Divemedic

We keep hearing from people about how we should have a discussion about guns, especially in light of the recent shooting in South Florida. Here are my thoughts:

Whenever we wish to address a hazardous situation, there are two categories of response: Prevention of an even that has not yet happened, and mitigation of an event that is occurring or has occurred.


Prevention:

1 The FBI had multiple warnings that this particular individual was about to carry out an attack. At least two people had contacted the FBI’s “If you see something, say something” tip line, and the FBI admits that they dropped the ball. The FBI made the same mistake with respect to the Boston Marathon bombers. Any time a shooting or other event like this occurs, there should be an independent investigation. If it is found that a government employee failed to follow procedures in chasing down or investigating a tip lead, or other evidence that would have prevented the event, and that failure results in a loss of life should be terminated and lose all retirement benefits. If it turns out that the procedures themselves were deficient, then the head of that government agency should be forced to resign.

2 Government agencies that fail to add prohibited persons to the NICS database should be terminated. Let’s enforce the laws as written. If we aren’t going to do that, we might as well repeal them.

3 Ever since we closed the mental hospitals, we have had problems dealing with the people who have problems: they are now filling our jails, our emergency rooms, and our homeless camps. We need to address the mentally ill people. Simply ignoring them is not solving the problem. This will likely cost gobs of money, so is not likely to happen.

4 Gun Control: There are between 400 and 600 million firearms in the US. Making guns illegal is not going to happen. Even if it did, you are never going to get even a sizable fraction of them. Additionally, in order to confiscate them, you will need to compensate the people you take them from for the fair value of the weapon, because of the takings clause of the 5th Amendment.

5 Banning so-called “assault weapons:” This is not going to happen, either. The AR15 is the most popular rifle in America, making up a quarter of all long gun sales in the US. Americans have been buying over one million of these rifles each year since 2007. It is estimated that more than 40 million of them are in American homes.

6 Access control: Every school needs to have a fence that would require would be entrants to pass through a control point. If you cannot control who enters the school, you are asking for trouble. Shooters, kidnappers, pedophiles, all of them want access to your kids. Why make it easy for them?

7 Magnetometers and xray machines: I have heard people ask for these, but I don’t think it is practical for a number of reasons. There are 1800 students and another 150 staff members at my school. In order to get everyone through the line in a reasonable amount of time, you would need 2 or 3 of them, with people to staff them. Those people would need to be armed. In Florida, that means they have to be cops, because no one but cops can be armed in Florida schools. The cost for three magnetometers plus the cops to staff them would be about $12,000 for the machines, plus about $600,000 in staffing costs. Per school. My county has 63 schools, meaning a cost of about $38.5 million for the first year. Will taxpayers want to pay an additional $1,000 a year in property taxes?

Mitigation:

1 Shooters select schools because they know that all of the people inside are unarmed and schools have no access control.
For starters, put a fence around the school so that no one can enter or exit during the school day without going through the office.

My school has only one police officer on duty. We cannot afford to have more, we can barely afford to buy textbooks. Instead, a low cost solution is to change state law to allow teachers to be armed if they meet certain criteria:
1 They volunteer to take a class on the proper use of force to protect the school. We as teachers train on everything else, why not something useful?
2 pass the same marksmanship test as police officers.
3 They carry their weapon in a retention holster, to prevent a student from grabbing the weapon

Of the 18 staff members in my building, there are three teachers who are either former military or former public safety. One is a retired cop. In fact, more than 15% of our staff are either veterans or former emergency responders. Why not let us protect your children as we educate them?

The law as it stands does not allow anyone but police to carry guns at schools, not even security guards. This ensures that a killer will likely be facing defenseless victims. What we have been doing, trying to create gun free zones and telling kids to hide as a shooter enters campus without so much as a fence preventing him from entering the classroom isn’t working. Let’s try something different.

