Shannon Watts tweeted this yesterday and I forgot about it till just now.

Now, apparently being arrested equals being a bonafide violent felon for Shannon, so I could not help myself and tweaked a bit with the screen capture:

And…

and closed with:

Can I get hired as Social Media Specialist somewhere? I know I can do a better job that the Bloomberg-backed expert here.

The Nationwide Superbowl commercial managed to piss a lot of people off.  It is a good, poignant and creative ad, but the Superbowl might have not been the proper event to have it aired. We can discuss consequences in a bit.

But what was not unexpected (at least for me) was the reaction of the Gun Control cavalcade and specially Shannon Watts:

I love the misuse of cancer statement. Their own report says that about 100 kids, zero to fourteen die of accidental shootings (their estimations, not the lower official CDC numbers which is lower), while the American Cancer Society estimates 1,350 cancer deaths for the same age group. And let’s take into account we are comparing dissimilar causes of death

Mother Jones magazine happened to tweet about the ad, but failed to mention guns so they incurred in Shannon’s ire:

Now, there is no doubt that the ad generated a lot of talk and conventional wisdom says that it is a good thing, specially in this age of Youtube where replays of the ad will be done for free without the company having to buy more air time than needed. But there is such thing as negative attention or basically people in big numbers disliking the company because of the commercial; one thing in becoming famous and another is becoming notorious. Everybody knows both Mother Theresa and Charles Manson, but they are not necessarily transmitting the same message.

There is a palpable need to be first in this era of instant message delivery. But for somebody who worked so many years in PR, mistakes like this one are inexcusable.

But fanaticism will make you do stupid stuff and I don’t mind that.

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FLINT, MI (WNEM) –
Police officers have many tools of the trade. The shotgun is one of their most deadly tools. But a recently completed inventory audit, the first the Flint Police Department has completed in 12 years, turned up some troubling results. Twenty shotguns are missing.

“You ask yourself, how could that happen? It’s the police station, the utmost security in Flint. How is something like this possible?” James Lloyd said.

“Could be just an accounting error or whatever, but of course, I don’t want to see more guns on the street,” Claire Holton said

via Audit finds 20 shotguns missing from local police department – WNEM TV 5.

Not implying that there is a conspiracy within the Flint PD to sell big boomers to gangs, but there is a certain pattern of carelessness by law enforcement about how they secure their firearms including the one federal agency in charge of guns.

If you do a Google search for guns stolen from police cars, your hair will stand on its end at the amount of returns….and that is if you consider that those are the cases that make it to the news.  And just a reminder that some of those weapons are truly, honest to God, full auto Assault Rifles.

Not specifics for this case other that was done during holstering/un-holstering (yeah, that specific.)

In my opinion, most of these type of injuries occur while re-holstering the sidearm. For some reason, there is this thing where we are supposed to put the gun back as fast and as tactically good-looking as possible which is not needed. Let’s be clear, if you are done shooting, speed is no longer of the essence: take you very slow time and reholster safely.  

And if you have not figured it out, another bog part of a safer reholsteing is minding where the muzzle is aiming. The person above might have avoided the injury created by finger violation if the muzzle was aiming at something other than a body part. Never aim at anything you are not willing to destroy.

I think the issue is that many people see advanced shooters and confuse economy of movement with speed. They make it looks so easy, so smooth that appears fast when in reality it is not.

Although a video in never a substitute for good training, this one will give you an idea of how to perform a good drawing and reholstering so you can minimize surprise ballistic body modifications:

Be safe!

With the exception of a couple of ads, they pretty much were “meh” or sucked. Even eternal favorite Budweiser failed to deliver with his revisiting of the Horsie/Puppy love (My first thought was “Well, the damned dog did not grow from last year, did it?”.)

About the only one that I found funny and creative (not by much) was Snickers taking the “You are not your when you’re hungry” bit to an extreme:

The rest of the commercials were lacking imagination or even preachy/Social Justice BS.

At least the game was awesome… that should count for something. 😀

You know there is an X-Box or other gaming device he is too attached to.