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Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida _______________________ (December 11, 2020)

Before WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, HULL and MARCUS, Circuit Judges. WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge: This appeal requires us to decide whether the district court erred when it dismissed a civil-rights action filed by students present at the Parkland school USCA11 Case: 19-14414 Date Filed: 12/11/2020 Page: 1 of 17 2 shooting. The students sued Broward County and five public officials on the theory that their response to the school shooting was so incompetent that it violated the students’ substantive rights under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The district court dismissed this claim with prejudice because it was an impermissible shotgun pleading and, in the alternative, because it failed to state a claim and leave to amend it would be futile. On the merits, the district court reasoned that because the students were not in a custodial relationship with the officials and failed to allege conduct by the officials that is “arbitrary” or “shocks the conscience,” the students could not maintain a claim that the officials violated their substantive right to due process of law. The students appeal this decision, but settled caselaw makes clear that official acts of negligence or even incompetence in this setting do not violate the right to due process of law. Because we agree with the district court that the students failed to state a claim of a constitutional violation and that leave to amend would be futile, we affirm.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these States; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.