For the past two years, I have been testing the security theater of non-permissive environments. That is, the theme parks and other venues that prohibit firearms, even licensed weapons carriers. What I found is that most places don’t do a very good job at finding weapons, legal or illegal. I have entered Disney while armed, even though they have metal detectors and bag searches, dozens of times. Likewise, the Central Florida theme parks of Universal Studios, Sea World, Discovery Cove, Lego Land, and Busch Gardens. 

I was going to begin a new round of testing theme parks, but today’s announcement of increased prices has placed this on the back, back burner. Now that it costs the same as buying a handgun for a family to enter a theme park for a single day, coupled with the high profile that these places have from a terrorism perspective, theme parks are no longer on the list of places I wish to be. Four people entering the park for a day, eating lunch, and leaving now costs over $600, including parking.

I will continue to enter non-permissive environments, but theme parks have simply become too expensive to continue testing them.

The entire auto industry follows a sales model that is as unpleasant as possible, and is exceeded in discomfort only by root canals and colonoscopy. You take what should be fun, buying a car, and make it into a high pressure pin in the ass.

The incident began in the gym where one of the students, the 15-year-old, was arguing with his girlfriend and it was during that argument that the girlfriend made threats toward him and the 16-year-old, the report stated. Staff tried to simmer down the 15-year-old, but he refused to listen and kept causing a disruption, deputies said.
Moments later, [the SRO] was called to the gym because the 16-year-old was acting aggressively, he wrote in the report. The student mouthed off to Assistant Principal Ryan Mahaney and threw down his backpack, according to the report…
 [The SRO stated] that moments before he responded to the gym, the 16-year-old student had taken a “fighting stance” toward [the vice principal] several times and ignored [the vice principal’s] orders to go to the office… [The vice principal] also told [the SRO] that [the student] repeatedly told the vice principal, “I am going to (expletive deleted) you up!” 

The title of this post seems a bit over the top. How could Obama and the Democrats possibly be blamed for the epidemic of drug overdoses that is sweeping the nation?

The roots of this problem lie with Obamacare- the Affordable Care Act and a company called Press Ganey. The little known company sends surveys out to patients of medical providers, and uses the patient’s satisfaction to rate doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. Over the past decade, the government has fully embraced the “patient is always right” model–these surveys focus on areas like waiting times, pain management and communication skills–betting that increased customer satisfaction will improve the quality of care and reduce costs.  I have seen patients lower a hospital’s scores because they didn’t have HBO on the televisions in the Emergency Room.

The government, due to Obamacare, has tied reimbursement of facilities to their Press Ganey scores. As a result, the focus in healthcare is in making the patient happy, but not necessarily on making the patient healthy. So doctors prescribe narcotics because patients want them, not because they need them. As they become addicted to these painkillers, the patients return again and again for their fix, all the while improving the doctor’s satisfaction scores.

But giving patients exactly what they want, versus what the doctor thinks is right, can be very bad medicine. Researchers using data from nearly 52,000 adults found that the most satisfied patients spent the most on health care and prescription drugs. They were 12% more likely to be admitted to the hospital and accounted for 9% more in total health care costs. They were also the ones more likely to die.

All of those facts mean nothing. All that matters is making the patient happy. Thanks Democrats, the plan you voted for is killing America.

A Canadian serial killer has killed at least five people, and perhaps dozens more. This doesn’t count though, according to US anti-gun advocates, because they were not gun deaths. It isn’t even due to “privilege” because the killer is gay.

Our neighborhood has 99 homes in it. The neighborhood is mostly upper middle class people in their 30’s through their 50’s. Many of the people who live here have children. Professionally, the people here have ordinary jobs: Cops, teachers, real estate sales, a couple of business owners.

A couple of years ago, my neighborhood started a neighborhood watch, complete with a page on the book of faces. The watch is not an official one with police involvement, it is being run by the Homeowners’ Association. When I was asked to join, I declined with visions of George Zimmerman and the “wannabe” label attached to him because he was part of the neighborhood watch dancing in my head. My wife joined the social media page because it is good to be informed.

