Divemedic

Violence at Work

I firmly believe that no employee should have to sit at work and be threatened with physical violence. While at work, I am threatened with violence against my person and family several times per week. Since I was suspended for the patient’s accusations the week before Christmas, I have been threatened at least three more times.

  • A Baker Act said that she would follow me home to see where I lived, then return to my home while I was at work to murder my entire family. She kept saying “you just wait until I catch you out in public.” I demanded that management call the cops. They did, but the police did nothing but take a report. That’s fine. At least there is a record if I have to smoke the crazy bitch at the end of my driveway. I carry nearly everywhere when I am not at work. “Catching” me outside of work and attacking me would be a critical, terminal failure in her victim selection process, but still expensive and time consuming for me.
  • The very next day, a patient came in with a complaint that aliens mutilated his genitals and he wanted them removed. When the Doctor discharged him, he said that if I didn’t let him stay, he would kill me. I had security remove him. He came back in 3 hours later and security refused to do a thing about it. Finally, four days later, he was Baker Acted and sent to a mental health facility.
  • Later that same night, a man came in and demanded to be permitted to see his wife, who had been brought in by ambulance and was off at radiology getting an X ray. I told him that she would be back in about 10 minutes, but he wanted to be taken to her NOW. I told him to have a little patience, and he replied that if I didn’t take him to her, we were gonna have a problem. I told him that if he wanted to issue threats and cause a scene, I would have security remove him. He kept yelling, so I had him tossed out.

One of the nurses that I work with told me that I have too short of a fuse when it comes to threats, and I need to understand that most people are just venting and don’t really mean it. I agree that most people don’t mean it, but how do you really tell the difference? Why should I have to? If a person has so little impulse control that they can’t stop themselves from issuing threats of death or physical violence every time something doesn’t go their way, when does it stop?

My hospital, like most employers, doesn’t permit concealed carry for employees. So what happens when one of these people who doesn’t mean it comes in and decides that they DO mean it? The one who pays the price for misjudging the idiot’s ill intent is me, but certainly not my employer.

It’s the attitude displayed by this fellow nurse that results in no one saying anything when a mass shooter turns out to have been saying all sorts of disturbing things, and people inevitably say “Why didn’t anyone report this before he snapped and killed half a dozen people?”

That’s my problem with the cop who threatened to kill me before physically attacking me. The police wouldn’t press charges because they said that the man had a medical problem and was delusional, therefore wasn’t responsible for his actions. OK, I can see that. But then why does someone who isn’t and can’t be responsible for their violent actions still permitted to carry a weapon under LEOSA because he is a retired cop?

It isn’t just my employer, it’s most employers. They have taken the attitude of “the customer is always right” to the extreme, and now we see attacks and threats by customers becoming commonplace. Why is that? Because our legal system absolves employers of liability for customers’ actions while at the same time punishing employers by making them liable for the actions taken by employees in self defense. It sets the stage for making employees more easily and cheaply being replaced than violent customers.

By Divemedic, ago

Illinois Makes All Semiauto Rifles Illegal

How did they do that? Because of the overly broad wording of their new assault weapons ban (edited to clean up the text to make it more readable, but not change the wording):

(3) "Assault weapon" means:

(snip of irrelevant sections A and B)

(C) A semiautomatic rifle that can accept or can be modified to accept a detachable magazine and has at least one of the following:
(i) A folding, telescoping, or collapsible stock.
(ii) Any grip of the weapon, including a pistol grip, a thumbhole stock, or any other stock, the use of
which would allow an individual to grip the weapon, resulting in any finger on the trigger hand in
addition to the trigger finger being directly below any portion of the action of the weapon when firing.

emphasis added

Now picture any semiauto rifle you can think of. Now tell me which one, if any, sees the pinkie finger of the trigger hand not being below the action of the rifle.

Thus, all semiauto rifles in Illinois are now legally defined as assault weapons and are thus illegal to possess, transfer, or own.

By Divemedic, ago

Disappointing Range Day

So I decided to take the new 1911 with me to range morning. I arrived at the range with my EDC pistol, the new 1911, 100 rounds of 9mm, and some CCI Blazer in .45ACP. I setup my lane, loaded a magazine with 5 rounds of .45, and squeezed off the first mag full of ammo when I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was the range officer telling me that only brass cased ammo is permitted at the range. But if I wanted to buy some .45 ammo, they had some for sale at $40 a box.

