They Blamed a Child

So, this Ohio dad found out his eleven year old daughter was being groomed by a dude on the internet, and manipulated into creating and sending sexual images of herself to the perp. He did what any of us would do (provided we didn’t have an address for the perp… lots of options when you know that… but I digress): he called the police.

Watch the video. I cannot EVEN. The cops say, and I quote, “I mean, she could probably get charged with child p*rn.”

I’m sorry, the ELEVEN YEAR OLD?

First, under the age of consent in a state (generally around 16, tho a bit higher and lower in various places), a child cannot consent. Therefore, they can’t be involved in sexual things by choice. Second, the unknown male perp should be getting charged with something, that’s for sure, and those cops should have been asking questions about him! Third, I don’t know that I’d have had the calm that father did, in just shutting the door and walking away. Good f’ing grief.

For those who may not know, CSAM means Child S*xual Abuse Material, and it’s a term used to differentiate between porn (which is legal and done between consenting adults) and child abuse (which cannot be consented to).

For as long as I’ve been scouring Twitter’s entertaining #GunSense tag, any time I’ve come across a phony “mom” demanding “action” (or worse, a real mom so resigned to being helpless that she’s actually emdangering the only things on earth she ought to risk it all to save), I’d typically just seagull the thread long enough to poop out the following image. It pretty much sums up Bloomberg’s city-dwelling, terrified, out-of-touch, vaguely female clientele and its uniformly uninformed opinion about safety and defense:

I dont know who came up with that, but it’s a classic. And like most classics, there’s now a remake with better special effects and a bigger budget, plus some corporate product placement for good measure. And unlike the sewage pouring steadily out of Hollywood, this one’s actually better than the original (or at least as good). Save it to your online ammo box and hit ’em where it hurts:

Delicious.

Hat tip D. Mike.

Oh, Apple.

A while back, the company dipped its toe into the #GunSense* arena by banning images of firearms from game previews inside its App Store, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue for developers of popular first-person shooters, side-scrollers, military-themed strategy games and, ultimately, Apple itself. Since money trumps phony morals, that particular policy was deep-sixed faster than a disarmed serf** on a French promenade.

Now, following news of Tim Cook’s $50,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for the most rabidly antigun Presidential candidate this side of ever, Apple’s taking its anti-rights acitivism one step further: The company is getting rid of the kinda-sorta-realistic revolver emoji and replacing it with a neon green water gun.

A freaking water gun!

From Popular Science:

On its website, Apple says it wants to “ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere.” And with millions of people using emoji in their daily communications, even the smallest changes will have significant impacts on our conversations. Apple’s stances on emoji can’t help but have political ramifications, in other words.

In this case, the change to the squirt gun emoji comes two years after a social media campaign called #DisarmTheiPhone was launched by advocacy group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, with the goal of pressuring Apple to drop support for the revolver emoji.

Previously, Apple was reported to have pressured the emoji masters of the universe —the Unicode consortium, an international standards body — to drop plans to add a rifle emoji to the set.

Derp.

OK, two things:

One, Popular Science is attributing this decision to the wrong entities, essentially declaring victory for the so-called #DisarmTheiPhone “movement” and its partner group NYAGV. In reality, #DisarmTheiPhone was and remains a trivial Twitter hashtag campaign that was abandoned about a week after it launched.

Similarly, the association alleged to be behind it likely had zero influence on Apple’s decision (potential Bloomberg puppet strings notwithstanding), as this is a change that’s been a long time coming for the California company. As noted, Apple is and has been consistently antigun, terrified of individual responsibility and self reliance in the interconnected world its future profits depend so dramatically upon. There is globalism, and there is tech globalism. It’s a tossup as to which version is more patently stupid.

Two, while this move will have no impact whatsoever on its PC purpose to “reduce gun violence,” it does have the rather insidious potential to make light of a serious matter in the minds of hundreds of millions of children and young adults the world over. See, water guns are toys. Kids point them at their friends and pull the trigger. But real guns — for which this naive nonsense will be substituted in the Pictionary-style communication that is emoji — are not toys. Far from it, firearms are potentially dangerous tools, deadly to the innocent when used improperly. And that improper usage, on a very basic level, is all Apple is encouraging with this move. When Johnny 10-Year-Old, raised on emoji and iDevice, finds a bright green gun or some zombie-themed Hornady hollow-points, he might not take those things too seriously. Indeed, like all such efforts to censor firearms from public consumption, the sole upshot (hopefully not into some poor kid’s developing brain) is the creation and curation of ignorance. Abstinence — and that’s all this really amounts to — doesn’t make children safer. It makes the taboo more mysterious, more enticing, and less familiar. If you want your kid to get the clap, never teach them about sex. If you want your kid to get banged, never teach them about guns.

Of course, Apple will never truly put its money where its progressive advocacy is. The company won’t ban games or apps where guns feature prominently, and you’ll still be able to buy John Wick and Deadpool from iTunes. Better, you’ll continue to have access to great firearms resources, retail stores, and auction sites through iOS’ Safari browser. Sure, you could protest this decision and boycott Apple (knowing, of course, that Google and Microsoft and Amazon et al. are no better on gun rights), but there is no more poignant mockery of such half-hearted #GunSense than to use the very tools built by these various anti-rights companies against them. Hell, I’m writing this post on an iPad, and I just used my iPhone to order 4000 rounds of remanufactured 124-grain 9mm JHP from Freedom Munitions.

Anyways, now that Apple has banned the scary, deadly, mass-murder-promoting cartoon handgun from its emoji lineup, I think it’s only fitting — and morally consistent — that the company also honor the hundreds of thousands of yearly victims whose deaths are likewise “represented” in the standard emoji alphabet. That is to say, as far as I can tell, Apple at the very least must now get rid of the following:

⚡️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ✈️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ⛪️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

Lightning, explosions, junk food, booze, vehicles, greed, hammers, bombs, knives, tobacco, pills, drugs, drownings, hospitals, doctors, houses of worship, various deadly critters, and hands and feet take countless lives annually, together (and many even separately) dwarfing the roughly 2000 innocents killed each year with firearms.

Worse, if one utilizes emoji combinations, one can get mighty specific about some mighty terrible events. Consider ✈️?? or ?? or ??‍?‍?‍??. How delightfully subversive! We all probably know someone who’s been killed by ??, too. And just recently, ??? made the news.

Looking at that last icon above, a thought occurs: nothing has been more responsible for killing more innocent people over the last (insert huge number here) years than government. Thus, I expect Apple to firmly and boldly address the number-one killer of man in their next update and ban these odious symbols:

?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

I just have one more thing to say:

?***

Footnotes:

*A blending of the term “gun control” and the word “nonsense.”

**I am aware that “disarmed serf” is a redundancy. I just happen to like the way it sounds.

***I dont know if Apple added this emoji for its users or for itself. Both seem appropriate. Up mine? Up yours, Cook and Co.

I like to argue. A lot.

In college, I was invited to join our two-time defending national champion forensics team. Naturally, that involved a trip to D.C., so naturally, I dropped out of school instead.

But I kept arguing.

Except now, I’m not an idiot 20-year-old, and I’ve distilled my focus down to a single issue — the single issue: gun rights.

It’s a good fit.

Too bad it’s mostly a giant waste of time.

After all, the practical outcome of any argument with a #GunSense* advocate is this little beauty right here:

While the above represents perhaps the deepest, most profoundly meaningful treatise on the nature of fundamental human rights and interaction that’s capable of being conveyed in four words or less**, it usually takes an actual living brain on the other side to piece together its multilayered implications.

So Gonzales is and always will be the TL;DR of the never-ending gun debate.

If you’re like me, though, that TL;DR mic drop is considerably less fun than wading waist-deep into the Stupid. You probably view anti-gun zealots on the Internet just as I do: a sort of shooting gallery to test and refine your own logic and internal consistency. They are practice. This series, then, is for you, and in each new part, I’ll be discussing a single debate tactic or gambit typically used by one side against the other. I’ll do my best to present these in order of most to least common, but there’s a distinct ebb and flow to the politics of the day to day that makes that more or less impossible.

Why is this important?

Because even as #GunSense hemorrhages capital and capitols (there is more restored legal support for private firearms carry today than at any time in the last several generations), the ferocious rhetoric of anti-gunners around the country continues to heat up. Much like your typical rifle barrel, the hotter it gets, the less accurate all the blather becomes. As custodians of Gun Culture 2.0, we can’t afford to respond in kind. Rather, we ought to pace ourselves cooly and calmly, refuting every onerous, fallacious claim with unassailable logic, remembering all the while that an argument is only an argument when proper reasoning is the aim. No shooting from the hip here.

So, without further ado, I present:

Argument 1, “The Problem”

• #GunSense claim: “There is a gun death problem in America.”***
• Gun Rights response: “Prove it.”

