August 2015

I am at a loss for words:

This is where we are as a nation. “He didn’t do no wrong, he just shot a cop.”

Here is the article. Let the implications of this sink in for a bit…

Read this petition on Whitehouse.gov:

We the people of the United States demand that George Allan Burdock be charged with animal cruelty for is gross sordid & deplorable actions. On Thursday August 13th around 8:30pm according to the witness George Burdock of Winter Park,Florida shot his neighbors harmless beautiful dog named “Lilly” with a loaded 38 pistol. Allegedly on the evening of the 13th Mr. Burdock was walking the neighborhood with a gun allegedly scaring the neighbors. Allegedly Allan Burdock claims he thought his safety was in jeopardy by Lilly whome was a neighborhood favorite pet for the past 14 years according to the witness. The witness alleges lilly is a great dog and harmless. This was a hanice act of aanimal cruelty. The Winter Park police department have not charged George Allen Brdock and we demand justice!

I did not correct the absolutely atrocious spelling, but I did add emphasis on a couple of phrases.

Here is the News article from WESH TV in Orlando, which as anyone who saw their coverage of the Zimmerman trial, is not exactly friendly to gun owners:The man who shot the dog has been identified as George Burdock, 70. Burdock was not arrested, police said, because he was defending himself and was licensed to carry a concealed weapon.
According to a police report, Burdock said he shouted a warning to the owner, Ann Elizabeth Christensen, to get the dog, Lilly, under control or he would shoot it. The responding officer said, based on witness reports, Burdock, due to his age, physical condition and prior experience with the dog, acted in self defense and was in fear for his safety and that of his wife and small dog. Christensen said she was about to put Lilly on her leash around 8:30 p.m. when she broke away and started walking towards another dog.

(1) No domestic animal owner or person having charge, care, custody or control of any domestic animal shall permit, any domestic animal to run at large, upon any public property, or off the premises of the owner.
(3) No domestic animal at-large shall be permitted to cause injury, or threat of injury, to any person, or cause property damage.

According to local news reports, this isn’t the first time this woman meant to put the dog on a leash and failed to do so. The man who shot the dog has complained to animal control about the dog being aggressive towards him and his dogs in the past.

Ann Christensen took her fluffy white dog outside for a walk on Kenwood Avenue.She saw a neighbor, who had just returned from shopping at IKEA, and they started chatting.Lilly noticed a couple of small dogs across the street and took off toward them just as Christensen says she was trying to put her on a leash.The man walking the smaller dogs, George Burdock, took out a pistol and shot Lilly in the eye.

A man robs a post office in Gainesville, Florida. Two Alachua county deputies arrive on scene shortly thereafter, and encounter a male suspect matching the description of the perpetrator. He refuses to comply with instructions, reaches into his pocket, and produces a handgun. He is shot by both deputies. Here is the dashcam footage of the incident, watch how quickly it all unfolds:

They make contact with the man at 15:18:23
The deputy tells him to put his hands on the car at 15:18:27
The suspect doesn’t comply and begins to back away at 15:18:30
The suspect reaches in his pocket at 15:18:32 and the deputy orders him to stop, saying “I will f–king kill you!”
The hand comes out of the pocket with the gun at 15:18:33
The shots begin one second later.

The cop has less than a second to decide shoot or no shoot.

That is how quickly things play out.

The officers were suspended with pay, and the case was turned over to FDLE, as it is in all cases where an officer uses deadly force. The FDLE declared that the shooting was proper on August 13th.

The cops have to decide whether or not to shoot in one second or less, on penalty of death. Those who review their actions get three months to review the shooting from the comfort of their safe office.

There are still those in the #blacklivesmatter community that will use this shooting to disparage police officers, and claim racism. There are those in the anti-gun rights community that will use this shooting to say that the law abiding should be disarmed.

Do those sound like rational people to you?

 Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital.

There is a study that states there are more police officers dying from gunfire from 1996 to 2010 in states with higher gun ownership rates. I want to fact check this article, so let’s get started. The article claims:

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Montana were the states with the highest rates of both gun ownership and for law enforcement killings. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island had the lowest per-capita rate for both.

I will be using the “Officer down memorial page” to list officer deaths.

