Divemedic

The next claim I want to take on is the one I keep seeing all over the internet:

Australia same geographical size , Prime Minister Howard =1 put in gun control and since , the 1990′ NONE , NOT ONE MASS SHOOTING Tell me it doesn’t work . GUNS DO NOT KILL PEOPLE
PEOPLE WITH ACCESS TO GUNS ……… KILL PEOPLE. Due to the nation’s controversial and oppressive gun restrictions, no one has died as a result of a mass-shooting on Australian soil today, for the 7158th day in a row.

Fact check coming at ya:

Since 2009, Australia has had at least 6 spree killings.
1 Lin Family murders a man murdered a family of 5 in their home after having dinner with them.

2 Hunt family murders a man murdered his entire family with a shotgun in Lockhart, NSW, Australia. 5 killed

3 Hectorville hostage standoff  mass shooting in Australia in 2011 in Hectorville, where a man took hostages and held police at bay for nearly eight hours. He shot 6 people, killing three and wounding three. Two of the wounded were police officers.

4 Quakers Hill murders a man killed 11 elderly residents of a nursing home by setting the home on fire as they slept, to hide the fact that he had been stealing drugs from the sick.

5 Cairns child killings  Eight children stabbed to death by their mother

6 Sydney hostage incident: a man robbed a bank at gunpoint. 3 killed and 4 wounded.

Six years, six spree killers, 35 homicides.Australia, like many countries, doesn’t list a death as being a homicide until someone is convicted of the killing. That skews the numbers, because the killers in the Hunt murders and the Sydney incident died before they could be tried. The Hectorville murderer was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Is it any wonder why Australia reports a homicide rate of 1.1?

The US homicide rate is 3.8 per 100,000.

There is a meme that is being pushed by the left, where they claim that there have been 300 mass shootings in 2015 alone. The supposed source for this little talking point is a website called shootingtracker. Lets take a look at where shootingtracker got their data from, shall we?

The data came from news sites all over the country, which hardly makes the data accurate or scientific. There are a number of issues with the data, including the following:

1 To be counted, the story had to claim that four or more people (including the shooter) had to be injured or killed. Note that this doesn’t mean that anyone had to have been actually shot. If a guy fired a gun into the air inside of a crowded shopping mall and four people were injured trying to flee, this would count as a mass shooting, even though no one was actually shot.

2 They included ANY shooting where 4 or more people were injured, including murder suicide. So if a mother went nuts and shot herself after bludgeoning her children to death inside of her own home, this would count as a mass shooting.

3 The FBI is much more selective, probably because they have less of an agenda than the gun grabbers. The FBI defines a mass shooting as:

“the killing of four or more individuals occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders.” (emphasis added)

Using this definition, there are far fewer mass shootings. Mother Jones, hardly a bastion of far right thought, used this definition to determine that there have only been 73 mass shootings since 1982. That is 2.2 mass shootings per year. Granted, this year has seen 4 shootings, which is more than the average, but this is not unprecedented. There have been more than 4 mass shooting a year several times during that period: 2013, 2002, and 1999. Even the Huffington post admits that violent crime is at a 50 year low.

To make the problem look worse, President Obama signed a law in 2012 that reduced this definition to three killed.

4 The agreed-upon definition of an active shooter used by U.S. government agencies for decades—including the White House, U.S. Department of Justice/FBI, U.S. Department of Education, and
U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency—was

an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and
populated area. Implicit in this definition is that the subject’s criminal actions involve the use of firearms.

 The gun grabbers that run shootingtracker are claiming that the FBI is wrong, that the definition of a mass shooting should include any incident where 4 or more people are shot, because whether or not they die is not relevant, only the fact that they were shot should count. Even using this metric, they are grossly inflating their numbers, as most of the news articles that this ‘study’ is based upon do not state the mechanism of injury for the injured parties. This means that a person who was not shot, but twisted his ankle in an attempt to flee the shooter is counted towards the statistic.

In order to see the manipulation a bit more clearly, let’s look at the data for my state of residence, Florida. The site claims that there were 27 mass shootings in 2015. The problem is that nearly all of these shootings were gang ind drug related. For example:

One of the shootings from January was an incident where 2 men in Lakeland tried to rob a drug dealer,  a fight ensued, and 4 people wound up getting shot. Both the robbers and their drug dealing victims were convicted felons with lengthy criminal histories that were illegally in possession of drugs and firearms. In fact, the police identified gang or drug activity as being the cause of 13 of the 27 shootings.

