Sutherland Springs is a prime example of a mass shooting that shouldn’t have happened. All the laws we’ve been told we needed were in place to prevent that horrible tragedy. The killer was dishonorably discharged from the military, which meant he shouldn’t be able to buy a firearm lawfully, yet he did.

That mistake cost a lot of people their lives, leaving their loved ones to pick up the pieces.

Nothing the Department of Justice could do will change that, but the families of Sutherland Springs somehow manage to reach a settlement agreement with the DOJ.

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it reached a tentative settlement of $144.5 million with the families of the victims of the mass shooting that took place in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017.

The shooting took place in a church and killed 25 people including a pregnant woman. Officials put the death toll at 26, and it remains the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.

…

The settlement comes after months of back-and-forth in the case. A district judge originally ruled that the government was 60% responsible for the attack that took place because of its failure to enter the shooter’s domestic violence history into the background check system. The judge said the government owed the families $230 million.

But in January, the DOJ appealed the ruling, arguing that it could not be held mostly responsible for the attack and pushed back on paying damages. That position stunned gun-control advocates and received praise from the National Rifle Association.

Of course, what the NRA said was that it simply forced the government to admit the limits of gun control and it hammered the Biden administration over its hypocrisy since they were continuing to push for anti-gun legislation during that same timeframe, but what else should you expect from state-affiliated media?

The truth is, though, that the government dropped the ball. The laws they claimed we needed did absolutely nothing to stop this shooting.

What’s more, there’s an argument to be made that they should have.

I know that the killer could still have gotten his hands on a gun regardless of the laws against it. I’ve pointed that out in too many cases myself. Yet this killer went into a gun store on two different occasions and passed the NICS check.

For me, it’s not that the background check system works or is even a good thing. It’s that they pushed this on us and then can’t be bothered to use it correctly.

Now, though, the taxpayers will be footing the bill for this.

While the families deserve some kind of recompense for what happened, mostly because we can chalk at least part of it up to government failures, and now they’ll get it, but that money won’t come from those who actually screwed the pooch. It’ll come from us, from our tax dollars.

The government is never really made to pay. It’s us who ends up screwed.