There have been 29 New York officers killed by gunfire and 3 by accidental gunfire during those years.
4 in Connecticut. One of those four was shot by another cop, who was off duty and illegally hunting at the time.
5 in Massachusetts. One of them was shot in 1988, and died in 2001.
11 in New Jersey. One of them was killed while off duty and working as a security guard. 2 other cops had their cause of death listed as gunfire (accidental) because they shot themselves by accident while performing maintenance on their own weapons without unloading them.
In Rhode Island, 1 officer was killed by gunfire. 2 others were killed by accidental gunfire.

In those same years, there were 3 officers killed in Montana.
7 in Alaska
22 in Alabama
12 in Arkansas
20 in Mississippi

Population figures were obtained from the US Census Bureau. It is impossible to track population at the time of each murder, so we will use the less accurate method of simply using the 2000 figures, which would be the Census year closest to the halfway point of the period. We must use the geeral population of each state, rather than the number of police officers, because there are no available, reliable figures to show the number of law enforcement officers in a given state.

The rate of death of police officers per 1,000,000 residents in each state:

New York: 1.76
Connecticutt: 1.21
Massachusetts: 0.80
New Jersey: 1.58
Rhode Island: 3.00

So let’s look now at the states that they claimed had high gun ownership rates:
Montana: 3.00
Alaska: 10.71
Alabama: 4.88
Arkansas: 4.61
Mississippi: 7.14

So what does this mean? Does it mean that they are correct, that higher gun ownership rates means more police deaths? Not exactly. There is a bit of subterfuge here. By cherry picking the states that have small populations, the death rates look much higher than they really are. For example: the rate of police killed by traffic accidents is also higher in these states. For example, the rate of police officer death was 3.57 in Mississippi, and 0.939 in New York.

TO make the comparison more fair, let’s look at Florida. Florida has the highest number of concealed weapons permits in the US, with over 1.3 million people legally carrying concealed weapons.

Florida had 38 law enforcement officers killed by gunfire during the period. This means that there is an officer death rate of 2.5 per one million residents. Washington, DC, where guns were illegal for all but two years of the period, and where there were almost NO guns legally owned during that period, lost 6 officers, for a rate of 11.47. Washington DC has a population approximately equal to that of Alaska.

If you claim that guns are the reason for mass killings, you are ignoring that the largest mass murders in the USA did not use a gun. Here are a few of them:

1 On 911, there were 2,996 dead and over 6,000 injured. The weapons used were box cutters.
2  The Oklahoma City Bombing. There were 168 dead and over 680 injured. The weapon used was a bomb made from fertilizer and diesel fuel.
3 The Bath School massacre of 1927: 45 dead, and 58 injured. The weapon used were a pair of bombs.
4 New York Bombing of September 1920: There were 40 killed and several hundred injured. The weapon was a bomb.
5 The Upstairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans on June 24, 1973 was an arson that was intended to kill the patrons of a gay bar. It worked, killing 32 and injuring dozens.
6 The LA times is attacked with a bomb in 1910, killing 20.

Columbine and Sandy Hook don’t even make the top ten.

The fact is that guns have nothing to do with spree killings. The first mass murder in US history happened in 1780, and was committed by a man named Barnett Davenport. He killed an entire family (all 5 of them) during a pre-planned burglary. He used blunt instruments to beat the adults and one of the children to death, and then set the house on fire to kill the other children.

Ikea, the company with the sign at the door to all of its stores proclaiming that it is a “weapons free environment” to the point where even police officers are prohibited from carrying weapons, has an incident where two people are killed and a third seriously injured in a mass stabbing attack.

I’m sure that the dead and their families are happy that they did not die from senseless gun violence.

A judge orders a man to get married or go to jail…

I keep hearing people call Republican politicians “Republicans in Name Only” or “RINOs” for short, and claiming that these politicians and candidates are somehow not true Republicans because they support socialist positions. However, it seems to have gotten to the point where pretty much every politician from the GOP is leaning to the left, and the majority of them seem to be falling into the “RINO” category.

At some point, you begin to realize that the mainstream of the party’s leadership is moving to the left. I will point out that I have not called myself a Republican for years. I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me.

We need to pass a law requiring background checks to close the “break into the gun show and steal guns while the gun show is closed” loophole.

Orlando police have made another arrest in the theft of nearly two dozen guns from the Fairgrounds Gun Show. Surveillance video shows several juvenile suspects forcing their way into the gun show at the Central Florida Fairgrounds on the Fourth of July and making off with 24 firearms, police said.