safeguard his firearm. His actions “created a risk of harm” for Steinle, attorney Valerie McGinty said.
In a 12-page opinion issued Tuesday, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel refused to accept that argument. The panel affirmed Judge Spero’s January 2020 decision granting the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment.
Woychowski left his .40-caliber pistol loaded and unsecured in a backpack in the cabin of the car, despite BLM policies requiring guns be stored in locked containers, kept unloaded and equipped with trigger locking devices. The agency also requires that firearms and ammunition “not be left unattended in motor vehicles or watercraft unless they are physically secured from theft and out of public view.”
To be fair, the vehicle was said to be locked. But in downtown San Francisco….
The BLM ranger parked his SUV in downtown San Francisco at 10 p.m. on June 27, 2015. He went to have dinner at a restaurant with his family and left the car “packed to the brim” with luggage and visible electronic equipment in a city notorious for property crimes and car break-ins, according to the Steinle family’s motion for summary judgment.
And in all honesty, you’d really have to be a Ninth Circuit judge to be able to show this level of bias for a government employee that you would never show to a civilian:
Someone
[perhaps the undocumented alien?]
had to break into the locked vehicle, steal a “seemingly innocuous” backpack, find the pistol, remove it from the backpack, wrap it in a cloth and place it under a bench where an undocumented immigrant found it four days later and picked it up, Graber wrote.
“We conclude that Woychowski’s storage of the pistol was too tenuously connected to Ms. Steinle’s death for the proximate cause element to be satisfied,” Graber wrote for the panel.
So, go ahead and steal a bunch of explosives (if I’m reading this correctly) from the government and leave them under some bench (not a judge’s bench, of course) in Portland or Seattle. If Antifa uses them; well, that’s just too bad for the victims. Antifa won’t be blamed (like the homeless guy in this story) because they just simply innocently found them; and you, who left the explosives where they could be stolen can’t be blamed (like the government employee in this story), because of how “tenuously” you are connected to the victims of the gruesome explosion. And, of course, you’ll probably serve only minimum time — if your politics align with the judge’s, that is — because you had nothing to do with how the explosives were used. Win-win-win all around! Someone is dead and no one at all is to blame! Kind of like the Pfizer vaccine.
The victims, though, will have an irreducible number of dead bodies to bury, with no one blamed by the courts (like the Steinles in this story).
RIP
Do you have something you’d like to share? A link? A joke? Some words of wisdom? A topic to discuss? It’s our nightly Open Thread, and you have the floor.
