A 17 year old black youth, named Trevon, was shot under dubious circumstances in Miami.

It seems that young Trevon had broken into the wrong home.  The home owner was alerted to the break in by her security camera, rushed over to the home, and shot the youth after a confrontation as we was climbing out of the back window.

Not all of the details are in yet.  The home owner has not been charged and is cooperating with police.

I’m not going to rush to judgement on this case.  Could she have been attacked during the confrontation, making the shooting justified?  Maybe.  Could she have shot an unarmed teenager snaking out of her home?  Equally likely.  What I do know is, as a citizen with a gun, it’s best to avoid this type of situation all together.  It’s one thing if you are home when the break in occurs.  If your alarm goes off and you have security camera footage of the burglar, let the cops deal with it.  Not just as a mater of law, but you don’t know if the intruder is armed.  Don’t go looking for a fight.

That said, sometimes the loved ones of the victims make it very, very hard for me to sympathize with them at all.  Trevon’s aunt is one of these people.

“It’s no reason she should have waited until I think he walked out the yard to try to shoot him.  If she called the police already why would she shoot him? You have to look at it from every child’s point of view that was raised in the hood.  You have to understand… how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school? You have to look at it from his point-of-view.”

Hold on a minute.  Let me see if I got this right?  Because your nephew was raised in the hood (Liberty City, FL), it is OK for him to break into home and rob them in order to obtain the legal tender necessary to purchase necessities?  Burglary is an acceptable form of occupation?

I’m trying to remain objective here, waiting to for all the facts to come in, and if need be call a bad shoot a bad shoot.  Now I have to try an ignore the crap that came out of your mouth.  Auntie, please, STFU.

The right to self-defense is not basic. One’s protection can be delegated to others such as parents in the case of young children and the military in the event of foreign invasion. Moreover, if we enjoyed perfect physical security, there would be no need for protection. The right to self-defense is grounded in the fundamental moral right to physical security.
(David DeGrazia (ddd@gwu.edu) is a professor of philosophy at George Washington University.)

Source: Gun rights include the right not to be shot – Baltimore Sun

This guy has to be tenured. No other way he could put out an editorial without a basic research and get away with it. A bit of Google-Fu would have taken him to read about No Duty to Protect and avoided him this embarrassment. If anything, in Warren versus District of Columbia you will find the following:  “[t]he duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists.”

Do we need to explain this in crayola or what?

So the ultimate foundation of the right to private gun ownership — physical security — is also the basis of the right not to be shot. Rights are extremely important, but they also require support. Supporting the right not to be shot requires some limits on the right to gun ownership.

I see where he is coming from: If you own a gun, you are a criminal, period. You are a bloodthirsty animal who goes out every morning seeking for targets of opportunity to increase your collection of minority heads mounted in your wall. Your Gun Club and the local chapter of the Bloods or MS-13 are one and the same legally and morally wise not to say intellectually. I am still baffled by this attitude but they need to feed out of their own Narrative which sees us as a bunch of brain-dead rednecks with a second grade education and a felony record for dealing moonshine.  That we are probably more law-abiding than 99% of his friends in the faculty does not compute in his pre-programmed little mind.

Pro-gun scholars often assert that the right to bear arms trumps considerations of social utility — including the possible fact (suggestive evidence abounds) that widespread gun ownership increases homicide, suicide and lethal-accident rates.

Again, a total lack of five minutes of Google research which may have led him to the FBI data proving this statement so wrong, his jacket’s elbow patches would have fallen off.

We need to do more to prevent violations of the right not to be shot.

Shoot first at those who come after you?

It is time to say No to those who tolerate the killing of thousands of innocent Americans each year in the name of gun rights.

The blame for the murder of innocent people lays 100% on your feet dear professor.  Your kind has been playing some sick game of Social Engineering and collecting bodies on the way. Your ilk kept telling us that family is bad, drug abuse is good, honor and religion are dead, charity is outdated, being a leach to the taxpayers is OK, humility is shameful and disrespect for others is fundamental.

You are so stupid, you think you can juggle six jars of nitroglycerin forever without a problem.

Boom.

The European Parliament re-started its maneuvers to impose stricter gun control with what we fear the most: Confiscation without compensation.

Unfortunately the video is in Spanish, but for those of you who can understand it, here you go.

The questions that the woman ask are two: Do we know how many of the Category B under Council Directive 91/477/EEC are out there and what about compensation.

Category B – Firearms subject to authorization

1. Semi-automatic or repeating short firearms.

2. Single-shot short firearms with centre-fire percussion.

3. Single-shot short firearms with rimfire percussion whose overall length is less than 28 cm.

4. Semi-automatic long firearms whose magazine and chamber can together hold more than three rounds.

5. Semi-automatic long firearms whose magazine and chamber cannot together hold more than three rounds, where the loading device is removable or where it is not certain that the weapon cannot be converted, with ordinary tools, into a weapon whose magazine and chamber can together hold more than three rounds.

6. Repeating and semi-automatic long firearms with smooth-bore barrels not exceeding 60 cm in length.

7. Semi-automatic firearms for civilian use which resemble weapons with automatic mechanisms.

The man replies that they do not have an accurate account as of yet due to each countries record keeping issues but that they are working on it. And on the subject of compensation the amount will be a big fat zero.

It is obvious that they wouldn’t be talking about compensation if they were not planning on a continent-wide confiscation order. European Gun Right organizations are pissed off as they were assured that no confiscation would be happening, only some extra controls to make sure guns would not end in the hands of the bad guys… a song we are very much familiar with but they were not.

That there was an raid in Brussels itself where four cops were wounded and a Jihadist asshole linked to the Paris attack was killed might have closed the brains of the politicos and decided to play into the hands of those who do not like regular folks to reply with gunfire attacks on them.