American Eagle at 80 cents per round? I can buy that elsewhere for 54 cents per round, and can buy PMC brass cased at 46 cents per round. No thanks. I don’t want to sound like an old man, but I remember when .45ACP was $8 a box, and that wasn’t all that long ago.

I had to switch to the 9mm and finish my shooting for the morning. After I was done, I asked the RSO why the ammo restriction. It’s because the range sells the used brass to a recycler, and they can’t sell steel or aluminum cases. So not only do they sell the ammo at nearly double the going rate, but they are selling the brass and making more money there.

I would love to find another gun range, but this one is only 20 minutes from my house, and there is only one other range within a half an hour’s drive. That second range is owned by a dishonest meatsack that I wouldn’t trust to sell me a stick of gum. So I can either suck it up and get fleeced by the brass recycling buttheads at the range 20 minutes away, or I can make the 40 minute drive to the third closest range and see if they are any better.

At any rate, I am going to have to order me some brass cased .45 and try to shoot the new 1911 some other time.

By Divemedic, ago

Ask and Ye Shall Receive.

So I wanted a 1911 to play with before committing to buying an Ed Brown, and a Para USA Black Ops just happened to fall into my hands. For a pistol that is just a plaything, the price was right, at only $400.

It looks like it was hardly ever fired. Wear is consistent with a pistol that had maybe a box of ammo put through it, then was put in a nightstand drawer and never fired again.

  • The match barrel has no wear on the bluing.
  • There is a 2mm scuff on the bluing near the top of the slide.
  • The bluing is warn around the top of the only factory magazine I have for it. The other magazine that shipped with the handgun is apparently missing.
  • The bluing is a bit warn on the outsides of both safety levers, and on the points at the front on both sides of the slide, as if the pistol spend a lot of time sitting in a drawer.
  • On the contact points of both sides of the grip safety, the bluing has rubbed off.
  • There is gunpowder residue on the feed ramp and the breech face. The bluing on the locking lugs is quite worn, but the lugs are in good shape.
  • Most of the bluing is still present on the face of the hammer.

The only thing that I can find wrong with it, is the tritium sights no longer glow, but that isn’t surprising since Para USA was absorbed by Remington in 2012, and the Para pistols were discontinued in 2015.

This thing is a boat anchor, I mean it is heavy, weighing in at 42.2 ounces with an empty magazine inserted. That makes it 10 percent heavier than a GI model. The guy wanted a good price, so I took it. I will get some new sights for it and then take it for a spin.

By Divemedic, ago

Not the USA

AWA over at GunfreeZone worries that the anti-gun folks will start using the gun laws of the old west to bolster their attacks on Bruen. The theory that some towns in the old West prohibited residents from having guns to attack the 2A is not a new claim. Gun controllers were using that same stupid argument during the gun control arguments of the 1990’s. That is a large part of New York’s line of argument in the Bruen case.

SCOTUS already addressed this issue:

Finally, respondents point to the slight uptick in gun regulation during the late-19th century. As the Court suggested in Heller, however, late-19th-century evidence cannot provide much insight into
the meaning of the Second Amendment when it contradicts earlier evidence. In addition, the vast majority of the statutes that respondents invoke come from the Western Territories. The bare existence of these localized restrictions cannot overcome the overwhelming evidence of an otherwise enduring American tradition permitting public carry. See Heller, 554 U. S., at 614. Moreover, these territorial laws were rarely subject to judicial scrutiny, and absent any evidence explaining why these unprecedented prohibitions on all public carry were understood to comport with the Second Amendment, they do little to inform “the origins and continuing significance of the Amendment.” Ibid.; see
also The Federalist No. 37, p. 229. Finally, these territorial restrictions deserve little weight because they were, consistent with the transitory nature of territorial government, short lived. Some were held unconstitutional shortly after passage, and others did not survive a Territory’s admission to the Union as a State. Pp. 58–62.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen (06/23/2022)

By Divemedic, ago