October 2017

Errors in testing

So a man who was arrested for possession of Methamphetamines, after two field test kits said that white flakes found on his floorboard were drugs, sues the city of Orlando after the state crime lab certifies that they were actually the frosting from a glazed donut and wins $37,500.

The problem here is that the cops use their own pocket knives to put the sample into the test kit. The knives are contaminated with drugs from previous tests. So the test turns out positive.

Cops should have to report when they screw up arrests like this, so a person arrested is able to bring up the cops error rate in court. Drug dogs, too. When the police department makes a mistake like this, at least part of the money should come from the cop’s pocket.

By Divemedic, ago

Back to business

Just a week ago, I posted that the casinos in Las Vegas would not be able to search everyone entering the casino. It turns out that I was right:

In the days after the shooting, visitors found marked police SUVs parked outside their hotels along the Strip. Security employees of the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore casino-resorts used hand-held metal detectors to check bags. Guards asked some visitors to pop their trunks.
But those measures have since been scaled back. A tour of several major resorts found no apparent new security measures other than guards checking room keys at Mandalay Bay.

With more than 20,000 people a day entering these mega-casinos, it would be a logistical nightmare to search all of them. Not to mention the fiscal cost and the inconvenience. Remember that people go to Vegas to leave their cares at home, and the goal of the casino is to have people carefree and gambling. You can’t do that if it feels like you are in a prison. 

By Divemedic, ago

2 gun limit

Slate has gone full retard. They published an article on October 13th that forwards the idea that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, but since it doesn’t specify which arms or how many, the people should be limited to two guns each: a pistol, and a shotgun. That’s it- two guns per person, unless you apply for a license to own more and show a need to own those extra weapons. The license, according to Slate, will cost $200 and will list the serial numbers and descriptions of the guns owned.

The author is a former staffer at the Brady Campaign. He goes full retard here:

First, the Constitution and its text are a starting point, not an end point, for determining what gun regulations federal, state, and local governments may pass.

In support of this argument, the reporter admits that there is no right to gay marriage, and in this he exposes one of the fundamental flaws in his argument: the Constitution isn’t now, and was never intended to be, a list of the rights of the people. The document is a list of the powers that were granted to the Federal government. Nowhere in that document is the power granted to regulate marriage, nor arms. Of course there are other, more obvious flaws.

One obvious one is, if the Second not mentioning the number of guns a person may own allows the government to arbitrarily limit the number of arms, then the same reasoning could be used to limit the number of books one may own, or the number of articles that may be written by a reporter. Of course, the comments to the article address this:

I originally spent over an hour refuting the rest of this idiotic article, but I tired of it. I am not going to change their minds. They also published this drivel. Don’t let anyone tell you that no one is trying to take your guns.

I am tired of arguing. So here is my new answer:  I own guns because fuck you. If you think you have the votes and the ability to deal with the civil war that will follow, then go ahead and ban them.

Pass the law, and then order the cops to go door to door and take them. Your plan, aside from being based upon a flawed legal analysis, violates not only the Second Amendment, but the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth.

Even so, if the law you proposed were passed, there are practical considerations: How are you going to know when a person already owns two guns? Registration? Who will manage this? How will you pay for it? Have you considered what will happen when people refuse to obey? Or simply make their own? I can make an AR15 from scratch with hand tools. As long as they are illegal, I may as well make them with a happy switch. All of the felonies after the first are free. How will you prevent that?

What happens to all of the cops who kick in doors? Are you prepared to deal with hundreds of dead cops and the martial law that will inevitably follow? Really? Keep in mind that the same people who want to restrict guns to everyone but the military and the police are the same people who despise the police and military. This is a win for them- they get to watch groups of people they hate annihilate each other, while they sit safe- or so they thing- in their ivory towers observing their intellectual inferiors. Or so they think.

By Divemedic, ago

Everyone is suddenly a firearms expert

I ran across this post where a guy is claiming that the shooter in Vegas knew nothing about guns because guns are hard to shoot, and courts can’t issue secret gag orders.

Here is my open letter as a reply:
There are plenty of courts that issue sealed orders, beginning with the FISA court. Even regular courts routinely issue gag orders that are sealed. I myself have been involved with a court case that involves a gag order, and that order has been in effect and sealed for nearly five years.

