Catching up on some old stuff, from a few days ago, Moms Demand Action posted a link to this article from The Trace Private Insurance Pays a Tiny Fraction of Gunshot-Victim Health Costs.

The article starts with this sentence:

“More than two thirds of gunshot victims admitted to American hospitals are covered by Medicaid, or don’t have health insurance at all. And the price of that care is staggering: The average annual cost per admission for a firearm assault injury is $20,989, more than twice that of a typical hospital stay.”

Being a cynical SOB, I thought back to the news I heard last night: 4 Dead, 30 Wounded In Labor Day Weekend Shootings In Chicago.  Checking in with Hey Jackass and several other sources, it seems that 100% of this weekend’s shootings were gang related.

So if I do the math: most gunshot victims are on Medicaid + nearly (if not) all the weekend violence in places like Chicago is gang/drug related = no shit!

Poor criminals and gang members are shooting each other and we’re picking up the tab.  Great…

“The total annual cost for gunshot patients reliant on Medicaid alone amounted to $205 million.

It’s important to recognize that this is a public cost,” said Corinne Peek-Asa, the study’s lead author and director of the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center. “Being admitted for a firearm injury is very expensive, and we see so much of that cost is from uninsured or Medicaid sources. Which, for hospitals that see a high volume of firearm injuries, is going to be a challenge.”

I’d say so.  Maybe we should do something about that.

What does MDA say.

A tax and make the NRA pay for it.

It’s unfair to call gun control groups one trick ponies.  They are generally Left Wing and the Left knows two tricks: ban it and tax it.

I was in Chicago when Cook County passed their gun tax.  Cook County tried to pay for the cost of gang shootings by charging a $25 per gun tax on all guns sold in Cook County.  Amazingly it failed.  The tax is still in place but nobody buys guns in Cook County.  The gun counter at the Cabela’s in Hoffman Estates is one of the saddest sights I’ve ever seen.

Beyond besides not bringing in the expected level of revenue, it was an insult to law abiding gun owners.  Why should the deer hunter from Schaumburg pay extra to treat some Gangster Disciple who got shot in a drug war in Franklin Park.

By the time you factor in sales tax and the gun tax, everybody goes to the Bass Pro in Bollingbrook.

Personally, this is a job for Civil Asset Forfeiture.  Take everything from the gang members to pay for cost of the gang shootings.

Nope.

The attitude of the The Trace – which makes no mention of the gang or crime connection with shootings – is that these poor people are just innocent victims.  Anti-gun groups want law abiding gun owners to foot the bill.

I can’t think of a worse situation that making the criminals who get shot not have to pay for the cost of their own shooting.

But when has an anti-gun group ever proposed anything actually useful.

Sorry about this weekend.  I had big plans and stuff I wanted to do.

Then SOMEBODY decided the three day weekend would be the perfect time to crash course potty train Mr. Three-Year-Old.

I am tired and frazzled, my house smells like pee, and my washing machine and dryer have been running non-stop since Friday night.

I need a weekend from my weekend.

In the last few days I have seen two political cartoons criticizing the people of Texas by absolutely terrible media shit weasels.

After that I saw New York Congressman and totally corrupt fuck-shit Joe Crowley open his stupid lie hole on Morning Joe blathering on about the same crap.  (You can tell this subject doesn’t put me in a good mood)

Yep, you head that right.  Hurricane Harvey is reason to support Nancy Pelosi … because “all politics is local” Texas and Kentucky have to support a Representative from California who is becoming hated by her own party.

This is more proselytization by worshipers of the religion of the Church of State.  There is nothing that doesn’t require more big goverment intervention.

Was the response to Hurricane Katrina a cluster fuck? More goverment!

Was the response to Hurricane Sandy politics gone awry with everybody trying to stick their hands in the government cookie jar at once?  More Government?

Was the response to Hurricane Harvey a heartwarming reality show of neighbors helping neighbors?  Texas rednecks in mud boggers dubbed the “Diesel Army” driving through flood waters to rescue people and turn down offers of money.  Guys in punts and airboats known as the “Cajun Navy” driving in to rescue people.  A successful businessman known as “Mattress Mack” turned his stores into emergency shelters, which other local businesses dropping off food and other supplies to help the survivors there?  More fucking government.

There is no end for these people.

Hence the cartoons mocking the people of Texas.

There are crazy Christians who are bible literalists.  They believe the world is 6,000 years old and the Grand Canyon and dinosaur fossils are evidence of Noah’s flood.  Their faith seems strong but it is really a house of cards.  If the world is really 4.54 billion years old, how can anything else in the bible be true

The cartoons above are the big government equivalent to that.  Their is no room in their faith to incorporate the idea that independence and self reliance are good too.  It’s all big government all the time, or nothing.

I am one of these small goverment types.  I believe in independence and self reliance.  I still believe in the need for good goverment.  Those are not mutually independent.

I remember the words of the Preamble “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Note both the “promote the general Welfare” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty” clauses.

These Statists would have you believe that the opposite of big goverment is anarchy.  Either you want a cradle to grave welfare state with massive economic redistribution and social engineering schemes OR you die in a flood because the Coast Guard doesn’t exist.

