Divemedic

Sergeant Matthew Corrigan called the National Veterans Crisis Hotline for advice on sleeping because of
nightmares from his year training Iraqi soldiers to look for IEDs in
Fallujah. The operator, Beth, called 911 and reported Sgt. Corrigan “has a gun and wants to kill himself.”  He claims that he never threatened suicide.

In any case, what resulted was a SWAT standoff, where he was taken to the hospital for evaluation.The police then conducted a warrantless search of his home, causing extensive damage. The search revealed unregistered firearms.

Even if one assumes that he is lying, and did threaten suicide, once the sergeant had surrendered and was in custody, there was absolutely no valid reason for police to enter the home without a search warrant. Maybe there needs to be a law that bars anyone who is found in court to have violated a citizen’s constitutional rights from ever again holding a government job. Maybe that will stop some of the abuses.

So I put a Picatinny hand rail on my AR15, and I also added this rail mounted light/laser/grip. It is a 450 lumen white LED light that can either be steady or strobe as either momentary or constant switched. I got it sighted in at the range, and it holds zero pretty well.

Along with some 70 grain hollow points, this will be an effective home defense gun.

Many in the prepper community talk about the SHTF, the Zombie apocalypse, the end of life as we know it, whatever they call it. In these cases, they almost invariably talk about waking up one morning, and things have fallen apart. That really isn’t how it goes down. Societies don’t fall apart overnight, and looking at how the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and now watching the European union, fall apart gives us a look at how things happen.
The Soviet Union spent years building up their military in the arms race of the cold war. This large amount of government spending was taking its toll on the productive parts of the economy, and the economy stalled. By 1985, the stagnation was obvious. The Soviet Union had been importing grain from the US throughout the 70s, because their own economy was not capable of producing staples. The central government was powerful enough, that change seemed impossible.
Eventually, the government could not maintain the strong hold that they had on the population, and cracks began to appear. In an effort to control costs, Premier Gorbachev became friendly with the US, and relations improved. A series of reforms was put in place that were designed to appease the population, but unrest continued. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The military was upset that they were losing so much power and clout, and attempted a coup in 1991. The coup failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed, taking many of its satellite countries with it. The reason that the collapse that was decades in the making seemed to happen so quickly is that the government fought to maintain an appearance of normalcy until there was no fight left.
There are parallels here to the current state of the USA. Years of profligate, irresponsible spending have torn the guts out of our economy. The resulting tax burdens needed to sustain this spending, combined with the populist regulations put in place by bureaucrats, have forced the productive parts of the economy to either leave the country, or out of business. The small businessman has been regulated out of existence, and the large business has fled for distant lands. This has resulted in a country that cannot produce staples or maintain its standard of living, which has been falling for over 5 years. The central government is stable, so change or collapse seems impossible.
Cracks have begun to appear. The end of the US economy approaches, as the economic weight of our government’s excessive spending increases. The government will attempt to maintain normalcy, and maintain order and control, and this is obvious by the ever increasing police presence, government cash giveaways, and other programs. However, the spending required for these programs will only worsen the problem in the long term. The decline will accelerate as the debt climbs.
The collapse is near, and I believe it will be in less than 20 years, perhaps less than a decade. Decades in the making, to those who have not been observant, it will appear to have happened with blinding speed.

Here we go.
Naked Man Allegedly Eating Victim’s Face Shot And Killed By Miami Police..

I hope they shot him in the head.

All jokes aside, there is another link to the story here, and I want you to pay attention to the money quote:

Sergeant Altarr Williams, supervisor of Miami police’s Homicide Unit, said a man doesn’t have to be armed to be dangerous.

So to those who criticize Zimmerman for shooting an unarmed Travon Martin: try again to tell me how anyone is wrong in using deadly force against an unarmed attacker.

The internet news stories are flying. A woman gets drunk and breaks into a home at 3:30 in the morning. Confronted by an armed homeowner and given orders to halt, the intruder continued advancing towards them while shining a flashlight in the homeowner‘s face, and was shot. After she was shot, she pulled out a cell phone and made a call. The female intruder is taken to the hospital, where tests confirm that her blood alcohol was 0.2%. The woman was identified as Zoey Ripple, a recent graduate of the University of Colorado, who pled guilty to shoplifting in 2010.

ABC story here.

The homeowners are a pair of psychiatrists. The female of the couple was stalked by an unbalanced schizophrenic patient, who ultimately had a restraining order placed against her. They live in a $3 million home, and were sleeping with the door open, and a screen in place.

In the comments on these articles, many people are critical of the homeowners for a number of reasons. Among these reasons:
– They are just rich assholes.- This reason is stupid. The posters who claim this are dick bags who think that having money means that you deserve whatever happens to you.
– The intruder was just drunk and had no intent to commit a crime. -Since when does being drunk excuse you from following the law? and whether she intended to commit a crime or not, she did. What she did is a crime.
– The intruder was a pretty female. Ah, yes. We all know that pretty woman are never criminals.
– She was a “good girl” and helped organize a campus coat drive last winter and spent the summer of 2010 teaching English to children in Guatemala. She was also a convicted criminal. “Real” criminals usually don’t just begin their first day as a career criminal by robbing a bank, they start small. As the homeowner, am I supposed to do a background check before defending myself?
– The homeowners are at fault for leaving the door open. This sounds suspiciously like the “She wanted it, or she wouldn’t be dressed that way.” defense.

There are a host of reasons to not be so drunk that you do stupid things like commit felonies. She could have been robbed or raped. Instead, she chose to break into a home, and fail to heed the armed homeowner’s warning, and continued to advance on him while blinding him with a flashlight. From the homeowner’s perspective, he couldn’t see if the intruder had a weapon or an accomplice with a weapon, nor could he possibly know what the intruder’s intent or criminal history was.