Bump stocks affect accuracy because it is impossible to hold the weapon on target with high precision while the thing is bouncing back and forth in the stock. The distance isn’t that great, according to Google maps, it is only 280 yards from the hotel to the stage. It is 400 yards to the center of the concert area. My ballistics table says that you only have about a 25 inch drop at that range, and a 55 grain bullet still has more than 300 foot pounds of energy at 400 yards.

The guy is full of crap when he talks about the shooting distance being the hypotenuse. The bullet only sees the horizontal component of the distance when computing drop, but sees the flight distance (hypotenuse) when computing energy. Even so, the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by a 32 story hotel and a 400 yard horizontal distance is only 414 yards. That really doesn’t matter a whole lot to energy.

As to accuracy: At 400 yards, one minute of angle is equal to approximately 4.18 inches. This means that the concert venue at 500 feet wide, being 400 yards away, is more than 1400 minutes of angle wide. The shooter wasn’t trying to hit individual people, which I admit would take quite a bit of skill. Instead, he was shooting into an area the size of two football fields, and hoping to hit any of the 22,000 people who were densely packed into that area. This would be the equivalent of shooting at a standard highway billboard (which is 48 feet wide) at a distance of about 100 yards. NOT a difficult shot. Stevie Wonder could make a shot like that.

Only about 200 of the injuries/deaths were due to GSW. The rest of the injuries were due to being trampled or otherwise injured while taking cover. There were 22,000 people in the venue, and he hit less than 1% of them- meaning he missed more than 99% of the time.

I don’t know why I am getting sucked into these discussions.

By Divemedic, ago

Incompetence, deliberate, or something else?

With regards to the Vegas shooting, there are many theories. Some are outrageous, some buying the official version, some make more sense than others. Everyone seems to have their own theory. Why there are so many theories is obvious: the official investigation is being publicly and obviously bungled.

The Las Vegas metro police cannot even establish basic facts. When did the shooter (I won’t use his name) check in to the hotel? Was it the 28th? Or was it the 25th? Don’t the police department, the FBI, and all of the other agencies involved have the ability to check the hotel register?  This seems rather basic to me.

They cannot even establish a timeline. When was the security guard shot? Six minutes before the crowd was fired upon? Immediately before the crowd was fired upon? After? When was 911 called? As a former emergency worker who was involved in hundreds of criminal and internal investigations, I can tell you that ALL radio traffic and 911 calls are recorded and time stamped. Why can’t the cops reliably establish a timeline of something that their own systems record and time stamp?

Even though there are several receipts from room service showing that there were two people in the room, there has been no explanation of who the two are.There are reports that there was a phone charger that could not be matched to any of the shooter’s devices, then the next day, the cops say “nevermind, we figured it out.” Matching phones to chargers: a skill that any average American middle school student has mastered, seemingly can’t be handled by the FBI or a major metropolitan police department.

While his car was out of the garage, his room was opened with the key. The police and FBI have not even tried to explain this one away. More incompetence? Cover up? Who  knows?

Instead of explaining all of this, the FBI’s official line is that there was not a second person. Since the FBI can’t figure out who the person was, there must not be one, and if there is not a second person, then the shooter was obviously faking the existence of the second person. Case solved. This is the height of incompetence and arrogance. The FBI is essentially saying “If we don’t know it, it must not exist.”

It is a fact that no one can count cards or cheat in a Vegas casino, yet the shooter- a man who is 6 foot four, was not seen on camera entering or leaving the place even once. To haul nearly a thousand pounds of firearms and ammunition into the room would have taken several trips, even using a luggage cart.

The security guard who was shot: Where is he? Why did he disappear? Why isn’t there a security guard licensed in Nevada by that name? Was he registered under a fake name? Or is his legal name different than the name that people use? After all, I used to have people call me by my middle name, and maybe that is the case here. Even so, why did he disappear?

A reporter trying to get answers to these questions has had her press credentials taken away, and is now prohibited from attending LVMP press conferences. She was also chased away from the home of the missing security guard by an armed man who claims to work for On Scene security. On Scene security doesn’t have an active license to operate in the state of Nevada. Their license expired in January, and the corporate address is a company that provides virtual office space.

