Divemedic

President Obama says, in response to the church shooting in South Carolina: ‘This Type of Mass Violence Does Not Happen in Other Advanced Countries’

The people of France would disagree, as evidenced by the Charlie Hebdo shooting.

 The people of Norway also disagree.

The congress critters from Connecticut are proposing that everyone in the nation who owns a pistol will have to have a pistol purchase permit.  Applicants would have to submit to background checks and fingerprinting, prove they’re at least 21 and a lawful U.S. resident, and be eligible to purchase a handgun under federal law.
The Connecticut lawmakers are claiming that a state law passed in 1995 that is similar to this is associated with a 40% in gun homicides in the first ten years it was in place. Let’s fact check that claim, shall we?
All numbers that follow according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, as accessed here.

The law took effect on October 1, 1995. So we will begin with the murder rate in 1995:
In 1995, 4.6 murders per 100,000
In 2005, 3 murders per 100,000. This rate is 34.8% lower than 1995. So they are correct, there was a significant reduction in the murder rate over that ten year period.

Lets see if this was due to the law, or if this was a nationwide trend. We will compare these numbers to the nationwide statistics as a control.
In 1995, the murder rate for the US was 8.2 per 100,000. In 2005, the rate was 5.9 per 100,000, or 28.2% lower than 1995.

This would seem to indicate that Connecticut had a slightly larger reduction reduction in the murder rate than the rest of the nation experienced. Then it occurred to me: Why stop in 2005? Why not go all the way to 2013?

The US had a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 in 2013. This rate is 45.2% lower than 1995, and 23.8 percent lower than 2005.

Connecticut had rate of 2.4 murders per 100,000 in 2013. That is 48 percent lower than 1995, and 20 percent lower than 2005.

In other words, this gun control law had little, if any impact on murder rates. In fact, the trend of reduction becomes even less significant when we compare Connecticut to s state with similar population, but lax gun control laws.

Kentucky had a murder rate of 7.2 in 1995.
In 2005, the rate was 4.6, or 36.2% lower.
In 2013, the rate was 3.8, which is 47.3% lower than 1995, and 27.4% lower than 2005.

In other words, Kentucky saw a larger decrease in their murder rate than did Connecticut, and without passing any gun control laws. The US murder rate also sharply declined during the same period.
However, when you graph the above data points, you see that the slopes are identical. The differences between them are statistically insignificant.

A man allegedly shot up the Dallas Police Headquarters this morning. According to police, his name is James Lance Boulware. It turns out that he has a felony criminal record from 2013 for Felony Domestic Battery, and he was making comments about “shooting up schools and churches.” He also reportedly complained about religion, Jews, Christians, and Korea. At the end of the argument, he reportedly fled with firearms, body armor, and ammunition.

I am not sureif he was convicted, pled out, or whatever, but even if this was pled to Misdemeanor DV, he was a prohibited person. What always gets me about these shooters is that it always turns out that they had previous serious brushes with the law, and the law always lets them go free.

Plan on this being used to push for the nationwide pistol license bill, which would require that everyone apply for a license and be fingerprinted to purchase a handgun, even through a private seller. Isn’t it funny that every time a new gun law is proposed, an incident occurs that is tailor made to push its agenda?

This story is another example of global warming climate change affecting our world! Now the water in Maine is too cold for me to eat lobster.

So a woman claiming to be a fortune teller gets her mark to give her $700,000 over the course of two years, and after the 32 year old finally realized he was being taken for a ride, goes to the police. The police charge the woman with a crime.

He wanted the medium to tell him how to get a woman to fall in love with him who was not interested in him. One year and $200,000 later, the idiot found out that the target of his affection had died, so he gave the medium another half a million, so that he could locate the woman in her reincarnated state.

If you go to any person who claims that they can talk to the spirits of the dead and pay that person money, you are an idiot. You compound that if you continue to pay them to locate the reincarnated version of the woman you are pining for. Even if you believe in that reincarnation nonsense, the woman would be reincarnated as an infant.

What bothers me the most about this story is that the police are going to waste taxpayer resources to prosecute the medium. There are fortune tellers and mediums all over this country, and they are only going to prosecute the one who manages to rip off the guy who has more dollars than he does sense?

Vince Vaughn just gained a bit of respect from me.

