Divemedic

 Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital.

There is a study that states there are more police officers dying from gunfire from 1996 to 2010 in states with higher gun ownership rates. I want to fact check this article, so let’s get started. The article claims:

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Montana were the states with the highest rates of both gun ownership and for law enforcement killings. Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island had the lowest per-capita rate for both.

I will be using the “Officer down memorial page” to list officer deaths.

There have been 29 New York officers killed by gunfire and 3 by accidental gunfire during those years.
4 in Connecticut. One of those four was shot by another cop, who was off duty and illegally hunting at the time.
5 in Massachusetts. One of them was shot in 1988, and died in 2001.
11 in New Jersey. One of them was killed while off duty and working as a security guard. 2 other cops had their cause of death listed as gunfire (accidental) because they shot themselves by accident while performing maintenance on their own weapons without unloading them.
In Rhode Island, 1 officer was killed by gunfire. 2 others were killed by accidental gunfire.

In those same years, there were 3 officers killed in Montana.
7 in Alaska
22 in Alabama
12 in Arkansas
20 in Mississippi

Population figures were obtained from the US Census Bureau. It is impossible to track population at the time of each murder, so we will use the less accurate method of simply using the 2000 figures, which would be the Census year closest to the halfway point of the period. We must use the geeral population of each state, rather than the number of police officers, because there are no available, reliable figures to show the number of law enforcement officers in a given state.

The rate of death of police officers per 1,000,000 residents in each state:

New York: 1.76
Connecticutt: 1.21
Massachusetts: 0.80
New Jersey: 1.58
Rhode Island: 3.00

So let’s look now at the states that they claimed had high gun ownership rates:
Montana: 3.00
Alaska: 10.71
Alabama: 4.88
Arkansas: 4.61
Mississippi: 7.14

So what does this mean? Does it mean that they are correct, that higher gun ownership rates means more police deaths? Not exactly. There is a bit of subterfuge here. By cherry picking the states that have small populations, the death rates look much higher than they really are. For example: the rate of police killed by traffic accidents is also higher in these states. For example, the rate of police officer death was 3.57 in Mississippi, and 0.939 in New York.

TO make the comparison more fair, let’s look at Florida. Florida has the highest number of concealed weapons permits in the US, with over 1.3 million people legally carrying concealed weapons.

Florida had 38 law enforcement officers killed by gunfire during the period. This means that there is an officer death rate of 2.5 per one million residents. Washington, DC, where guns were illegal for all but two years of the period, and where there were almost NO guns legally owned during that period, lost 6 officers, for a rate of 11.47. Washington DC has a population approximately equal to that of Alaska.

If you claim that guns are the reason for mass killings, you are ignoring that the largest mass murders in the USA did not use a gun. Here are a few of them:

1 On 911, there were 2,996 dead and over 6,000 injured. The weapons used were box cutters.
2  The Oklahoma City Bombing. There were 168 dead and over 680 injured. The weapon used was a bomb made from fertilizer and diesel fuel.
3 The Bath School massacre of 1927: 45 dead, and 58 injured. The weapon used were a pair of bombs.
4 New York Bombing of September 1920: There were 40 killed and several hundred injured. The weapon was a bomb.
5 The Upstairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans on June 24, 1973 was an arson that was intended to kill the patrons of a gay bar. It worked, killing 32 and injuring dozens.
6 The LA times is attacked with a bomb in 1910, killing 20.

Columbine and Sandy Hook don’t even make the top ten.

The fact is that guns have nothing to do with spree killings. The first mass murder in US history happened in 1780, and was committed by a man named Barnett Davenport. He killed an entire family (all 5 of them) during a pre-planned burglary. He used blunt instruments to beat the adults and one of the children to death, and then set the house on fire to kill the other children.

Ikea, the company with the sign at the door to all of its stores proclaiming that it is a “weapons free environment” to the point where even police officers are prohibited from carrying weapons, has an incident where two people are killed and a third seriously injured in a mass stabbing attack.

I’m sure that the dead and their families are happy that they did not die from senseless gun violence.

A judge orders a man to get married or go to jail…

I keep hearing people call Republican politicians “Republicans in Name Only” or “RINOs” for short, and claiming that these politicians and candidates are somehow not true Republicans because they support socialist positions. However, it seems to have gotten to the point where pretty much every politician from the GOP is leaning to the left, and the majority of them seem to be falling into the “RINO” category.

At some point, you begin to realize that the mainstream of the party’s leadership is moving to the left. I will point out that I have not called myself a Republican for years. I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me.

We need to pass a law requiring background checks to close the “break into the gun show and steal guns while the gun show is closed” loophole.

Orlando police have made another arrest in the theft of nearly two dozen guns from the Fairgrounds Gun Show. Surveillance video shows several juvenile suspects forcing their way into the gun show at the Central Florida Fairgrounds on the Fourth of July and making off with 24 firearms, police said.

Ever since I retired, I have picked up cooking as a new hobby. Here is one the better recipes I have come up with:

Nut Crusted Mahi with Vanilla Rum Butter Sauce


Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 40 minutes
Serves: 4

4- 4 ounce pieces of Mahi
1/2 cup Roasted unsalted Macadamia nuts
Sesame oil
1/4 cup Panko Breading
1/2 cup Flour
salt
black pepper

Grind Macadamia nuts in a food processor, and mix with Panko, salt, pepper, and Flour

Rub fish with sesame oil, and then roll the fish in the breading mix. Place on a baking sheet, and bake for 35 minutes at 375 degrees. Fish coating should be brown.

1 shallot sliced thin
2 tsp vanilla extract-pure
1/8 cup white wine (cheap will do)
1/4 cup Rum (cheap rum will do)
¼ cup granulated sugar
1cup heavy cream
1- 4oz stick of unsalted butter (room temp)

Place the rum, shallots, white wine, sugar and vanilla extract into the sauce pan and stir
Place the pan on the stove with high heat and bring to a boil
Reduce heat, simmer until the mixture starts to thicken
Add the heavy cream and reduce by 1/2
Turn off the heat and whisk in the softened butter