There are so many problems and inconsistencies with the investigation that it is no wonder that people are creating their own theories to fill the void. Nothing about this makes sense. There are a few old sayings that come to mind: “Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.”

At the same time, there is Occam’s razor, which essentially says that when presented with multiple theories about a phenomenon, the one which requires the fewest assumptions (the simplest) is usually the correct one.

In this case, we are asked to choose between two explanations:
1 That a man who has no public persona, no political opinion, no history of mental illness, was a person who made more than $5 million a year but can’t fully explain where it came from, somehow managed to spend months or even years plotting to commit one of the largest mass murders in US history without leaving a trail for investigators to follow, and without alerting any of his family and close friends that anything was amiss, and without anyone figuring out that he was a “gun nut.” No one has EVER been able to do this.

Then, after all of that, when the FBI, the local cops, the ATF, and every other police agency you can think of begin to investigate the shooting, they handle the investigation with so much incompetence, that they can’t even establish who was in the room, or when he even checked into the room. This is the same FBI that arrested Tim McVeigh less than an hour after the Oklahoma City bombing.

2 That we are all getting played. The FBI and police know more than they are letting on, and are covering up key facts in this crime. The question is: Why? Who is playing us? The shooter? The cops and FBI? Or someone else? and to what end? This explanation creates more questions than answers.

This is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists.

By Divemedic, ago

Valid Question

If the shooter in Vegas was shot at 9:59 and called it in, then the shooter was firing on the crowd until 10:15, then why did it take LVMPD dispatchers until 10:25 to declare that there was an active shooter, and why did police wait until 11:20 to enter his room?

How many people bled to death while waiting for help that wouldn’t come in time? Nearly an hour and a half passed before police entered that room.

Gun ownership: because when you need help, police are only an hour and a half away…

By Divemedic, ago

I support the NAACP

The NAACP says that the owner of the Dallas Cowboys is violating the Constitutional Rights of his employees by not allowing them to protest while they are on the clock. So is the NAACP saying that an employer may not violate the Constitutional Rights of their employees while they are at work? I want to see the result of THAT court case, so I can finally begin carrying guns at my workplace without having to worry about my 2A rights being violated…

(This is satire)

By Divemedic, ago

Disney: Guns only for the rich

Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, said this week that we should be outraged by the Las Vegas shooting, and should be discussing gun control.

On the same page is a link to a story where Disney’s government arm, Reedy Creek Improvement District, has budgeted $13.7 million to hire off duty deputies at $40 per hour to work at the park. I guess when you have millions to hire gunslingers to guard you and your business,  you can be for gun control, knowing that the laws will never apply to your hired guns. According to Disney, guns are only for the rich, because fuck the poor.

By Divemedic, ago

Lying liars that lie

So Steve Wynn was interviewed on 60 minutes about guns in his hotels and had this to say:

WALLACE: So, given all of that, and I know that you had a hidden metal detectors and you had profilers in your casinos, watching the people walking in and out, would any of those measures have prevented Steven Paddock from checking in to one of your hotels?
WYNN: Well, I know that my friends at MGM are particularly fastidious about trying to protect their employees and their guests. Having said that, there are couple of things in retrospect and it’s always good to look over your shoulder on these things. But we have a routine with housekeeping, with room service, with audio visual, who anybody that goes in the room to do an inspection.
We also have rules about do not disturb. If a room goes on do not disturb for more than 12 hours, we investigate. We constantly — we don’t allow guns in this building unless they’re being carried by our employees and there’s a lot of them. But if anybody’s got a gun and we find them continually, we eject them from the hotel.

He then goes on to claim that a person with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on a room for several days would trigger an investigation. I call BULLSHIT. First, are we to expect that a man who was known to gamble $100,000 an hour in a casino, who was a high roller, and a millionaire would be subjected to his room being summarily searched because of a “Do Not Disturb” sign?

Hidden metal detectors? What are you going to do when every person who goes through it sets it off because of their cell phones or keys?

