The gun control proposals, including the proposed executive orders that will be issued by the White House, in my opinion, are not the true endgame. The real goal here is to provoke a few hot headed gun owners into enacting a “Second Amendment remedy.” Once this happens, the President will have the excuse he needs to declare martial law. This is the true reason behind this unconstitutional power grab.
To you Republicans: This is where I get to say “I told you so.”
Cheaper than dirt received a lot of criticism because they stopped selling firearms in the wake of the Newtown shooting. They also raised PMAG prices from $12 to $60 in an attempt to profiteer on the instant demand.
Many shooters, myself included, vowed to never buy there again. Now they are back pedaling, and claiming that the stoppage in firearms sales was caused by large demand. Funny, that isn’t what they said initially. Many comments on the post that are critical of CTD were deleted, and now comments are closed.
Frankly, I hope they go under.
Suppose that I came up with a plan to eliminate poverty once and for all: Let’s give every person in the country $100,000. That would enable everyone to buy whatever they want, right? Except who would go to work the next day at the car lot, the sandwich shop, the grocery store, or anywhere else, knowing that they would only get $10 or less, when they had a shopping spree to take care of?
So after a day or two, the vast majority of people in the country would be out of food, and out of gas. Since no one is at work, there are no goods to be had anywhere at any price. People will be screaming for stuff. It begins with craigslist, a man selling sandwiches for the low price of $500. They sell like crazy to the starving.
He decides to open himself up a sandwich shop. The only problem is that no one is going to work for $10 an hour, so he has to pay his people $1,000 an hour. Sandwiches now cost $750 each.
That is how inflation works, although at a slower pace. In 1962, what $100,000 could buy you today could be had for just over $13,000. In 1912, that same hundred grand worth of products would have cost a mere $4,350. As the government continues to put more money into circulation, it takes more and more money to entice people to continue working. We call that inflation. As the government continues to print and borrow money in order to give it to others, it causes more and more inflation.
This is why this so-called economist is an idiot. His plan is for Obama to mint a one trillion dollar coin, and use it to buy debt from the fed. In essence, print the money out of thin air. He claims that this will do no economic harm. Well, of that is true, lets go ahead and mint up 30 of those coins, pay off the entire debt, and then cut every American a check for $50,000. Dumbass. Paul Krugman needs to contact the college he graduated from and demand his money back.
Flashlight that takes whatever you give it, that will run on almost any battery you’ve got on hand.. AAA, AA, C, or D-sized batteries can all be accommodated at the same time.
This is a follow up to the post last month on the effect of urbanization on crime rates and why it is not an even comparison between the US and Canada.All of the data following comes from the FBI Uniform Crime in the United States report for 2011.
There were a total of 14,022 deaths declared to be “murder or nonnegligent manslaughter.” To make things simple for me to type, and to make this post more readable, I will refer to this category of death as “homicides” for the rest of this post.
In the United States, there are just shy of 88 million people who live in cities with a population of 100,000 or more people. (Population groups I and II) This represents 28.15% of the total population of the country.
If we combine groups I and II, we see that there were 7,424 homicides in this population group. This resulted in a homicide rate of 8.46 per 100,000. For the remaining 224 million people in the country, the homicide rate is 2.94 per 100,000. In other words, 28 percent of the country is responsible for 53 percent of the homicides.
I downloaded the data to a spreadsheet, and did a little more arithmetic.
Cities that have a population of 1 million or more, with a total population of 25.2 million, were the site of 2,223 homicides. That means that the 8 percent of Americans who live in cities of over one million are responsible for 15.8 percent of the murders.
So let’s reduce that to the Canada versus US discussion. For the purposes of this, we will exclude the Americans who live in cities of over 500,000. There are approximately 269 million people in the US that are not living in cities of over 500,000 people. In those areas, there were 10,043 homicides, leaving a rate of 3.73 per 100,000.
Canada reports a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000. However, Canada only includes first and second degree murder, manslaughter, and infanticide in their statistics as “homicides,” furthermore, Canada requires that a person must be CHARGED with the crime in order for the death to be reported as a homicide. The United States, on the other hand, includes all intentional killings of one human by another (except deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; and justifiable homicides), and no arrest must be made. This means that unsolved murders do not count towards Canada’s statistics. For this reason, a direct comparison between the statistics of the two nations is not valid.
Even so, the disparity between the murder rates of the two nations is much narrower than the anti gunners would have us believe.
My prediction for the year of 2013:
The Democrats will propose a plethora of gun control bills. That is a no brainer, but here is where I go out on a limb: The Republicans will pick one, and they will go along with it. We will get a new ban on some sort of firearms. The reason is that the Republicans are first and foremost wanting to get reelected. A constituency that is energized and ticked off will be likely to repeat the sweep that happened after the 1994 ban was passed. You must understand that this is politics, and the one thing that ALL of congress wants is to keep their money, power, and prestige. They want it more than they believe in any quaint idea like duty, honor, or country, words that have become a joke in today’s language.
My next prediction is that the gun owners, for the most part, will do nothing about it. Sure, they like to bitch and complain on the internet, but you can’t seriously expect a group of people who can’t even be bothered to show up for a rally or to write a letter to their congressional representatives to actually join any kind of armed resistance.
Elections have consequences. This election was doomed to fail from the start: we had to choose between a gun-grabbing racist socialist and a gun-grabbing rich socialist. There was no chance from the start.
In the end, this is all just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: We are currently $16 trillion in debt, with another $144 trillion in unfunded liabilities. There are $trillion + budget deficits as far as the eye can see. This is the beginning of the end, and there is no avoiding it now. The problem is that large, powerful governments do not go gently into the good night. The questions that I have are:
– How long will it take?