The neighborhood is just about 2,000 feet from a school. This means that, being more than 1,000 feet from a school, our neighborhood is also a place where sex offenders can live. Of those 99 homes, there were two of them. Until last week.

One of the police officers who lives here posted a link to an FDLE sexual predator flyer for a third offender who moved into our neighborhood. Nearly ll of the people who responded were thanking the cop for letting everyone know. Except one woman, who said that the people posting should avoid spreading rumors, and further said that since we didn’t have all of the facts, we remember that it isn’t our place to judge.

She apparently complained to the HOA, because the entire thread was deleted because, in the words of the HOA, the neighborhood watch FB page is not the place to engage in hurtful gossip. She also said  that since his crime was more than 20 years ago, we should give him a second chance.

I disagree in multiple ways. This is not gossip, nor is it a rumor. Verdict is a word meaning “truth” and once a person has been convicted of a crime, including molesting a child, it is a legal fact that the person is a convicted child molester. Letting your neighbors know that a convicted child molester is living in your neighborhood is not spreading rumors, it is spreading factual information about a convicted felon who is living in your neighborhood. This is the very reason why you have a neighborhood watch. If the board of the HOA wants to give him a second chance, perhaps they should hire him to be their baby sitter.

Incidentally, convicted sex criminal number two, who was convicted of molesting a child under 16 10 years ago while he was 30 years old, was arrested last night for talking to small children at a local big box store.

The powers that be cannot keep guns, drugs, and other contraband out of prisons, they can’t even prevent inmates from using contraband cell phones to transmit a 49 minute live video diatribe, and the anti-gunners are trying to convince us that that they can keep criminals from getting guns.

This year’s anti gun chorus is singing. The tune this time? They are claiming that 2018, even though it is only 26 days old, has seen 11 school shootings. They are lying. The lie is being repeated by news outlets all over the nation. It’s almost like this is an organized disinformation campaign.

Here are the 11 shootings that are being claimed:

First, the ones that resulted in no injuries:

1 A bus in Iowa was hit by a BB gun on January 6th.

2 The window of a college building on the San Bernardino campus of Cal State was hit by a bullet believed to have come from the foothills of the city- more than half a mile away.

3 A bullet hit a window at a Seattle high school. No one was hit, no shooter was seen, no shots were heard.

4 A student in a criminal justice class fired a shot through the wall of a simulated firing range after the instructor left a live firearm inside a simulated firing range.

5 Unknown people traded gunfire in a COLLEGE parking lot. One bullet hit a nearby dorm. No one was injured by the gunfire.

6 One high school was injured while diving for cover when a group of students he was with exchanged gunfire with unknown parties. Appears to be gang related. No one was injured by the gunfire. The high school is an “alternative” school for so-called “at risk” youth. (Meaning criminals in training and gang members)

Then there were the suicides where the only person injured was the shooter:

7 A 14 year old boy shot himself in a Tuscon school’s bathroom.

8 A 31 year old man pulled into a school parking lot and committed suicide in his car.

There are the ones involving someone other than the shooter being shot:

9 A student at Wake Forest COLLEGE was killed after being shot during a fight at a sorority party. Alcohol was involved. Some of those involved were minors, not students of the college, and IMO there was some gang affiliation here.

10 Two were killed and 18 wounded when a 15 year old fired shots at Marshall County High school in Kentucky. Two were killed and 14 wounded by bullets, the rest of the people injured were injured trying to escape.

11 A 15 year old with a troubled history shot and killed a girl in the cafeteria before school. The boy had a troubled past. It seems that he had previously made threats, and the school did exactly nothing.

So there you have it: 11 so called school shootings. One of them involved a BB gun, not a firearm. One didn’t involve a school at all, as it had been closed permanently months before. One involved a police training accident. In all, no one was shot in six of the incidents. Many of the incidents were colleges not schools. 
A further two of them were suicides.

In fact, only two of the shootings involved actual “schools” and actual shootings. Of those two, one of them was carried out by a student who had a troubled past and probably should have been in jail. When you have to lie or mislead to make your point, your point probably isn’t worth making.