Divemedic

I decided to go to the range today. I went to Shoot Straight in Apopka. They have an indoor range, and more importantly, they allow long guns, and since I needed to test some repairs that I had done to one of the ARs, we went there.

When we got there, I went to go pay the fee, and the employee behind the counter insisted that he inspect my firearms. Now, I have shot at this store and the sister store in Cassleberry perhaps 20 or thirty times. I have bought perhaps 15 firearms from that store over the last few years. Heck, I bought four firearms there so far this year alone. Not once have I had my firearms ‘inspected’ by an employee.

They have never asked this before, so I wanted to know why things had changed. He told me that they have always had this policy, and proceeded to lecture me about how they can inspect or search anyone who is on their property at any time. I told him that I wasn’t looking for a lecture, I wanted to know what they were checking for. He ignored me. I still don’t know why they were inspecting my guns.

This was rude, and will mean that I will likely never set foot in that store again. Congratulations guys, you just lost thousands of dollars in future sales.

Years ago, before I became a paid fire medic, I was a volunteer, and I made my living in industrial automation. It was a tough life, and layoffs were common, because Florida doesn’t have much industry to automate. One of the places that I worked was a certain theme park that was infested by a huge rat.

We, the employees, had a meeting once with management to discuss the future of the company. We were told that the company’s vision was to have no permanent, full time employees. Replacing the full time workforce would save the company approximately $90 million in benefit costs each year. Later in the meeting, during the question and answer portion, of my coworkers pointed out that he had read an article that the CEO had been paid $270 million in salary, perks, and stock options the year before. He asked if it would be more prudent to let the 30,000 full time employees keep their benefits, pay the CEO $180 million, and the company would still save the same amount each year.

The management team told us that executive compensation was not up for discussion. My coworker pressed on: He asked how one man could be worth three times as much as every other employee combined. After all, he pointed out, if the CEO was on vacation for a week, no one would notice, but if the other 30,000 of us didn’t show up for work for a week, the company would shut down.

He was disciplined for advocating a strike.

I think he had a valid question. The Disney CEO received nearly $53 million in salary and stock options last year. Disney’s 58,000 other employees received $1 billion, meaning that the CEO was paid 3,075 times as much as the average employee. I can see paying a CEO more than the average employee, but how can you justify paying him more than 3,000 average employees COMBINED? You can’t claim it is because he is such a great CEO, not when the company has shown a loss during four of the six years that the he has headed the company.

I think that the occupy movement has a legitimate beef, I just think that government intervention is not the answer.

This is the third part of a three part post. Part one is here. and Part two is here
 
 
When we got to the court, it turned out that the tests on my shotgun did
indeed show that my shotgun had not been fired, nor had any other
weapon that the police had taken that night. There was no evidence of
GSR on my hands. However, the witnesses (teens in the car) all testified
that they had seen me shooting.

Then, the attorneys asked the judge if they could have a recess, and it
was granted. My attorney talked to the others, and then came over to me
and said that the other side had offered to drop the charges against me,
if we agreed to drop our charges against them. We agreed, and so did
they. It all went away.

For weeks after that, gang members would sit outside of my house,
watching us through binoculars. We called the cops daily. I still had no
weapons, as mine had not yet been returned. They had plenty, I guess
bought on the street. One day, my neighbor came over and told me he knew
how to put a stop to the harassment.

He stood in my second floor bedroom, about 10 feet back from the window,
looking back at the gangsters through the scope of his Remington 700.
After a minute or two, the one with the binoculars did a double take,
and they got in their car and left.

The harassment continued, and my wife did not want to stay home alone. We moved a few miles down the road.

Lessons learned:

– I should not have allowed the bat wielding teen to leave AND/OR
– Once I saw a weapon (the SKS) in the teen’s hands in the car, I should
have shot him. Letting either of them leave, taking with them the
evidence to prove me correct, was a mistake.
– When the police arrive, keep quiet until you have an attorney there.
There is not anything you can say that will help you that won’t wait and
help you after the attorney gets there. You can, however, say something
stupid or make a minor mistake that will come back to haunt you later.
– When the cops get there, they will likely take all of your guns, not just the ones they think were involved.
– Lawyer up. Don’t try to handle things yourself. There is an old
saying: “A good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.” I
was amazed at how my attorney knew everyone, and at how he got things
done that I couldn’t. Well worth the money.
– The altercation took place in 1991. This country has decidedly gotten more
self defense friendly as far as the law and local prosecutors are
concerned. People in the 1980s and 1990s used to get routinely charged
for murder in situations that people now walk free and clear in. In
Florida and maybe other states you are now even protected from civil
lawsuits after cleared in a self-defense shooting. That was unheard of
until recently. Different time and different laws. This is why stand your ground is so important.
– This time period was during the early part of the anti-gun movement’s heyday. Remember that.
– Even CCW laws are better now. This was back in the time when concealed weapons permits were nearly impossible to get. I will freely admit that I was committing a first degree misdemeanor by carrying a weapon without a permit for several years before I was able to get one.
–  Gangs used to be given more freedom to
operate. If a situation like I described happened where I live now, it
would result in an army of LEOs responding, and the gang members would be
dealt with ruthlessly. In the 1980s and 1990s,
I can remember drive-by shootings where 1 or 2 officers would show up
and they wouldn’t even bother looking for the shooters.
– This incident is why I have sympathy for George Zimmerman. I have been where he is now, except my incident was not a political football being used to advance political ambitions and agendas.

