Month: November 2013

I believe in the power of prayer, but……

MDA pastor prayerYouth pastor Daniel Diaz, 33, was driving home from a church party with friends when he was shot and killed by an unidentified assailant in Pomona, Calif.

The shooting occurred just hours after a peace and prayer rally was held by community leaders against gun violence.

via Daniel Diaz, Youth Pastor, Shot Dead Hours After Prayer Rally Against Gun Violence In Pomona, Calif..

Sad when the biped animals do not respect a Man of God. I do believe in the power of prayer, but sometimes is more a question of Praise The Lord and Pass The Ammunition.

Language Parsing for Effective Gun Control

Saw this bit in Twitter:

MDA reporting gun accidentsSlate has a blog post titled: Child shootings: How to report on unintentional child shooting deaths. On its surface, it just a guideline for journos on how to write about accidental “unintentional” child shootings. Then you realize that the who-when-where-what-why-how should be already basic knowledge to anybody working the news. It is this next set of instructions that are the eye opener.

MDA reporting gun accidents2We have come a long way on reducing the firearms accidental deaths, specially in the children demographic, but we also know that shit will happen and there is no 100% safety in this world.

But these people, the same people that would rather set a school on fire rather than allow the Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program be taught to kids, want to make any accidental death a cause to strip rights. Then again, if there were not kid’s corpses, they would not know what to write about.

And somewhat related, Bitter gives us a preview of future journalists in action.

Once again, Gun Violence researchers discover water on Planet Earth.

brady gun violence social interaction

“What the findings essentially tell you is that the people who are most at risk of becoming a victim are sort of surrounded by victims within a few handshakes,” Papachristos says. “These are young men who are actively engaged in the behaviors that got them in this network.“…

The network in question consists of more than 3,700 high-risk individuals – young, African-American males from a poor neighborhood – who were clustered into a network by instances of co-offending, meaning each person in the group had been arrested with another person.

Overall, the community’s five-year homicide rate was 39.7 per 100,000 people, which was still much higher than the averages of other areas of Chicago (14.7 per 100,000). But being a part of that network of co-offenders, essentially just being arrested, raised the rate to by nearly 50 percent, to 55.2 per 100,000. What’s more, being in a network with a homicide victim increased the homicide rate by 900 percent, to 554.1 per 100,000……. “It’s the behavior of sharing needles that puts you at risk for contracting HIV, not simply being poor and black and living in a certain neighborhood,” Papachristos says. “The same is true with violence. It’s who you hang around with that gets you in trouble.”

via Gun Violence Significantly Increased by Social Interactions – US News and World Report.

Hang around Stupid People. Do Stupid Things. Win Stupid Prizes. How many times have we heard this? How many times much nicer versions of the above were told to us by our parents? But apparently for some in the Intelligentsia, it was not true until somebody from an “accredited” house of parchment actually made a study.

I am expecting that the Bradys and others would use the study to tell parents to steer kids away from all people with guns because, you know, all those killings happening in the Scholastic Shooting Sports.

 

Layers and layers of editorial cliches

What was the surest winning bet in Florida last week? That the legislative committee hearing on repealing the state’s controversial Stand Your Ground law would end up with a lopsided No vote. The roll-back effort never had a chance.

But you can’t fault the repeal’s supporters for trying. Not with a self-defense law that gives immunity to someone who shoots first and asks questions later.

via Stand your ground law needs clarification – Editorials – MiamiHerald.com.

I will grant you that it is a nice talking point for the average Anti, but that the editors of a major newspaper in the country do not realize the sheer stupidity of the cliché is nothing short of pitiful.

These are the idiots that not only think that self-defense is a sporting event, but that the bad guy won the coin toss and get to injure/kill you first.

And then we have:

And there’s the major problem with Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute. It is so loosely written that the self-defense claim often is interpreted differently in separate cases.

But of course not one single criminal has ever claimed to have shot his victim in self-defense, right? I am sure more than one judge have said: “Well, I am a wee bit confused here by the fact you stabbed Mildred 75 times on her back, but I am gonna set you free because you claim it to be self-defense.”  Yeah right.
The only good thing about the editorial is that they not use the “Stand Your Ground is Racist” meme….wait, they couldn’t because they used the example of Marissa Alexander, a case that same as in the Zimmerman case, Stand Your Ground does not apply.
It is a shame, but the best thing that has come out of the Miami Herald lately was to have used the abandoned building as the climax for the last episode of Burn Notice.

ATF builds a 3D gun and blows up. I am not surprised.

gov 3D gun kaboom

Testing found that the type of material used in the 3D printing was critical to whether the weapon would function properly. The ATF produced several versions of the weapon, some using plastic produced by the company Visijet and others using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic material. The Visijet version actually exploded during the test, as seen in the video above.

via Feds Printed Their Own 3D Gun And It Literally Blew Up In Their Faces.

Are we really surprised that the Federal Government is unable to do what private citizens can without too much sweating? Gun agency can’t make a gun. Healtcare agency can’t get insurance up… Call me suspicious but I see a pattern here. [snicker]