On the other hand

Many have blasted the deputy in south Florida for refusing to enter the school while children died. I agree with them. However, in the interest of intellectual honesty, this story certainly explains why you wouldn’t want to.

The officer involved was shot in the head during the Pulse nightclub incident. Even though his helmet prevented the bullet from killing him, he did receive a closed head injury that has prevented him from returning to work. The Orlando police department has a rule that officers must return to work within a certain amount of time after being injured in the line of duty. If they do not, they must be examined by a doctor of Orlando PD’s choosing to qualify for a medical pension, or they will be fired. OPD does not have a doctor that can do the exam, so this officer will be terminated on September 30.

Now picture that you are a cop who is standing outside of a shooting incident, and you know that you could be killed or injured. You also know that your family would not be cared for if anything happened to you. Many people are willing to risk their own health and well being, but not those of their wife and children. Do you think that this is more or less likely to make you want to enter the building and risk it all for a public that will likely weasel out of their responsibility to you and your family?

Before you say that this is what cops sign up for, remember that the small risk of being hurt on traffic stops is different from charging an enemy in an entrenched position while under direct fire. That is more like combat than police work. Even worse, since combat troops have tools at their disposal (grenades, suppressive fire, air support, etc.) that police do not. On top of this, many insurance companies will not pay out if you are killed in a terrorist incident. You better believe that a cop’s insurance company is going to look for ways not to pay up, in a situation like this.

Facebook Jail

I was on Facebook the other day and there was an editorial cartoon:

The comments were ridiculous. There were talks of bans, including one person who said that anyone who wants a gun is too mentally ill to be allowed to have them. There were the claims about limiting in rights, and the tired old saw about “fire in a theater” and taxing cars came up. I refuted them in turn, using facts and logic.

I told them that gun owners would not stand for confiscation. I was called every name in the book: insane, racist, stupid, etc. Finally, I replied with:

Exactly. COME AND TAKE THEM. I dare you. If you think that you have the votes to amend the Constitution, do it. Pass the law that follows, and join the people on the confiscation teams. If even one percent of gun owners decided to veto your decision, the casualty count would dwarf the civil war. Over 100 million adults own more than 800 million guns and several billion rounds of ammunition. How do you think that will play out?

I received a 24 hour suspension for violating community standards. The notice said:

If you request a review, we’ll have someone take another look at the comment.

Except there is no review button. This is my third stint in FB jail. I don’t see how I violated community standards, and the people calling me names and threatening me were not.

Magic power of signs

Yesterday I was at my school for the first time this school year. The fence that is now required around all schools was about half complete. One of my fellow teachers complained: “See that fence? That is the raise we should have gotten, right there. I could have saved them some money by putting up a sign that says ‘We shoot back.'”

I pointed out that we can’t shoot back, because teachers can’t carry. She replied that she didn’t think teachers should actually have guns, but the students who saw the sign wouldn’t know that we were unarmed. The sign would be a deterrent.

I don’t understand how people think sometimes.

ACLU are now biologists

The American Civil (some) Liberties Union is at it again. Already famous for supporting the Bill of Rights, with the exception of that pesky Second Amendment, they again showed the country how they are actually supporters of the leftist agenda, when they began a campaign to declare:

biological male athletes who identify as females won’t ‘end’ women’s sports: ‘Trans women are WOMEN’

Let’s say that I believe myself to be a gorilla. No matter how strongly I believe it, I am still not a gorilla.
Let’s say that I take pills to make myself grow more hair to look more like a gorilla. I am still not a gorilla.
If I hire a surgeon to perform an operation to make myself look more like a gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.
If I get a million people to say that I can be whatever I identify myself as, and declare than I am a gorilla, I am still not a gorilla.

If I were to believe myself to be a gorilla and took the steps above, people would say I am crazy.

Why doesn’t the same thing go for trannies? Just because you think that you are a woman doesn’t make you a woman, it makes you crazy.

Lightning again

Last year on July 31, my house was hit by lightning and we lost a surveillance camera. This year, the house was struck again, just a day short of last year. I was working in the garage, when there was the sound of hail striking the walls. There was a bright flash, instantaneously accompanied by LOUD thunder.