Brock Townsend posted this over at Borepatch’s place, and I thought that it applied to what we see in America today. Tell me what you think:

When certain sovereign and independent states form a union with limited
powers for some general purpose, and any one or more of them, in the
progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which
there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such
withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact
of union to states? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances; the
attempt to go out brings war and subjugation. The ambitious and
aggressive states obtain possession of the central authority which,
having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty
over the states.

Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire
is declared to be guilty of insurrection, its citizens are stigmatized
as “rebels”, as if they revolted against a master, and a war of
subjugation is begun. If this action is once tolerated, where will it
end? Where is constitutional liberty? What strength is there in bills of
rights-in limitation of power? What new hope for mankind is to be found
in written constitutions, what remedy which did not exist under kings
of emperors? If the doctrines thus announced by the government of the
United States are conceded, then look through either end of the
political telescope, and one sees only an empire, and the once famous
Declaration of Independence trodden in the dust of as a “glittering
generality,” and the compact of the union denounced as a “flaunting
lie”.

Those who submit to such consequence without resistance are
not worthy the liberties and rights to which they were born, and
deserve to be made slaves. Such must be the verdict of mankind.

–Jefferson Davis’ farewell speech to the United States Senate, January 21, 1861

Massachusetts has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. That didn’t help these two women and the EMT who was murdered trying to save them, but at least they weren’t killed by a gun. This gun control success story just goes to show you that gun control DOES stop gun violence.

This is part two of yesterday’s post.

Just after midnight, two cars full of people pulled down my dead end street. The
car closest to me had 4 teenagers inside. It was later determined
that this car contained one female and three males. They
were all known gang members with lengthy arrest records for various
offenses, including drug offenses and weapons charges. One of them had
been arrested 22 times before his 17th birthday.

I didn’t know any of this. All I knew was that a car load of people who
had threatened violence was 10 feet from me, and the front seat
passenger had what appeared to be a long gun in his hand. (It turned out
to be an SKS- at the time, one could be bought for $95) I ran to the
car and stuck my shotgun into the window of the car. I said something
along the lines of “If anyone moves, I will kill you.”

It was at that moment that I heard a gun shot. I looked up in time to see the other car peeling
away, and my neighbor lying on the ground. The car closest to me sped
away. As they drove away, another neighbor (who HAD been drinking) ran
out of his house and fired a shotgun at the car. (It was a 12 ga
Mossberg 500 with a 3″ magnum barrel, found at the scene by the police) I dragged my downed neighbor into
my house to find my sobbing wife on the floor of the kitchen, talking to the
police.

It turns out that my neighbor dove when he saw a handgun, and was not hit when the shot was fired.

They arrived less than 5 minutes later, but it seemed much longer. We
told them our story. While we were doing so, the car came back. This time, the
teens were all unarmed, and claimed that they were sitting at the light
when I shot at them for no reason. They showed a pattern of holes in the
driver’s side door of their car.

I pointed out that the pellet count in their car was too high for my 2
3/4″ shotgun, and that the incident could not have happened they way they said, because the bullet holes were on the wrong side of the car. The cops told me
not to tell them how to do their job. I was photographed, and my guns
taken. An SKS was found in the trunk of the teens’ car, which the cops
also took.

Three days later, I got a call from a detective with the VA Beach police. He
said that he had a warrant for my arrest, and that if I came in that
afternoon, he would get me released on my own recognizance. He said if
he had to look for me, the bond would be high, considering the charges. I
was stunned. I drove to the police station, where I was arrested for
brandishing a firearm, discharging a firearm within city limits, discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle, and aggravated
battery.

I went to see the attorney that helped me get my CWL (he had been
recommended by the NRA) and we went to the prosecutor’s office and filed
charges ourselves against the teens for aggravated battery (the cops
refused to- they said that they had not seen them brandishing a weapon, and also stated that a bat is not a deadly weapon).

part three is here

During a break, I was talking to some students about the country’s economy, and I made the statement that our economic situation is unsustainable because we as a nation spend $2 for every $1 we get in taxes. The student asked me why the government needs to borrow, and why can’t they just print the money.

