Divemedic

It’s easy to blast pensions, unless you realize where they came from. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the economy was booming. In good economic times, people leave public employment to seek employment in the private sector, which has better pay. That is exactly what happened. The public sector was being bled of talented employees, who were leaving government employ for the greener pastures of the private sector.

For example, as a firefighter paramedic, I could have gone to a bridge program, transitioned from paramedic to nurse, and gotten a 40-50% increase in my pay while working fewer hours (Firefighter medics work a 56 hour week, nurses a 36 hour week). I stayed for the pension.

The powers that be were busy wasting the newfound largess of tax receipts from the booming economy on governmental baubles that were designed to win votes, and therefore could not afford to raise employee pay enough to stop the bleeding of talent. So instead, they instituted a pay later approach- they started a pension system. The promise of a good retirement kept many workers in government employ. The government had the best of both worlds- buy good employees now, pay for them later.

Now here we are, 20-30 years later, and the bill is due. Now instead of paying the bill, the government cries poor and refuses to pay the employees who stayed the benefits they were promised. The government is perfectly capable of paying, but like a consumer who had a big party on their VISA card, they would rather keep spending it on wasteful projects than repay the debt that they incurred.

Don’t blame the public employees. They worked as asked, fulfilling their end of the bargain. Now that they expect the government to hold up their end and pay what they owe, the government decides that they don’t want to pay, because they have other things they would rather spend the money on.

So there was a study that found gun ownership rates had a direct correlation to teen suicide rates. They found that for every 10 percent increase in household gun ownership, the youth suicide rate increased by 26.9 percent. There are so many flaws in this logic that it is laughable.

The first is that they compared Alaska and South Dakota’s high gun ownership rates and high suicide rates to New York and New Jersey. They ignore population density as being a factor. When you compare New York and New Jersey to Alabama and Mississippi, the rates are closer. Perhaps the lack of access to timely EMS and trauma centers means that an attempted suicide is more likely to be a successful suicide.

Nah, it’s easier to blame guns.

I carry a weapon all of the time, even while walking or jogging. The fact that a woman in Central Florida was attacked by a coyote seems to prove me correct.

A 19 year old mechanical engineering student from UCF was arrested with several DIAS equipped AR’s. The press gets it wrong, though: Drop in auto sears have been illegal to manufacture since 1986.

I’ve been thinking:
Since a semiautomatic rifle is defined as: “any repeating rifle which utilizes a portion of the energy of a firing cartridge to extract the fired cartridge case and chamber the next round, and which requires a separate pull of the trigger to fire each cartridge.”

There is a workaround. Eliminate the recoil springs and most of the firing mechanism. Replace them with a small servo set that cycles the bolt and then re-locks it after each shot. The weapon would not be a semi-automatic at that point, since the energy to extract and chamber would not come from the energy of the fired cartridge.

The magazine of such a weapon could contain the battery and be recharged between firings, the battery could be in the weapon, or both.