“In all of our schools it is illegal to have guns on campus, so again and again these guys go and shoot up these f***ing schools because they know there are no guns there,” he said. “They are monsters killing six-year-olds. You think the politicians that run my country and your country don’t have guns in the schools their kids go to?” he asked. “They do. And we should be allowed the same rights.”

The left is claiming that there is nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can rent an apartment and then using that as a talking point to push for a higher minimum wage. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, and based upon several false assumptions.

First, this is based upon the fact that housing should not be more than 30% of a person’s income. They refer to the “Housing Wage” which is defined as:  an estimate of the full time hourly wage
that a household must earn to afford a decent
apartment at HUD’s estimated Fair Market Rent
(FMR), while spending no more than 30% of income on housing costs.”

Also, the term “decent apartment” is not defined. This esoteric definition allows the numbers to mean whatever the author wants it to mean.

These numbers are all based upon a report that was generated by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. According to their website, “the National Low Income Housing Coalition is dedicated solely to achieving socially just public policy that assures people with the lowest incomes in the United States have affordable and decent homes.”(emphasis added) In other words, they are part of the “Social Justice” movement.
In fact, the founder of the group was a woman named Cushing Dolbeare, a known communist. In 1974, she even sent a cablegram to the members of the Communist Coup in Portugal. This cablegram was a message of support from America’s Socialists. Ms. Dolbeare was a speaker for a workshop titled “Housing: The National Issue” at the 1979 Democratic Agenda Conference of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.
Ms. Colbeare was also the vice President of the Independent Voters of Illinois- Independent Precinct Organization, a Socialist group of  “community organizers.” This is the same group of community organizers that included Democratic Socialists of America and Committees of Correspondence member Timuel Black, David Orr, Carol Moseley Braun, one time Communist Party USA member David Canter, and Barack Obama.

According to Housing and Urban Development, a person who lives in Orange County, Florida MSA can expect to rent a one bedroom apartment for $836, on average. Since this is an average, one could expect to find apartments that are far below this figure. In fact, according to Rent.com, apartments can be had for nearly half that amount in the Orlando MSA, with the lowest price for a one bedroom apartment coming in at $477 a month. That is just using rent.com, I am sure that there are cheaper apartments to be had.
How does HUD calculate the market rent? According to the HUD website, the rent used to calculate the FMR is the rate paid for a 40th percentile 2 bedroom apartment, meaning that 40% of the rents in the MSA will be lower than the one used to calculate the FMR. This figure is then ‘adjusted’ with a government formula, and the higher of the state average from the previous year or this figure is used.
Anyone who understands math can tell you two things about this method:
1 Nearly half of all apartments will rent for an amount below the FMR.
2 The FMR will be higher than the actual average, due to rounding and the fact that no FMR can be less than the state average.

A minimum wage is just that: The MINIMUM that a person will earn if hired to work in the United States. How, mathematically, can a person who is making the minimum wage expect to make enough money to afford an average apartment?
In Florida, the minimum wage is $8.05 an hour. A person making this wage would take home $1100 a  month.

They claim that no one should pay more than 30% of their income towards rent. Where did the 30% number come from? Per 24 CFR Part 92.252, HUD provides the following maximum rent limits. The maximum HOME rents are the lesser of:

1. The fair market rent for existing housing for comparable units in the area as established by HUD under 24 CFR 888.111; or

2. A rent that does not exceed 30 percent of the adjusted income of a family whose annual income equals 65 percent of the median income for the area, as determined by HUD, with adjustments for number of bedrooms in the unit. The HOME rent limits provided by HUD will include average occupancy per unit and adjusted income assumptions.

In a recent online debate about crime, a poster stated that I should support “reasonable gun control” to eliminate crime. I asked what he considered “reasonable” and this is the list he came up with:

If a citizen harms a police dog, it is the same charge as attacking a human police officer. So, why then is it not a crime for a police officer to kill his K9 partners by leaving them locked in a hot car all day?

In this video, we have a crowd of people who attack a police officer and the citizen who was assisting him in making an arrest. (I tried to embed it, but it wouldn’t work.)

Now we have people who are attacking police nationwide. There is a pattern forming here, and it doesn’t look good. If the trend gets worse, will we have calls for a national police force? Think of how quickly the TSA was formed in response to 9/11.

Obama  has been stirring emotions against the police since the Beer Summit, then the Zimmerman case, then Michael Brown, and on and on. Never let a crisis go to waste, especially if you are the one who caused it.