This could easily be avoided if the girl had not broken into a house and charged an armed homeowner.

A tip to homeowners: Put a really bright flashlight on your home defense gun, so an intruder can’t blind you with a light of their own. Had this been an armed person, the homeowner may well have been killed.

There are over 2.2 million people in prison in the United States, a number which represents 0.7% of the nation’s total population, or 743 people per 100,000. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world. One in six of those prisoners is in jail for marijuana. That means that over half a million people are in prison for marijuana in the United States. 

Isn’t it time to either admit that the drug war is lost, or do we want to be more of a police state than we already are?

I was teaching class today, and I had a student tell me that an EMS system to our north was using a protocol that instructed rescuers to use two defibrilators simultaneously, in order to deliver 720 joules to patients in refractory Ventricular Fibrillation. At the time, I hadn’t known anything about this, so I told the student that this didn’t sound right, but that I would research the subject and get back to him.

It turns out that he was half correct. The procedure calls for two defibrillators to be used to deliver two shocks in rapid sequence, one with the traditional pad placement at the sternum and apex, and the other being in an anterior-posterior configuration. This is not delivering 720 joules, for the following reason:

Defibrillators do not deliver 360 joules per shock. Modern defibrillators are biphasic, and they deliver a shock that is EQUIVALENT to 360 monophasic joules. This means that when you press the shock button, the monitor measures the patient’s resistance to electrical current (called “impedance”), and delivers the energy that will get the appropriate energy to the fibrillating heart. This shock is actually 200j, and was determined to be the best energy level in clinical trials. (Mittal et al JACC 1999 24:1595-1601) Even so, the energy delivered would not even be equal to 400j, because the shocks are going to be delivered at least a half second apart. This makes them 2 “stacked shocks” of 200j each, not one 720j shock.

With that being said, systems using this procedure have had some success in converting stubborn Vfib with this protocol. My thought is that this is more due to either the placement of the pads of the second defibrillator in the anterior-posterior configuration, which would put more current directly through the heart, or is due to the fact that the shocks are being “stacked.” What strikes me as typical here is that there is serious talk about going back to “stacked shocks” as part of the ACLS algorithm, considering that the AHA removed those with the 2000 update. Will we see a return of them in the 2015 ACLS update?

Instead of recommending a return to stacked shocks, how about a study to determine is there is another factor at play here, like pad placement?

So let me get this straight:
Osama Bin Laden was living in a house just a mile away from the main Pakistani military academy, the people who helped find him were convicted of treason, and committing acts against the national interests of Pakistan, and we still send Pakistan $1 billion in aid? How stupid is our country, that we continue to borrow money from China, so we can send it to our enemies?

Years ago, I was shopping for a laser printer. The salesman at the store was telling me that “this printer prints with HP level quality.” That was when I realized that if the HP printer was the one that others were being compared to, then I would be buying an HP.  After all, with the price points being close, I would be a fool not to buy quality.
The same should go with a self defense handgun. You should buy quality, because when you carry a firearm for self defense, you are literally betting your life that it will go “bang” when you need it to. Now most guns and ammunition made today have reliability that is far superior to where it was 100 years ago.

Rob Pincus recently fired up 1911 gun owners when he said that 1911s are not reliable, and issued a challenge. Michael Bane immediately added his opinion. Immediately, the fanboys came out of the woodwork with ludicrous claims:

– It is good, because the FBI HRT, my local SWAT team, etc. uses it.
This claim is stupid, because these SWAT teams are that- teams. They take that 1911 in as part of a team, with a half dozen other team members behind them. Besides, the 1911 isn’t the primary weapon, it is a backup weapon. In either case, a failure of the gun is not as catastrophic as it would be for you- someone has their back.

– The 1911 is good, because it was the military issue sidearm for 80 years
and now it isn’t. So does that mean it isn’t good any more? Not only that, but are you saying that the US Government always buys on quality? Not politics?

– It is good, because many competitors use it in IPSC and IDPA matches
Those matches have rules that are designed to favor the 1911 platform. That was always one of the problems I had with those matches: they are gamed. IDPA has a division that is devoted to it, called “Custom Defensive Pistol,” in which the pistol must be .45ACP loaded to a certain power factor, and cannot hold more than 8 rounds. Not only that, but those competitors are shooting $5,000 custom weapons. If you have $5K to spend, you will do better to buy a $1,000 pistol and $4,000 worth of practice ammo.

My personal favorite:
– No one used an XD to clear VC tunnels, or to root Japanese soldiers out of trenches
The guns in question had not even been invented yet. Silliness.

Look, I bought several 1911s, and ran them through their paces. The first that I bought was a Colt. Out of the box, it had problems. I couldn’t fire 100 rounds without 5 or 10 stoppages. Everyone told me that 1911s have a break in period of 500 rounds. At 500, it was still not working. I took it in for warranty work, and they repaired it. It still wasn’t reliable. Then my 1911 friends blamed me as the problem, accusing me everything from performing poor maintenance to ‘limp wristing’ but the fact is, my other pistols worked fine. The Colt became a safe queen.

I bought me some Kimbers. Three, to be exact. One, a Pro Carry, had problems similar to the Colt, but they were solved by the factory repair. I was happy with all of them, until the round counts got up there. Then, they became unreliable. It turns out that they need repair every 1,000 rounds or so, and major work every 3,000 or so.

That isn’t reliable to me. I have a Sig pistol that I have had for over ten years, and it has over 20,000 rounds through it. It has only been to the shop once. (I must admit that another Sig that I had was just rebuilt because it rusted while in storage, but that is not the fault of the design) 1911s can’t do that. I have one 1911 remaining, the Ultra Carry II. It was the only one of the four 1911s that I bought that works worth a damn. 25% is not a good batting average.