Drawing the Line Between Heroes and Criminals

Saving Lives in Mass Shootings

Life is better when people get along. Political scientists, addressing the problem of cultivating the fragile flower we call democracy, turn to the abstraction of “civil society.” That’s the location where volunteers come from.

A principle of Anglo-American common law that has by and large survived the codification process (meaning common law is binding until the legislature “codifies” a different rule) always used to shock my undergraduate students: there is no duty to rescue, subject to two exceptions. When the person failing to act created the jeopardy or when certain legal relationships existed by choice — guardian and ward, medical professional and patient, parent and child.

Every semester I taught criminal law to youngsters, I witnessed the moral kneejerk that says if you can save a life without endangering your own, you should. The deadly hypothetical I used involved an Olympic gold medal swimming champion walking past a child struggling in four feet of water. Did the champ commit a crime? No, but the champ was self-revealed as a despicable human being.

Nobody questioned the existence of or the morality of an instantaneous calculus involving the odds of death or serious injury. There was a famous 1960 rescue of 17-year-old Deanne Woodward, whose boat…