One of them didn’t happen in Florida. It was a shooting that took place in California.

One was a murder suicide, where a husband shot his wife and the man she was having an affair with, before shooting himself. One bystander was hit as well. In fact, three of the 27 shootings were murder suicides, where the victims (with the exception of the lone bystander already mentioned) were all related to the shooter, including one case where a 60 year old woman killed her daughter, also shooting her 4 grandkids, killing three of them.

In eight shooting incidents, the shooting was the result of a fight or argument that started in a bar or a party, where the aggrieved person produced a gun and began firing.

In one case, police didn’t even know if anyone was shot. They could not determine the cause of the victims’ injuries.

There was only one shooting where the shooter randomly shot at people in what the FBI would classify as a mass shooter, and that shooting resulted in one death and three injuries.

Another interesting statistic is this:
20 of the 26 shootings involved drugs or alcohol.
In 3 of the shootings the shooter’s race was unknown, and in the 18 of the remaining 23 shootings, the shooter was black.
In the 7 shootings where a suspect was arrested, the shooter was a convicted felon in possession of a firearm in 4 of them, meaning it was already illegal for him to possess a firearm.

We have a gang problem. We have a drug problem. We do not have a problem with mass shootings. The “facts” in this meme that is being circulated are misleading and, in some cases, false.

It must be deliberate.

There was a movie made in the late 80s about the Third Infantry regiment during the Vietnam War. It was called “Gardens of Stone.” There is an exchange in that movie that has always resonated with me, and goes like this:

Private: We beat England when we were the guerrillas, and we beat Hitler. We beat everybody in between. We’re not gonna lose to a bunch of little Asian farmers.

Sgt:  Yeah? You take a look at that farmer. He can march 100 miles on no food, through a jungle, slaughter his own people, even babies. That’s a soldier.

Private: Firepower. He can’t soak up our firepower. I saw a photo, one of our choppers coming back with arrows in it! How do you beat a helicopter with bows and arrows?

Sergeant: How you gonna beat an enemy brave enough to fight helicopters with arrows?

Apply that to now:

We are facing an enemy that will do ANYTHING to win. They will even strap a bomb to their children and send them into a crowded area, in the hopes that his child will kill just a few of you. Any culture that believes in their cause so strongly that not only are they willing to die, but they are willing to kill their own children to get at you, is willing to do anything to win.

You can’t reason with that kind of faith. You can’t negotiate. Even the normal rules of war do not apply. Normally, a war is one when one side grows weary of fighting, when one side decides that the cost they are paying is too high. That isn’t going to happen here. They will not stop, because they believe that their god has ordered them to kill you.

No, the only way this modern version of the crusades ends, is for one side to eliminate the other. Not beat the other, bur eliminate them.

We have no choice. They have brought the fight to us. Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, and more. Now it is either kill, or be killed.

Here comes the media, claiming that the brother of the terrorist from San Barnardino is a Navy veteran, decorated for his role in the war on terror. They make it seem as though he was out killing terrorists with his bare hands, but the NY Daily News lists his awards:

Good conduct medal
Serve four years without getting in trouble, and you get this one.

National Defense Service Medal: 
Everyone in the military since 9/11 gets this one.

Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal:
This one is given to the members of any unit that was within the theater of operations.

Global War on Terror Service Medal
All military who deploy to the Middle East get this one.

Sea Service Deployment Ribbon
This one means his ship was away from its home port for 90 days or more. Pretty much everyone in the Navy who is assigned to a ship gets this one.

He served from 2003 to 2007. His awards were the equivalent of a participation trophy. The first two are give to pretty much everyone, and the last three were because the ship he was assigned to (the USS Enterprise) went to the Persian Gulf in 2004. He got those medals along with the other 10,000 people on the ships in that battle group. This is not some set of awards for heroic actions. He was never within a thousand miles of a terrorist, with the exception of his brother.

This is spin by the media to distract us from what his brother did, and to make us all believe that this was not the act of terrorist Muslims.

The press and the President are actually helping pro gun forces this week. You see, they all have been busy trying to spin the terror incident in California as “workplace violence” instead of the terrorist act that everyone knows it to be.  Even the people who are trying to sell this as a workplace shooting don’t believe what they are peddling.

Last month, in the week after the Paris shootings, the sales of guns set a new record. For the sixth month in a row. Each month sees a new all time high in gun sales. Americans are arming themselves like never before. In fact, Americans have bought nearly 20 million firearms so far this year, and I am predicting that December will see even more sales than the previous six record setting months. My prediction is that the year will end with over 22 million NICS checks.

