Divemedic

Anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time knows that I think Disney is a horrible company, and I rarely defend them, but in the case of the alligator attack, I think placing blame on Disney is wrong.

A gator is a wild animal. They are EVERYWHERE in Florida, as are other animals that have been known to attack and even kill in Florida:  rattlesnakes, bees, Black widow and Brown Recluse spiders, Black Bears, Bobcats, wasps, and Cottonmouth Moccasins, not to mention sharks. All of these animals can and do kill people, especially small children. As a child growing up here, there were some things that I was taught:
1 Don’t put your hands or feet anywhere that you cannot see.
2 Step on logs, not over them.
3 Piles of debris like firewood and leaves are home to rattlesnakes and vnomous spiders. Do not let children play in them.
4 Assume that all natural bodies of water have alligators in them.
 5 Breeding and egg laying season is April through September. Alligators are dangerous and territorial during this time.
6 Do not let toddlers and pets play near water. They are small enough to be food for alligators.
7 Do not swim in the ocean, ponds, lakes, or any other natural body of water from a half hour before sunset to a half hour after sunrise. The dark hours are when predators hunt, and are the times when human senses are degraded.

The local theme parks hire off duty police, fire, and EMS personnel to staff their parks. I had part time a job at one of them in the Health Services Department. I once saw a man and a small child feeding a squirrel, and told them to stop, because the squirrels are known to be aggressive. The father told me, “Mind your own f**king business.”

Ten minutes later, I was called to return to that area for an animal bite. You guessed it, the squirrel had bitten the little girl. The father was there, demanding that we locate and kill the squirrel to make sure it wasn’t rabid. I laughed and explained to him that we were not likely to find the same squirrel again (there are hundreds of them in that area) and that his daughter would have to go to the doctor for the rabies vaccines.  I made sure to document the earlier contact in my report, because you just know he was going to hire a lawyer.

 This alligator attack would not be national news if the child had been killed by a swam of bees, a spider, a snake, or had drowned. There was a no swimming sign there for a reason. Now there are people who claim that the “No swimming” sign should have been more specific, and specifically warned of alligators. I disagree, because what would have happened if the sign had specifically warned of alligators, and the child had been bitten by a water moccasin? Should the sign warn of snakes as well? Just how large and comprehensive should these signs be?

When you go swimming in a body of water that is plainly posted with a “No Swimming” sign, you have no one to blame but yourself when something goes wrong.

Yesterday, I posted a little test. Here are the answers:

1:
Rifles A, B, E, and G are fully automatic.
Rifles C, D, and F are semi-automatic

2:
Rifles C and D would have been illegal, because they are semi-automatic rifles with a folding stock and a pistol grip.

The fully automatic guns would be legal to own, as they were not part of the law. Even if all could be modified to semi-automatic operation only, they would still not have been illegal.

3:

Rifles C and D are the only ones on this list that have not been issued to the soldiers of any military.

4:

The criteria used to ban these rifles in 1994 were based only upon cosmetic features, none of which affected the operation or lethality of any of these weapons.

The weapons were:

A: Soviet Ppsh-41 Submachine gun
B: Model 1921 Thompson Submachine Gun
C: AR-15
D: Sig MCX
E: M-2 Carbine
F: M-1 Garand Rifle
G: M-14 Rifle

Until recently, police have been advising that if you find yourself in an active shooter scenario, that you hide, or run away instead of fighting. Now that tune has changed:

In the seven and a half years since Obama became President, there have been 130 million background checks performed through the NICS system. That is compared to the 78 million that were performed in the 11 years prior to that. (source here)

Now the number of NICS checks doesn’t always mean that the same number of guns were sold. Each check may be for more than one gun, as the check is done for each transaction, not each firearm. With that in mind, we use this as an approximation for the number of guns sold. Even so, the fact that there have been over 200 million guns sold in the past 18 years makes me seriously doubt that there are only 300 million firearms in the US.

If I were to guess, I would say that there are more like 400 or 500 million firearms in this country. Tell me again how you are going to confiscate all firearms, when you can’t even tell me how many you want to confiscate, especially when there are hundreds of millions of them.

Gun Sales Surge in LGBT Community Following Orlando Attack

I was glad to see this. As shooting and self reliance becomes more mainstream, it will be more difficult for people to take our rights away. I fully support this, because in order to expect freedom, you must support the freedom of others.

There are also many free gun safety courses being given nationwide. Find one here.

So when a man self identifies as a woman, I am supposed to believe him to the point of letting him use the same restroom as an 8 year old girl, but when a man self identifies as a Muslim terrorist, I am supposed to call him a liar and say he is a closet homosexual who is only killing gays as a hate crime against LGBTs?
Even though he posted on the Internet that he was a terrorist, he told his coworkers that he was part of al Qaeda (which is what got him investigated in the first place), and called police AND several news stations during the attack to claim the attack was done in the name of ISIS, we are supposed to ignore all of that.

There is a lot of talk about prohibiting anyone who is on the suspected terrorist list from buying a gun. Here is the main problem that I have with it:

My son is on that list. He is listed as a suspected terrorist. He was even visited by DHS agents, and his passport was revoked.

Now, I raised my son better than that, and he is most certainly not a terrorist, so how did he wind up on that list?

My son is a travelling nurse. He flies all over the world, treating and transporting patients from one place to another. It pays very well. He recently got paid for a 4 day trip, escorting a patient to Australia, and was paid $4000 for 4 days’ work. This week, he is in Milwaukee, and is being paid $12,000 for ten days’ work. In between trips, he works at the local trauma centers, and was one of the nurses on duty this past weekend in the Orlando area.

Now that you have the background, here is how he wound up on the terror watch list:

A known terrorist was arrested, trying to enter the country with my son’s passport. Well, not his actual passport, but a forgery with all of his information on it.

In all of his travels, he once had to go to the Dominican Republic to bring a patient home. While he was there, a government official photocopied the passports of the entire crew: 3 members of the flight crew, a respiratory therapist, and my son. Those photocopies were sold to people who make forged identity papers, and that information was used to create fake papers.

My son received a visit from DHS, they revoked his passport, and he had to apply for a new one. His name, birth date, and other information is now on the suspected terrorism watch list, because that information is now known to be used by terrorists.

This proposed law would prevent my son from buying a firearm, even though he has not broken a single law, nor is he likely to.

Form 4473 is a form that is required to be filled out whenever a person buys a firearm from a dealer. It contains a list of questions that are required to be answered before the dealer can transfer the firearm to the buyer. Some of those questions are:

Are you the actual transferee/buyer of the firearm(s) listed on this form? Warning: You are not the actual buyer if you are acquiring the firearm(s) on behalf of another person. If you are not the actual buyer, the dealer cannot transfer the firearm(s) to you.

Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?

Are you an alien illegally in the United States?

Do you plan on committing an illegal act with a firearm? An illegal act would be murder, workplace violence, a hate crime, or any other crime which would involve shooting or threatening to shoot, another person or persons?

When I advocate carrying a concealed weapon as a solution to mass shootings, I frequently get, “but what happens when innocent people get caught in the crossfire” as a response. Now we know what happens when no one gets caught in the crossfire.

20,000 gun laws, and decades of gun control have delivered us to the point where 50 people die in a terror attack. This plan obviously isn’t working. Can’t we go back to the gun laws of 1967, when anyone could buy a gun by mail, and these sorts of things didn’t happen?

Of course, there is always this response: