These are some screen captures I did over the week, but they really did not amount too much as to write a full post about them.

The good news is that they are so influential that they could only get 28,000 people to sign the online petition. The bad news is that there are 28,000 people who would rather see kids getting shot accidentally because of their beliefs.

“Weak government”… they make it sound like it is a bad thing.

Silly me. I did not know the United States was a democracy.

(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Thursday that “If 30,000 people in the United States of America fell sick of flu or Ebola or polio, this nation would be up in arms,” adding that the U.S. is dealing with “an epidemic of gun death and gun disease that is taking lives.”…
…Blumenthal was likely referencing the most recent firearm fatality data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which lists 33,636 firearm-related deaths for 2013.

Source: Blumenthal: If Same Number of Gun Deaths Were Due to Illness, ‘This Nation Would Be Up in Arms’

Senator Blumenthal should have kept on reading that report. The CDC’s numbers for Flu/Pneumonia deaths in 2013 were 56,979.

But then again you read that he was around minions and cohorts of the Cult Coalition to Stop Gun Rights Violence, and you figure stupid is contagious and he got infected with that particular strain of flu.

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/radiomeonline/videos/922382417844222/” width=”500″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]

“No roll, Hondo?”

Tactical Gymnasts courtesy of the Maharashtra Police Department, India.
(PS: they play for birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras)

Hat Tip to Enrico M.

I wanted to make a comment on Miguel’s last post but as I thought about it, the subject became more of a post in and of itself.

Pinellas County is a rather safe county in Florida, home to St. Petersburg and Clearwater.  It’s a tourist and retirement county, below the national average on unemployment and crime rate.

So why would it have such a murder happy sheriff?  I call it the “Rambo theory of Law Enforcement.”  Remember the movie Rambo: First Blood.

What was the plot:  Rambo, an ex-Army special forces vet, is passing through small town in Washington state.  The sheriff (played by Brian Dennehy) doesn’t like the look of Rambo, thinks he’s a drifter, and drives him out of town.  Rambo says he wants to get a meal before moving on and the sheriff arrests him for vagrancy and tortures him.  Rambo escapes and goes on a rampage.

The “Rambo theory of Law Enforcement”  is that you get sheriffs or police chiefs in power in (usually) low crime areas, and they get it into their heads that “this is my sleepy little town and I’m going to keep is that way with an iron fist.”  They become the kings of their little domains.  I’ve experienced this in Florida a number of times.  I grew up in a little town near South Miami called The Village of Pinecrest.  It had one of the lowest crime neighborhoods in Miami-Dada County.  Pinecrest police patrolled in SWAT gear.  Bal Harbor is a tiny town on Miami Beach, known mostly for having some of the most expensive condos and the most high-end shopping in the state.  Bal Harbor police are Nazis.  They will arrest you for doing 5 over the limit.

It’s not that the Sheriff of Pinellas County is oblivious to the insult he done to his officer’s intelligence or the people of the county.  He doesn’t care.  He is the law.  Nobody is make waves in his county.

But this brings me to my next point.

Is Rambo: First Blood the best Second Amendment supporting movie ever?  I know fans of the 2A love Red Dawn, and the idea of American citizens fighting off in invading army.  But our founding fathers put the 2A in place for the people to defend themselves from tyrannical government.

So… if you have a sheriff, who arrests, tortures, and tries to murder an American citizen, was Rambo exercising his 2A rights as envisioned by our founding fathers?

The CSGV likes to make the idea of “gun owners want a rebellion” against the federal government.  What if it’s just against a sheriff that threatens to murder his own constituents?

Keep in mind, this happened twice before in 20^th century America, the Battle of Athens (1946) and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921).

In an interview, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said “What I’m observing is that it’s tragic that in the immediate aftermath of a series of high-profile mass shootings people feel like they have to go out and purchase a gun.”

It’s not tragic.  It’s the act of the light bulb going on in the heads of thousands upon thousands of Americans.  Not just are Americans scrambling to buy guns, they are applying to carry them in record numbers.

Most Americans don’t pay attention when the government argues in open court that they have no duty to protect us.  They still trust that the police and federal law enforcement will come running to save us.

But attacks like those in Paris or San Bernardino show that the government can’t protect us.  Not all the time.

Farook and his wife were operating an IED factory out of their home.  They were radicalized overseas and had radical profiles online.  Despite warnings and intelligence, nothing was done to prevent the shooting.

To be fair to the government, the government is comprised of people and people make mistakes.  Doubly, It is hard to protect Americans from other Americans and respect civil liberties at the same time.  Pledging allegiance to ISIS online isn’t exactly a crime, it’s a 1st Amendment protected act (I’m pretty sure that it qualifies as right of association).  Our country was set up to make it difficult for the government to punish people for political or ideological beliefs.

But the point still stands.  The government can’t protect us all the time.  They can never make us 100% safe against attack.  So it is up to us to be our own last line of defense.

Every terrorist attack, every mass shooting, proves that to more and more Americans.  Every single new gun owner.  Every single new carry permit holder.  They are all proof that we can only rely on the government so much, no matter what they say.

They call it tragic.  I call it self reliance.

But Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, a staunch opponent of open carry, said the four amendments wouldn’t make the bill acceptable to him — or safe for people who openly display their guns. For instance, he said, if an officer arrives at the scene of a crime and sees someone with a weapon, “At a minimum, they’re going to be thrown down on the ground with a gun pointed at them — or worse.
“And if good citizen with a concealed weapon walks into, say, a bank during an armed robbery, Gualtieri added, “he’s going to take one in the chest because he’s a threat.”

Source: Florida Police Chiefs Will Back Revised Open-Carry Bill | WLRN

I always felt that people like the Sheriff are so afraid of losing their perceived power that they go to the extremes shown above without realizing that they are insulting their own officers or acknowledging that the training in their particular departments is less than optimal.

I think that Sheriff Gualtieri does not realize that if a tragic case does indeed happen and a citizen Carrying Openly gets shot and killed for doing nothing more than minding his own business, he is setting the county to be on the losing end of a multi million dollar lawsuit. Or maybe it is a fellow officer in plainclothes who “gets one in the chest” because the Sheriff gave a tacit consent to his troops that it would be OK.

Just in case, I am planning on staying the hell out of Pinellas County since they seem to be way too trigger-happy for my taste.

PS: Read the article as it has this juicy beginning:

Acknowledging “momentum” behind a proposal that would allow people with concealed-weapons licenses to openly carry guns, the Florida Police Chiefs Association said Thursday its board of directors had voted to back the controversial measure — as long as changes designed to protect law-enforcement officers are included.

I am not quite in agreement with all the changes, but I can live with them and the idea is to insert the Camelus bactrianus proboscis inside the wigwam.

The Missus and myself were watching some TV show where the wife was gravelly ill and in her deathbed, she begs the husband to continue living to the fullest. You know the script.

I turned to my bride and said:

“I am dying first. I know you can survive without me. You are stronger.”

She says nothing, so I continue:

“Besides, if you die first, I would probably follow soon.” pause, she smiles. “I’d probably die in a tragic washroom accident by mixing the wrong stuff and the washer explodes.”

She barely cracks a smile, I press on:

“And love of my life, I would try to reach you in the afterlife anyway. I’d get a Ouija board and summons you ‘Honey, are you there? Give me a sign. I need to know where the light-bulbs are and what’s the password for the Amazon Prime account.”

I forgot she packs a mean right hook.