November 2013

Here is an Orlando story about a woman who confessed to helping carry out a home invasion robbery of her parents’ home. During the course of the robbery, the woman’s father was severely beaten.

There are people in this state that are in a panic about Leon county’s proposed Universal Background Check ordnance. This topic comes up from time to time, and I have blogged on this before.

This is a big deal over nothing. Florida has preemption, and the only exception is found in Article VIII, Section 2(b):
(b) Each county shall have the authority to require a criminal history records check and a 3 to 5-day waiting period, excluding weekends and legal holidays, in connection with the sale of any firearm occurring within such county. For purposes of this subsection, the term “sale” means the transfer of money or other valuable consideration for any firearm when any part of the transaction is conducted on property to which the public has the right of access. Holders of a concealed weapons permit as prescribed by general law shall not be subject to the provisions of this subsection when purchasing a firearm.

Note that the only time that the county may require a background check for a transaction conducted between private parties who are not dealers (transactions at a dealer must go through a check and have a waiting period, but again, CCW holders are exempt from the waiting period) is when the transaction occurs on property to which the public has the right of access. The only place that the public has such a right is on property owned by the government. The public has no right to access on private property. This means that the background checks may only be required if you are conducting the sale on the roadway, a park, a gun show held at a civic center, etc.

Note also that there is a specific exception for people that hold a concealed weapons permit.

Even better, take a look at 790.33, which is the state’s preemption statute:
Except as expressly provided by the State Constitution or general law, the Legislature hereby declares that it is occupying the whole field of regulation of firearms and ammunition, including the purchase, sale, transfer, taxation, manufacture, ownership, possession, storage, and transportation thereof, to the exclusion of all existing and future county, city, town, or municipal ordinances or any administrative regulations or rules adopted by local or state government relating thereto. Any such existing ordinances, rules, or regulations are hereby declared null and void. 

The state went on to say this:

Any person, county, agency, municipality, district, or other entity that violates the Legislature’s occupation of the whole field of regulation of firearms and ammunition, as declared in subsection (1), by enacting or causing to be enforced any local ordinance or administrative rule or regulation impinging upon such exclusive occupation of the field shall be liable as set forth herein.

So the law is unenforceable. What happens if the law is passed anyway? What if the cops then arrest you? That is the best part:

If any county, city, town, or other local government violates this section, the court shall declare the improper ordinance, regulation, or rule invalid and issue a permanent injunction against the local government prohibiting it from enforcing such ordinance, regulation, or rule. It is no defense that in enacting the ordinance, regulation, or rule the local government was acting in good faith or upon advice of counsel. 
If the court determines that a violation was knowing and willful, the court shall assess a civil fine of up to $5,000 against the elected or appointed local government official or officials or administrative agency head under whose jurisdiction the violation occurred. 
Except as required by applicable law, public funds may not be used to defend or reimburse the unlawful conduct of any person found to have knowingly and willfully violated this section. A knowing and willful violation of any provision of this section by a person acting in an official capacity for any entity enacting or causing to be enforced a local ordinance or administrative rule or regulation
prohibited under paragraph (a) or otherwise under color of law shall be cause for termination of employment or contract or removal from office by the Governor. 

They will be fired, fined $5,000 PERSONALLY, they cannot use taxpayer funds to hire a lawyer, and you can sue them. I am sure that, should this pass, Florida Carry will be all over it. Send some money their way, they are fighting the good fight.

This story was relayed to me by a friend who works in a local emergency room:

A 28 year old woman comes into the ED. She is 19 weeks pregnant with twins: her 8th and 9th children. This particular pregnancy is from her 4th male. Her complaint is that she is possibly having a miscarriage. Upon exam, the head of one fetus is already visible in the cervix. There is nothing that can be done, the pregnancy is over.
The father begged the doctor to do all that he could. The doctor explained that there is nothing that can be done, and that he has sympathy for the couple. The doctor leaves the room, my friend is standing just outside and hears the conversation that ensues. The male complains to the female that he is upset because they were counting on the extra welfare and food stamps to buy a new car.

Think about that for a minute, and contemplate all of the implications of that.

My brother is a business owner and has a few employees. He is still a small enough company that his employees are like family. His son developed a significant health issue when he was only two years old, and needs to have surgery every 8 weeks as a result. My brother had to send this letter out to his employees today:

There has been a lot of talk about Obamacare and the changes to the law on the news lately. Here is my situation as a business owner, and as a parent of a child with a preexisting condition.

Because of the preexisting health concerns of my child, we could not get our own coverage in the past. We had to be part of a group plan, so we decided to purchase group insurance for the company, which meant that we would pay 50% of the premiums for our staff. That 50% was then a tax credit to us. So if we owed $10k in taxes each month, and paid $8k in staff insurance premiums, we now only owed $2k in taxes. My accountant has informed me that this tax credit has been eliminated under Obamacare. This means that next year, we will see an $8k per month increase in our taxes.

Now we can get our family insurance with a $0 deductible for a much lower rate than paying the monthly premiums for our employees through (I hate to say it) healthcare.gov by purchasing a “gold” plan. If we attempt to obtain coverage through the company, we will still have to maintain the 50% payment of our employees, the premiums for which will be increasing our half by an additional $2K a month. For this amount, we will have a $2K deductible, and we will lose that tax credit. This means that our insurance expenses and taxes will increase to $218,000 per year if we continue providing insurance for our staff. This level of expense is just not sustainable. For this reason, we will be dropping the insurance that we offer as a small business to our employees, will get our own  policy, and direct our staff to the healthcare.gov site.

This is just the insurance view. There is more to Obamacare that most do not realize. It has forced many in my industry to close due to the cost of compliance with the regulations put on food supply operators for calorie and nutrition infomation disclosure.