The storm was fierce, with 1200 lightning strikes within ten miles of my house in less than an hour. It was accompanied by pea sized hail, and winds reached 40 miles an hour. Lightningapps.org shows that there were 8 cloud to ground strikes within 250 meters of my house.

The damage this year was the loss of my personal weather station, the video driver for the surveillance camera DVR, and a wireless HDMI transmitter. The DVR is working and you can view the cameras online through the streaming feed.

The weather station is still locally reporting some data (wind speed and barometric pressure) but isn’t reporting on Wifi, nor is it reporting dew point or temperature. According to the factory tech support people, that means 2 of the three boards in it are no good, and replacements for those boards will cost more than a new sensor.

The HDMI transmitter broadcast the image from the DVR to the television in the bedroom

The only other issue was one of the cable TV boxes went out, but after a reset it came back. All of the electronics that broke were in the same room. All I had was electronic damage. My HAM radios are in that room, and they didn’t even blow an arc plug, even though they were connected to the antennas. My neighbor was not so lucky, his roof looks like this:

Life lesson

Kids plays Monopoly and cries because all of his money is lost to taxes. He says that taxes are the worst part of the game. Wait until he becomes an adult, and that horrible 10% Monopoly tax that you only have to pay if you land on that space becomes a 40% tax that you have to pay every year.


Facts are not a matter of opinion

It never fails. Whenever I get in a discussion about shootings or guns, the anti gunner presents uninformed opinion and emotion, and present actual facts. The discussion always ends with “We are going to have to agree to disagree.”

The most recent example was on a thread about how sad it was that parents were having to buy bullet resistant backpacks for their back to school shopping. It went like this:

antigun soccer mom: I have commented, deleted, commented, deleted. As a mom to a school employee, as a mother-in-law to a school employee, as a sister to a school employee, as a sis-in-law to a school employee, as an aunt to a teacher, as an aunt to students and soon as a grandmother to students, one school shooting is one school shooting too many. 8, 10, 20…1 is too many no matter where the stupid guns come from. Whether they are bought, stolen or stolen from an unlocked car, it’s still incredibly sad, terrifying and down right wrong that parents have to consider bullet proof backpacks. It’s time for guns to go.

Me: You are correct that one death is too many. However, the times we live in are actually safer than they ever have been before. The news makes money on selling fear. I am a teacher, and a retired firemedic. I will tell you that your child’s odds of being killed in an auto accident on the way to school or after being struck by lightning are exponentially higher than their odds of being killed in a school shooting.

Unintentional injuries—such as those caused by burns, drowning, falls, poisoning and road traffic—are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality among children in the United States. Each year, among those 0 to 19 years of age, more than 12,000 people die from unintentional injuries. For children 5 to 19 years of age, the most injury deaths were due to being an occupant in a motor vehicle traffic crash.
The proportion of teens dying from firearms decreased substantially, from 27.8 per 100,000 in 1994 to 9.13.8 per 100,000 in 2017. Even among deaths by firearm, suicide was the twice as likely to be cause of death than homicide, with suicide rates for 15- to 19-year-olds reached an all-time high of 11.8 per 100,000 in 2017. School shootings are an even smaller subset, with only 12 students per year on average being killed in the past decade, meaning that school shootings are statistically invisible when compared to suicide and auto accidents.

anti gun soccer mom: and we are going to agree to disagree.

I am going to repeat a bit of a post I did on that subject:

I won’t “agree to disagree” in this conversation or in others, because “agree to disagree” is an incredibly lazy tactic. It ranks up there with “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” among the pantheon of dishonest and self-defeating statements made in lieu of actual argument. I cannot heap enough contempt on the idea of “agreeing to disagree.”

The argument could be useful, I suppose, if it meant no more than what it says – mutual recognition of a disagreement. Some arguments are intractable – issues of personal taste or the subjective importance of certain values cannot be resolved empirically. In an argument like that, once both sides have expressed themselves as clearly as possible, if there is still no agreement then there is nothing left to do but acknowledge there is a disagreement, and leave it at that.

That is not, however, the sense in which I most often hear the phrase “agree to disagree” used. What is usually meant is “we’re both equally right, both equally wrong.” Two positions, one demonstrably true and the other based on nothing more than feelings, do not share the same level of validity.