Dive Brief:

• Citing the Uvalde school massacre as a catalyst, Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez proposed two pieces of legislation Tuesday addressing gun violence on school grounds.

• Senate Bill 574 would compensate school shooting victims and families of victims dating back to January 2018. The bill would provide $1 million for each deceased person, $250,000 for each "seriously physically injured" victim, $100,000 for each person suffering from a mental or emotional disability, and $50,000 for each physically injured victim after gun violence at a Texas public school.

• Senate Bill 575 would hold liable law enforcement officers if their failure to intervene results in a violation of individual rights. This bill would include school law enforcement officers employed by either the state or local government who fail to intervene in mass shootings. 

Dive Insight:

"This has to be the session where we do something — it cannot be the session where we have roundtables, it cannot be the session where we have discussions," said Gutierrez, a Democrat, in a press briefing following introduction of the bills.

Gutierrez in November said he would seek compensation for Uvalde victims, but at significantly higher levels. Gutierrez suggested up to $7.7 million per household that lost a family member and $2.1 million for injured victims. That fund would have also paid $250,000 for anyone who was on campus the day of the shooting and traumatized as a result.

"These families are broken," said Gutierrez. "There is not one damn thing anybody's going to be able to do in there that will bring their children back. But under no certain terms should we allow their children's deaths to have been in vain." 

Compensation to families under the bill proposed Tuesday would be funded not through a sales tax, but through a 5 cent tax on every bullet sold in the state, said Gutierrez. That would raise about $50 million for every billion bullets sold, he said. 

Following the Robb Elementary mass shooting on May 24, multiple lawsuits for billions of dollars in compensation have been filed in Texas against the school district, administrators and school law enforcement. One such class action lawsuit, which was filed for $27 billion, claimed victims' families and survivors' civil and parental rights were violated.

Traditionally, the outcomes in such cases have brought mixed results on school and law enforcement liability.

In a Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting lawsuit, a judge decided in May 2018 that "faculty and staff had to make split-second decisions" and that "subjecting their decisions to scrutiny, aided by hindsight, would no less serve the public interest than subjecting a police officer's discretionary decisions to second guessing."

In short, school officials in that case were offered liability protections similar to those for police officers.

However, in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, its resulting lawsuits, and overall increasing school gun violence, policymakers and the public are bringing into question the potential liability of school officials and law enforcement.