– How much will the American public take? Will we reach a breaking point of the people before we wind up in a police state? In the meantime, how much power will the large, powerful government take for itself before the end finally comes?
We live in interesting times, and things are going to get A LOT worse before they get better, if they ever do get better.
When we want to measure auto accident fatalities, the metric of fatalities per 100 million miles driven is the one that statisticians use. This formula eliminates the chance that short-term anomalies — such as a
rash of multi-vehicle or multi-passenger accidents in a certain state
— will cause fluctuations in the rate that are not related to the true
cause of the accident or accidents. The fatality rate for the last 90 years in the US looks like this:
| Year | Fatality Rate (Per 100 MVM) |
Fatal Accident Rate (Per 100 MVM) |
|---|---|---|
| 1921 – | 24.1 | NA |
| 1930 – | 15.1 | NA |
| 1940 – | 10.9 | NA |
| 1950 – | 7.2 | NA |
| 1960 – | 5.1 | NA |
| 1970 – | 4.7 | NA |
| 1980 – | 3.3 | 3.0 |
| 1985 – | 2.5 | 2.2 |
| 1990 – | 2.1 | 1.9 |
| 1995 – | 1.7 | 1.5 |
Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Converting these numbers into a graph, gives you the following:
Looking at these facts, I can draw a few conclusions: The creation of drunk driving laws and the lowering of the intoxication level to .08% did nothing to reduce the fatality rate. Even more remarkable is that lowering the national speed limit to 55 miles per hour in 1973, and the subsequent raising of the speed limit to 70 miles per hour also had no effect on the fatality rate.
Now we are being duped by calls for saving lives again, when the true goal is control of our lives.
There are many on the more control side of the gun debate that like to point out that Canada has a lower murder rate, and claim that the difference is due to the strict gun laws of our northern neighbors. Comparing the US crime rates to Canada is an apples and oranges
comparison.
The entire nation of Canada has a population that is smaller than the
state of California, yet Canada’s population is spread over an area that
is roughly the same as that of the entire United States. That results in a
population density that is much lower than the United States. (Canada
has a population density of 9.7 people per square mile, the US 79 people
per square mile.) This is evidenced by the fact that Canada only has 3
cities with a population over 2 million people.
Even so, violent crime rates (per 100,000 population) between Canada and the US will surprise you. The violent crime rate in Canada is 1282 per 100,000. The violent crime rate in the US is 386 per 100,000.
The murder rate in Canada is lower overall, until you exclude the large urban areas from the US statistics, and compare the areas of the US
with similar population density areas of Canada. Exclude US cities with
a population of over 3 million, and in this apples to apples
comparison, the US actually has a lower murder rate than does Canada.
I believe that this indicates that we have a problem with culture in our large cities more than it indicates a gun problem, being that our suburban and rural communities have a higher rate of firearms ownership than
do the cities. At any rate, the scientific method dictates that in
examining and comparing different data sets, one must eliminate all
variables, except the one that is being compared. For that reason, a
straight comparison of the US murder rate and the murder rate of any
other country is not a valid comparison.
A 7 year old girl is brought into the emergency room, having an asthma attack. The staff of the emergency department gives her three updraft treatments of albuterol and atrovent, and 125mg of Solumedrol. Since she is still complaining that she cannot breathe, the staff calls for a Critical Care ambulance to transport her to the children’s hospital for further treatment.
Upon arrival, the critical care paramedic sees a child who is obviously tiring of her respiratory effort, and her vitals show it: Her SaO2 is 86% on 2 liters by cannula, Heart Rate is 152, BP is 102/64. Her EtCO2 (which the hospital emergency department does not have the equipment to measure) shows a waveform that is too flat to determine is the classic “sharkfin” is present or not, and has a level of 16mmHg.
The hospital is busy debating on whether to give her another albuterol and atrovent treatment, epiniephrine, or intubating her. The paramedic asks why they have not given her a smooth muscle relaxer like magnesium sulfate, and the nurse replies that the doctor was worried that it might lower the patient’s blood pressure. Of course, he was perfectly willing to give a beta agonist like albuterol to a patient who wasn’t exchanging enough air for it to work, and risk sending the already tachycardic patient’s heart rate even higher. Epinephrine would also increase the tachycardia.
The scenario illustrates some big flaws in how hospitals treat respiratory problems:
– Hospital emergency rooms, for the most part, do not monitor capnography, even though it is the most effective way of measuring pulmonary gas exchange on a realtime basis.
– Doctors not being the all knowing, perfect beings that the medical profession would have us treat them like
– The doctor not realizing that intubation is NOT therapeutic to asthmatics. This is a small airway problem, and will not be resolved by putting a tube in the trachea.
In this scenario, the paramedic called medical control and requested and received orders for 25mg of magnesium sulfate over ten minutes. By the end of that ten minute period, her blood pressure was still 100/58, her heart rate was down to 122, SaO2 100%, and her capnograph showed a square wave at 38mmHg. Her lung sounds were clear, and she was breathing normally.
To everyone: We should be the masters of basic medical problems. Epi and albuterol are not magic fixes for everything respiratory.
To doctors: Medics occasionally know what they are doing
In a followup to last week’s post about the traffic camera ticket that was written to the stationary automobile, I found another article: Over 2,000 traffic tickets were sent out from a traffic camera, even though the officer who “reviewed” and signed the citations had been dead for months.
So much for the review system. Reminds me of the Robosigning scandal.