Anti-gunners love to argue that we don’t need all of our guns. Quite a fair number will tell you that while you may feel the need to defend yourself, you shouldn’t. That’s what the police are for, they argue.

The courts have ruled time and time again that the police have no duty to protect you.

Now, we have yet another example. This time, it applies to people who are required by law to be disarmed.

A federal judge says Broward schools and the Sheriff’s Office had no legal duty to protect students during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a suit filed by 15 students who claimed they were traumatized by the crisis in February. The suit named six defendants, including the Broward school district and the Broward Sheriff’s Office, as well as school deputy Scot Peterson and campus monitor Andrew Medina. Bloom ruled that the two agencies had no constitutional duty to protect students who were not in custody. “The claim arises from the actions of [the shooter], a third party, and not a state actor,” she wrote in a ruling Dec. 12. “Thus, the critical question the Court analyzes is whether defendants had a constitutional duty to protect plaintiffs from the actions of Cruz. “As previously stated, for such a duty to exist on the part of defendants, plaintiffs would have to be considered to be in custody” — for example, as prisoners or patients of a mental hospital, she wrote.

The problem with that is that students and teachers are required by law to be disarmed. If there is no legal duty for the officer on the scene to act–there is a moral duty, however–then that means the onus for protection falls on the individuals themselves.

Unfortunately, the law requires these potential victims to be disarmed. It makes it impossible for them to defend themselves from an attack, even while the state has absolved itself of any responsibility to protect those they’ve disarmed.

Frankly, it’s disgusting.

However, it’s also par for the course. While anti-gunners repeatedly echo refrains about the police protecting us and renew calls for disarmament, we should all remember that if children remanded to the care of the state for a mandated purpose–namely that of education–can be determined not to be deserving of literal police protection, then just how does anyone think you or I will be protected?

Get armed. Get trained. Learn. Protect yourself.

You and yours are the only ones you can trust to protect you. If school children and teachers who are barred from carrying a gun on government property aren’t going to be protected, there’s no way you’re going to be. For some of us, this is the reality we’ve understood for quite some time. That’s why we have guns. That’s why we carry guns. That’s why we train with them.

It’s also why we become so belligerent when some anti-gunner starts screaming bloody murder about how our guns somehow make them unsafe. No, they don’t. My disarmament will make me unsafe.