My opinion is mixed. The preexisting condition of my child is now moot. The cost to me appears to be cancelled out so far with lower deductibles. However, it is forcing my staff to now be transferred onto the health care exchanges for insurance, and they will now have to pay 100% of their premiums. Due to the added taxes and expenses associated with the compliance with this law, we are not in a position to give any of you a raise to offset the additional costs. Depending on how my taxes work out at the end of the year, there is a distinct possibility that we will have to scale back or even sell out our remaining contracts and lay off our entire staff. We will inform you as soon as we know more.

I went to Chik fil A to get breakfast a couple of days ago. It was five minutes before they were due to stop serving breakfast and begin serving lunch. I ordered a Sausage biscuit, and they told me that they were out of sausage, and that I could order a chicken biscuit. I didn’t really want chicken, but it is what it is.

I arrived at the window, paid for my food, and when they handed me my order, it was chicken nuggets, not a biscuit. I pointed it out, and that was when they told me they were also out of chicken patties. I was irate. I demanded my money back, and went to Wendy’s just down the street, and ordered lunch instead. When I began to eat, my burger and fries were ice cold.

A dispatcher in training sends ambulances to the wrong address. That happens more frequently than you know. I know that I got sent to the wrong location about once a month or so. Sometimes it is because of an error with the caller. Sometimes, the dispatcher. Sometimes, it is caused by the system.

A good example is Michigan Avenue. There is one in Orange County, and one in Osceola county. If you call from a cell phone, and the tower that is accessed is in one county while you are in the other, the wrong location and the wrong emergency crews will be dispatched.

Or perhaps you called for Orange Avenue instead of Orange Street.

In this case, the caller asked for paramedics to be dispatched to the Ormond Rec Center, when he was actually at the Nova Community Park. He gave the cross street for the correct location, but in making that mistake when giving his location, the dispatcher looked up the correct address for the Ormond Rec Center, was new, and her training officer was busy talking on her cell phone.

A comedy of small errors that added up to a dead victim, who had already collapsed from an apparent heart attack. He probably would have died anyway, but we will never know.

Some say that had the trainer been paying attention, the correct address may have been located. We will never know.

What do we know? We know that fast food workers have gone on strike, demanding that they receive $15 an hour for doing whatever it is that they do. A dispatcher makes less than that. So do the paramedics.

How can we justify paying someone $15 an hour to cook and serve a burger incorrectly, and then demand that dispatchers and paramedics perform their jobs with a zero percent error rate for less money than that?

The more that I see things like this, the more that I want to simply give up my cell phone. We are all being tagged and tracked like animals.

We have progressed to the point in our nanny state society where a person who is in a vehicle that has been driven into a body of water and is sinking needs to be told to get out of the vehicle before they drown.

A 911 dispatcher was suspended  for not telling a man in a sinking SUV that it would be a good idea to get out before the vehicle sank and took him with it. Seriously?

The real tragedy here is that people like this don’t die before they pass on their worthless genes to the next generation. Where is Darwin when you need him?

There is a lot of talk on the news about an NFL ‘hazing’ scandal. I am not a football fan, so I don’t know a lot about the team or the league, but I do know a bit about the law here.

Apparently, Richie Incognito was bullying a fellow team member. He sent texts to his teammate that contained racial slurs, threats of physical violence, and sexual content.

Multiple sources confirmed to ESPN that the following is a transcript
of a voice message Incognito left for Martin in April 2013, a year
after Martin was drafted:

“Hey, wassup, you half n—– piece of s—. I saw you on Twitter,
you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] s— in your f—ing mouth. [I’m
going to] slap your f—ing mouth. [I’m going to] slap your real mother
across the face [laughter]. F— you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill
you.”

 In this case, the other players on the team took it a step further, and got up from the lunch table when he sat down, in an apparent attempt to ostracize him. That takes it from being an isolated act of a single player to an organizational problem for his employer. Especially when it turns out that the coach wanted the player harassed, to “toughen him up.”

Compounding this, the father of the player that appears to be the ringleader entered the fray, and has also begun slamming the aggrieved player.

Even worse for the NFL, it turns out that the senior players shake down the new ones in every team, and force them to pay for trips, dinners, and other expensive ‘gifts’. ESPN reported that Incognito allegedly got Martin to contribute $15,000
to help finance a trip to Las Vegas by a group of Dolphins even though
Martin preferred not to travel with them. Martin gave Incognito the
money, fearing the consequences if he did not.

Why does a group of athletes, all millionaires, need a rookie to pay for anything? Harassment, pure and simple.

It seems that rookie players are often hazed, with new players being forced to pick up dinner tabs for the team of tens of thousands of dollars. According to a former Dolphins teammate, Ricky Williams:

 “Really I haven’t seen much hazing,” he said in an interview on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

He
said it’s a well-known “rite of passage” for a high draft pick to pick
up a big dinner bill for some other players on the team.
“Once you
sign that contract there’s a lot of rules, written and unwritten, that
you are expected to follow,” he said. “For me, this is something that
should be handled internally. I don’t think the media, I don’t think
fans, I don’t think anyone outside is really in a position to really
fully understand what occurs inside of a locker room and inside of a
football team.”

Of course, this is the type of behavior that jocks display and get away with, because they are good at playing a game. Acting like juiced up idiots, drugs, alcohol, DUI, being general asshats. They get a pass for
their entire lives, and then are surprised when finally someone calls
them on it.
  So now we have a league of billionaire team owners who employ hundreds of millionaires, all of whom are now demonstrably guilty of racial, sexual, and physical harassment. The lawyers are drooling…