I used this as an analogy:

Let’s say that I give everyone in the country ten million dollars. Would that get rid of poverty? No. This is why: no one will go to work in the morning, because we are all rich. The problem is that no one will be there to make food, stock the stores, deliver goods, or staff the power plants and hospitals.

How can I buy food that I need to survive, if no one grows, delivers, or sells any? At that point, since there is a large supply of money, but a small supply of food, no one will sell me their sandwich for a dollar. After all, each person has ten million dollars, but only a couple of sandwiches.

At this point, the only way to talk someone into selling a sandwich would be to offer them $100,000 for a sandwich, because the supply of money is too large for the supply of sandwiches.

That is what the unrestricted printing of money causes inflation. The more money you insert into the economy, the more inflation you get. I think he gets it now.

They aren’t stupid, they are just ignorant.

In the summer of 1991, Virginia Beach, VA. I was involved in an incident
in which shots were fired. I did not fire them, but witnesses identified me as the shooter. I am posting this story to illustrate what can and did happen.

I lived on the end of a dead end street near Newtown Road in Virginia Beach. My neighbors had gotten clearance from the city to close off the street and have a block party. There was a lot of beer drinking and BBQ. I had been out at the movies with my (then) wife. I had NOT been drinking, nor had my wife. We arrived home at about 10:00 pm, and found some of the neighbors still partying. The wife stayed out to talk to the
neighbors, but the BBQ was all gone, so I went in the house to make a sandwich.

When I came back outside, I found her and my next door neighbor having a loud argument with a man I had never seen before. I walked over in time to hear the man threaten to strike my wife. I walked over and asked what the problem was. The man told me that he was going to beat up this “asshole and his cunt girlfriend.” I said that I didn’t know what the problem was, but that he should not refer to my wife that way, and that he
needed to leave. I told him that I had already called the cops, and that if he left right away, I would forget what he looked like when the cops arrived.

He told me that if I didn’t get out of the way, I was gonna get it, too. That was when I noticed that he was holding a baseball bat. Seeing a weapon immediately changed my mindset. I drew my weapon (at the time I carried a S&W 4506) and ordered him to drop the bat. Still holding the bat, he turned around and walked away, and told me he was a part of “The Bayside Arms Posse” and that he was going to come back and show me
whose town this was.

We called the cops. 15 minutes later, they arrived, and assured me that they would handle it by driving the area (Bayside Arms Apartments) where the gang hangs out. They left.

A few minutes later, there was a neighbor from a few doors down knocking at my back door. It seems there were 6 or 7 teens going door to door looking for me, and she wanted to warn me. As my wife again called the police, I grabbed my shotgun (870 Wingmaster with 19 inch barrel and an extended 8 round mag tube) and opened the door. I racked the shotgun, and immediately heard someone yell “They have guns, let’s get out of here!” The teens jumped in a car with no license plate, and fled with their lights off. I did not see
them very well, so I could not tell anyone if it was the same guy or not.

When the police arrived (ten minutes later) they searched the neighborhood, and then they left, promising to make more frequent patrols. My neighbor came over, and we both agreed that the idiots would return. I sat out front in the parking lot, in my car. My neighbor in his. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait long…

[There are those who will say that we shouldn’t have waited out front for them, but I don’t think it was wise to sit inside the house, either. We had already called the cops twice, and they had done nothing. You can call what we did an ambush, but it isn’t like two car loads of armed gang members coming to a house on a dead end street (that was private
property) after midnight were going door to door selling girl scout cookies.- DM]

part two is here, part three is here.

Many on the right are blasting the recent ruling on Obama care, stating that the government has this supposedly new power to compel you to do things by using taxes as an incentive. As if taxing people if they do not buy things is a new phenomenon, or some new concept. The fact is, this has been going on for decades.
Buy a house, or you pay more in income taxes, because people who rent cannot deduct mortgage interest, nor can they deduct the property taxes that are paid as a part of the rent.
Buy energy efficient appliances, get a tax deduction.
Buy an energy efficient car, get a tax deduction.
Obtain an expensive college education, get a tax deduction.
Do with a student loan, deduct the interest.

Or are you pulling a switcheroo by claiming that a deduction on your taxes for buying something is any different from an addition to your taxes by not buying something? That is the same logic that a business uses when they are prohibited by law from charging extra for customers who pay by credit card, so they give a discount for cash.

Then there are the taxes that are designed to punish you for buying products, instead of not buying them:
Taxes on tobacco, alcohol, luxury goods, gasoline, tanning beds, certain foods, cars, and on and on. There are even taxes that increase with income, designed to punish you for being successful.

There is nothing new here, and you are fooling yourself if you think that the SCOTUS has changed anything with this ruling.

That doesn’t mean that I am in favor of Obamacare. What it means is that I have long ago come to the understanding that taxes in this country only provide about 65% of what the government spends, and are used more for behavior modification than they are for revenue generation.