I seriously doubt that the casinos in Vegas are going to search every person who attempts to enter or leave, and search the luggage of every guest. That just isn’t a viable, long term solution. People would simply stop going to Vegas. Like he said, there are 15,000 to 20,000 people a day entering those casinos. It simply isn’t practical to search each and every one of them.

What about the SHOT show? Are you going to tell them that they are no longer welcome?

Second: In June, I stayed in Las Vegas for a week. I spent two nights in the Freemont Street area, and 5 nights at New York, New York. During our stay, we walked into nearly every casino on the Las Vegas strip, including the Wynn. Since my Florida CCW is covered by reciprocity, I was able to legally carry in Las Vegas, and I carried all over that town. Including in the Wynn resort.

Not once was I approached by police, security, or anyone else.

By Divemedic, ago

Inconsistencies

There are a number of things that just don’t make sense to me about the Las Vegas shooter. I‘m not the only one. Now, I am not by any means saying that there was any sort of conspiracy, but there is a lot here that makes no sense to me.

First, there are the statistical anomalies: A 64 year old millionaire with a graduate level education, no political affiliations, no social media presence, and no history of mental illness just doesn’t fit the profile. I read an article with quotes from a former FBI profiler who is just as stumped.

Then there are the other anomalies:

The note left behind turns out to have included hand-written calculations about where he needed to aim to maximize his accuracy and kill as many people as possible. To me, this seems to indicate one of two things: either a ballistics table, or a range card. Either of those would indicate a level of knowledge that is higher than the average shooter, not just the average American. A range card is used as a guide for soldiers, particularly ones who are going to be using a weapon to cover an area with fire, as opposed to using a weapon to engage point targets. Below is a range card, right out of the Army field training manual:

In other words, he was planning on using his automatic weapon to place fire into a “beaten zone” to fire into a crowd, where hits on specific people don’t matter. All that mattered was putting fire into the zone, and count on the law of averages to get hits on individuals. Again, this would indicate a level of training and knowledge that is beyond what most people would know. Since this man is not alleged to have had any military training, where did he get the training?

Then there is the large amounts of cash he had. He paid cash for a house, gambled upwards of a million dollars a year, and there is a report that he won $5 million in 2015 by playing video poker in casinos. I am a bit of a gambler myself. I am not a high roller, but I do gamble enough to get limited comps, like the occasional hotel stay or cruise. Let me say this: The games are not predictable over the long term for people to pull those kinds of winnings out over the long term. Sure, there are people who hit the VERY rare large jackpot, but casinos use those large winnings as loss leaders to entice gamblers. People do not win over the long term, or everyone with some math skill would be in there making millions, and the casinos would go out of business. A more likely story is that he was using the casinos to launder money from some sort of illegal enterprise. Gambling is a great way to hide the source of illegal money.

Who pays cash for a house? Even millionaires don’t travel around with a briefcase full of cash. They would pay with a cashier’s check or bank transfer.

There are other anomalies pointed out here, and this is where things begin sounding like a badly written conspiracy theory novel:

He is a licensed pilot who let his medical certificates expire, but who still owned 2 aircraft. One of Paddock’s airplanes, tail number N5343M, was an SR-20, in production since 1999, and retails for $390K.
It’s now registered to Volant Associates, LLC (you should check out their website, and read the “Careers” page, to see if you get a whiff of Christians In Action as strongly as I did). The tail number is active, yet apparently, the plane has recorded not a single registered flight in the last three years.

Now the interesting part, if you go to faa.gov and put the same tail number into their search engine N5343M, you will find that the FAA says the n-number is inactive, and the last registration was a C152 (different aircraft) to some guy in San Diego CA. And no mention of the current registration by Volant LLC, or Mr Paddock. The FAA database is updated every business day at midnight. So, it looks like someone ether scrubbed the FAA database and forgot or didn’t know that flightaware posted the same info.

(Pssst! Say, just wondering, who can double-register tail numbers, and make flight records go away? Asking for a friend.)

These anomalies beg for Internet detectives to spin yarns. What scares me is knowing that people are capable of doing stuff like this to advance an agenda- after all, the Obama administration came up with Fast and Furious. I’m not saying that there was a conspiracy here, all I am saying is that it isn’t impossible.

By Divemedic, ago