The only issue the European Parliament has in its hands is Finland who has made very clear they will not disarm. Maybe they will be the fly in the ointment and stop this nonsense or maybe not and decided to go against the Crazy Ones. I heard somewhere that there are two major principles in European warfare: 1) Never invade Russia in the Winter and 2) You just don’t fuck with the Finns.

This is going to be a very interesting year in Europe.
(Think Chinese curse.)

To quote my buddy Enrico M. who gets the Hat Tip for this news item:

“Please make sure I am home.”

It is good to see that they are advising at least some of the many points that the NRA offers. Some great information on storage can also be found here.

There is simply no excuse for an unsecured gun around children.

I just saw this online and brought back many childhood memories. In case you are not familiar, you light up the end of the coil and it would produce a smoke that will keep mosquito away. I am not fond of the smell, but it works and I rather have a bad olfactory night than Yellow Fever. But the other use we had for it as children was as timing device for fireworks….the explosive-only kind.

I don’t remember now, but we even had the rate of burn for that think and would break pieces according our needs. We would attach the fuse of a martillito (M-80) with tape and then seek a target. The coils were so widely used nobody gave a second thought to the smell and nobody was the wiser. We would be blocks away from the target waiting to hear the boom! and laugh our asses off.

My crowning achievement with this timed device was at school when I tied three M-80s to a length of coil and left it in the boys bathroom timed so it would go off when we were all in our respective classrooms. If I recall correctly, the time was more or less 30 minutes and it was one of the longest 30 minutes I lived back then. The three explosions went off almost at once and people poured out of the classrooms to see what was that all about, me included.

What was not expecting was to see somebody coming out of the bathroom. It was another kid from school who I guess he needed to go and the teacher gave him permission. The poor bastard’s eyes were wide, he looked dazed… and was still holding his member in his hand which led me to assume he was taking a leak when the three devices went off in the heavily tiled enclosure. Other than a heavy ring in his ears, he was unhurt.

The Brothers at the school had a mayor meltdown, locked everybody in the classrooms and the teachers were told to search each and every bag and pat down every kid till evidence was found. But none was to be found. I had suffered an experience before which I will not share in this pages and I had nothing on me that could incriminate me.

Yes, I was an evil prick when I was in High School. There are reasons for it and again, they won’t be shared.

WARANING: don’t use the coil as a timing device. I just shared a story and does not mean it is legal to do the same nowadyas nor I am encouraging it.

I like it when life gives me hints in IMAX-sized clues. This past weekend I pulled out an old Home first Aid kit looking for burn gel (found it) and noticed it was getting low on a couple of items and another couple were gone. Not a big deal since I have redundant kits, but that is not the idea: If you have it, keep it supplied.

The other hit was a couple of videos of people with serious wounds being treated on the scene immediately. One was a man with a knife being shot by cops and getting treated right there by the police while waiting for paramedics. In both videos, it was not a big ass paramedic bag that appeared all of the sudden but a pocket Mylar packet with the basics for traumatic injuries. Something similar to this one I have:

When I got around to have a EDC-FAK (Every Day Carry First Aid Kit) I overdid it. No matter how you slice it, that sucker is going to grow to the point where you won’t carry it or have nearby. The I realized that my mistake was on trying to cover all what could happen and be ready for it, which you need to do but do not need carry with you all the time. Not making sense? You might be right, let me explain: I split the contents into two categories: “Oh shit!” and “Damn It”.

“Oh Shit!” is the bad stuff, arterial blood pumping, victim screaming in serious pain and 911 on the phone. “Damn it.” is the small cuts and burns that come with every day life. I split my items and separated them into two different containers. Those in the Damn It are the most used (unless you are in a war zone) such as band aids, over the counter pain killers, split removers, etc.

These are small boxes under $10 that have the basics and can be refilled with little cost. You can have one at work in your desk, specially if you are “that guy/gal” that gets asked every time if you have a couple of aspirins or somebody comes to you with a bleeding finger. Its other function is to keep people away from your “Oh Shit” kit which is a trauma kit.

The contents may vary according to your needs and more importantly, to your training.  It is your responsibility to make sure to renew the items with an expiration date with fresh ones and to keep this kit where is out of the way from prying eyes or you will have people come and make a mess of your carefully stacked bag looking for a band-aid.

The problem with the Trauma Kit is obviously the size. Carrying it back from your car to your office gets tiresome and you risk people getting into it. But leaving it in the car may not address that immediate need for trauma care that can suddenly appear. So the solution may be the  Trauma Pack by QuikClot mentioned first in this post. At 7.8 x 1.5 x 6.5 inches and 4.5 ounces, it can be carried comfortably or have hidden in your desk only to come out when you really need it.

The one thing I would add to the trauma pack is a 5 inch dowel in case you need to come up with a tourniquet. In ancient times, I would have told you to use a pen, but nobody but we Old Farts use pens anymore and Smart Phones are great to take notes and do a myriad of things, but the suck at tightening a field-improvised tourniquet . Under $20, get two or three trauma packs. Keep one in the center console of your car, one at work and one around the house as minimum. Do the same for the Damn it kits and you should be covered for about 90% of all incidents.

Get training, that is important. Unfortunately most first aid training nowadays consist on compressing the chest of a heart attack person while following the beat of a disco song or yell really loud “keep pressure on that wound!” If you have friends that are paramedics/EMTs, ask them to train you in the basics to keep somebody alive until help arrives and mores specifically to keep that person alive during the Golden Hour because you cannot bet on Paramedics to arrive in five minutes and the day you do need to use you stuff and your training, the ambulance will be at least 30 minutes away.