Why? Because EVERYONE senses the problems that are coming, and this ISIS terrorist attack is going to accelerate the trend.

So how does this add up to the press doing us a favor? Because even people who are uninformed on the issue are beginning to see the light. Gun free zones are a lie. Gun laws don’t protect you. They are scared, and they aren’t buying into the anti gun rhetoric any more.

The emperor has no clothes, and everyone is beginning to see.

Orangepizza:

#GreedosLifeMatters

Followed by Purpleraindrop:

Hans up, don’t shoot!

Seen as a comment to this.

More than a few times, I have discussed so-called “free” health care on this blog. The fact that giving someone a product or service at no cost to them means that someone else must provide that product or service for reduced wages or free. In this case of health care, that means that doctors become what are essentially slave workers who earn less than cab drivers.

We constantly hear about how Great Britain has such a great system, and how much better the NHS is that the system we have in the US. The doctors in the UK disagree. Junior doctors, who represent 50% of the physicians in the UK, are going on strike. Why? Doctors there make only US$34,000 per year to start, and top out at US$45,000 per year. Doctors in the UK work 90 to  100 hours a week. There are laws in the EU to prevent doctors from working more than 48 hours a week, but they are encouraged to waive that right and work more. Assuming an 80 hour workweek, a junior doctor in the UK makes between $8.17 and $10.62 an hour.

How does that compare to other professions? There are cab drivers in London who make US$100,000 per year. Accountants make US$45,000 per year to start, and attorneys make US$60,000 to start. Doctors, being upset about this state of affairs, are threatening to strike. The government is going to press charges against any doctor whose refusal to work long hours for low pay results in risking patient’s health.

That is called slavery.

Even with all of that, there are waitlists of more than a year for medical treatment for some, and the average wait for a surgical procedure is 18 weeks.

Tell me again how we want to emulate that system.

I spent Thanksgiving day as a volunteer: I was helping prepare and serve meals to 170 elderly people who have no family or friends to spend the Holiday with. The meal consisted of ham, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, corn, rolls, and pumpkin pie. The meal, which cost $12 per person, was prepared and served entirely by Veterans of the US military, who volunteered to serve yet again. It gave those people a place to go on Thanksgiving.

I learned over more than 2 decades of service as a paramedic and firefighter that most people who frequent charity soup kitchens are poor because of their own poor choices, so I didn’t want to serve in a soup kitchen where some ungrateful welfare kings and queens would feel I owed them something.

I then spent Black Friday at home. Watching TV and reading a book. What I didn’t do was emulate those idiots who were at Wal Mart, engaging in fist fights to get a cheap TV set or vegetable steamer.

From 1989 to 2010, police seized $12.6 billion worth of property and cash through asset forfeiture. The amount seized has been growing exponentially. In 2014 alone, Federal law enforcement agencies alone managed to seize $4.5 billion worth of property and currency. State and local police are taking in another half billion or so each year, making the total seized in a given year somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion.

The police write about $6.2 billion in speeding tickets every year in the US. One in five US drivers will receive a ticket every year, for a total of 41 million tickets written. Each police officer writes $300,000 in traffic tickets each year. The police have admitted that traffic tickets are used as a fundraising tool.

There are 12,000 local police departments in the United States, and the combined budgets of them and Federal law enforcement come to just over $126 billion each year.

According to the FBI, there were 8.9 million property crimes for 2012 in the US, meaning that there were 4 times more traffic stops than there were thefts. Burglars managed to steal $3.9 billion in property. Larceny, the most common property crime, cost the public $4.7 billion in 2012.

In fact, the total cost of all property crime for 2012 was about $12.6 billion. That includes Auto theft, robbery, burglary, shoplifting, all of it. Everything stolen by criminals.

Let’s run the totals (all figures in billions of US dollars):
Police cost is:
Budgeted costs: 126
Asset forfeiture: 5
Traffic tickets: 6.2

Total cost of US policing: $137.2 billion per year

Property crime: $12.6 billion per year.

The conclusion here is obvious: The financial cost of police is simply too high. We are wasting our money. In fact, if police were eliminated and all crime was 10 times worse than it is now, we would still be saving money.

Does this mean that I am advocating that we eliminate police? Of course not. What it means is that we must look at how we are spending our law enforcement dollar, and realize that our police are far too focused on fundraising activities instead of preventing crime and actually catching criminals.