There is an enormous gap between those two positions.  The moderate, reasonable, and dare I say the intent of our Founding Fathers, was to put government between those two points.  We (that includes the small government types in Texas) pay taxes with the expectation that emergency services are available to use.  We pay for an Army to defend us, police to protect us, and other programs to provide aid in a time of crisis.

That doesn’t mean when there is no emergency we want you meddling in our daily lives, over regulate the economy to death, bailout the banks in such a way that the executives whose decisions crashed the economy ended up with bonuses instead of prison sentences, create a surveillance state, and all the other skeezy shit that the government does on a regular basement.

If you want me to summarize my attitude, and if I may be so bold as to speak for many people in Texas and around the country:

“Leave me the fuck alone UNTIL I ask for your help, and then ONLY provide the help I ASK YOU FOR, until i tell you to fuck off again.”

I am happy to take care of myself until I am in over my head (for the people in Texas, quite literally) and then I’ll call emergency services.

Big goverment is not the answer.  The good people of Texas showed that.

That doesn’t mean they don’t want any government either.  They showed that too.

There is a healthy balance of self reliance and civil service that occurs that is optimal for society.

New Orleans was a city with a culture of government dependence.  When the city flooded and the local and state government fucked the dog on that response, people were unable to help themselves.  It was chaos.

Houston showed how well an independent people and responsible government can come together for everybody’s benefit.

These statistics can’t have people seeing that, they can’t have people learning that lesson.  If the do they might not want to give into big government so quickly.

Some people were in DC protesting Trump in Dinosaur costumes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e6GTEOZssKY

I couldn’t see their sign or hear what they were shouting, but the only thing that makes sense to me is that they must be protesting for funding for dinosaur cloning research.   I fully support that and believe Trump should fund that.  I can’t wait to see actual living Tyrannosaurus at the National Zoo.

Bob Menendez is the senior United States Senator from New Jersey.  He is a Democrat.   He is currently on trial for corruption in relation to taking bribes for covering for a health care provider that defrauded Medicare out of $105 million.   That provider has already been found guilt of fraud.

Menendez is a sitting Senator.  In an act of titanic, brass plated ballsiness, he requested leave from his trail to cast votes in the Senate.

The judge denied the motion.

I disagree with the ruling.

I think Menendez should have been allowed to attend the Senate votes.

I think he should be walked into the Capitol Building by Federal Marshalls, in an orange jumpsuit in handcuffs and leg irons, and escorted to his seat.  Once the vote was cast, the Marshalls should escort him out again. 

The people of New Jersey are entitled to his representation.  

The rest of us are entitled to see him be treated like the criminal he is.

This is probably why I’m not a judge.

Moms Demand Action was all upset because a kindergarten took a field trip to a gun range and induced a firearms safety course.

The response from the Moms Facebook crowd was as predictable as it was stupid.

Yep, because meth is legal and protected by a constitutional amendment.  Oh wait, it’s not.  A legal gun range is safe and responsible and the kids were given safe firearms handling training.

I didn’t know that these kids were being taught to hate Jews and the West and to kill people.  Or does she believe just holding a gun makes you a bad person.  I wonder what Deb Potter has to say about Leftist parents who use their kids to protest for Lefty causes, like the kindergartners who protested Betsy DeVos, the kids who protested Trump’s immigration policy, the six-year-old who was used by a pro illegal immigration group for a year to stage hugging the Pope, or kids being used for pro-choice marches.

I bet all those are fine by her.

PBS, a bastion of Liberal thought (or lack there of), thinks we should teach sex ed in kindergarten.  Sex ed is getting more and more graphic for younger and younger kids.  Does David Raper think it is a good idea to teach kindergarteners about anal sex because PBS thinks so?  If teaching gun safety leads to accidental shootings then I guess teaching safe anal sex to small children leads to sodomy.

I agree.  Maybe then we shouldn’t be having kindergarten transgender reveal parties where kids can become all confused about the basic biology of boys and girls.  Perhaps reading and math are more important than punishing the crimethink of not using a fellow kindergarten student’s preferred pronoun.

I’m not even sure were to go with this.  Being a law abiding gun owner makes you a Klansmen?  This is so prejudiced that I lack words to describe it.

I guess she comes from the Yvette Felarca middle school of thought, everything I don’t like makes you a Nazi.

This is where these people show their true colors.

It is totally fine for 5 year olds to learn how important it is to properly gender their transgender sex partner while demanding free abortion on demand, but if they learn proper gun safety, the world is coming to an end.

The group called Young Texas Democrats decided that the best way to help their fellow Texans after Hurricane Harvey was to protest the arrival of President Donald Trump in Texas.

They could have driven the 170 miles from Austin to Houston to be 70 more sets of helping hands.  They could have carried down water, formula, diapers, the things people need.

Instead they decided to #Resist.

They absolutely have the right to do that.   They are entitled to their First Amendment protections.

I just think that if their response to a disaster in their own back yard is to protest the President who has come to help, because actually volunteering is insufficiently partisan and too much work; they can at least volunteer to stop breathing because they are using up oxygen needed by hard working first responders.