Okay, yes, that’s a pretty TL;DR rebuttal, but it’s just to get things framed up properly. With something as crooked as gun control, that’s sort of a basic necessity, and it’s best handled at the outset. Indeed, for most claims, this one phrase will almost always be a valid first play. More often than not, the grabber will take the bait and cite the number of “gun deaths” from the latest batch of annual statistics. (Note: It would be apprpriate at any time to simply share a telling chart or two demonstrating the US’ declining “gun death” rates even as private arms ownership is at record highs and climbing, but these will be dismissed as “memes” and ignored outright, sourced or not.) After reminding them that suicide makes up two-thirds of the total and is a perfectly lawful natural right, both sides will settle on an average figure of roughly 10,000 to 14,000 such events per year. In 2015, according to this otherwise disingenuous pile of propaganda, there were approximately 13,500 “gun deaths” in the United States.

While there is no way to reliably qualify or quantify what exactly constitutes a statistical “problem,” it is possible, via some basic arithmetic, to put this seemingly large number into perspective.

First, consider the US population. At the time of this writing, there are an estimated 323,461,940 people living in America. To be conservative liberal, round this down to 320 million.

Now, the math (or “maffs,” for our redcoat friends across the pond):

• 13.5K/320M
  = 0.000042
  = 0.0042%
• 320M/13.5K
  = 23,703.70
  = 23,704
  = 1:23,704

Unlike the raw “gun death” total the antis like to toss around tethered to hysterical, childlike emotion, the above figures are actually contextually rooted. The first equation reveals that only 0.0042% of the US population is likely to die as a result of “gun violence.” That means, as the second equation shows, that any given person on US soil has a one-in-23,704 chance of being killed “by a gun.” Since so many antigun activists claim that “gun violence” is an “epidemic” that should be “treated like a disease” and “studied by the CDC” (more on that delightful bit of backfire in another post), let’s do that, just this once, for the sake of argument:

In medicine, what is the threshold for a disease to be considered an “epidemic”?

An epidemic is defined thus:

[T]he slow spread of infectious disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time, usually two weeks or less. For example, in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic.

The aforementioned “15 per 100K” rate is the most-cited baseline I can find regarding infectious diseases, so let’s go with that. For “gun violence” to be an actual epidemic, the US would need to experience a whopping 3200 “gun deaths” per week. All. Year. Long.

Since there aren’t anywhere near 166,400 “gun deaths” each year in America, “epidemic” is right out.

Hell, by medical standards, even Chiraq’s “gun death” rate is well below the necessary threshold. There were 445 “gun deaths” in Chicago throughout all of 2015. For “gun deaths” to be an epidemic there, there’d need to be 405 per week (for at least two weeks in a row). Not. Even. Close.

Clearly, “gun deaths” are not an epidemic. The bigger question, then, is: Are “gun deaths” even statistically significant?

You already know the answer.

Most mathematical models define statistical significance as at least five percent (0.05) of a given sample/population, but this can vary down to one percent depending on the area of study. From the initial calculations above, “gun deaths” occur at a rate of 0.0042% (0.000042), which is several orders of magnitude beneath either threshold for statistical significance.

In other words, US “gun deaths” are statistically insignificant.

If at this point the target of your overwhelming scientific acumen is still trying to argue (“Tell that to their families!” is not an argument, albeit I’ll write about how to handle that sometime down the road), he or she will posit that it doesn’t matter. He or she will insist that 13,500 “gun deaths” are simply and self-evidently “too many.”

Good.

Here’s your trump card: Respectfully ask them what number of “gun deaths” would be “juuust right.” The savvy-ish remainder will give up here, but a few morons may grasp at straws and, perhaps, cut the number in half.

Good.

Now you bust out this link (or, better yet even, its CDC source) and proceed to explain how approximately 80% of all “gun murders” are committed by known violent criminals against other known violent criminals (usually in gang- or drug-related events). Be sure to ask why it’s a “problem” that hoodlums and gangbangers are killing each other. Since there is no viable answer for this (unless it comes from the smelliest, flower-in-their-hairiest, most emaciated hippie on the face of the Earth), you can successfully and legitimately reframe the argument around the new number of “gun deaths” of innocents: 2700.

Reworking the original math, that leaves us with:

• 2.7K/320M
  = 0.0000084
  = 0.00084%
• 320M/2.7K
  = 118,518.52
  = 118,519
  = 1:118,519

In the US, “gun deaths” of innocent people are even less of a “problem,” way less of a epidemiological imperative, and way, way more statistically insignificant.

Oops.

But dont despair — the antigun parrot will come to the conclusion that “even one gun death is too many.”

Congratulations, you’ve won the debate.

But #GunSense will never give up, so we won’t either. I just need to decide whether to cover “militia” or “nukes” next week.

*Linguistically speaking, #GunSense is a blending of the term “gun control” and the word “nonsense.” Logically speaking, it’s a redundant, pathetic portmanteau, more French**** in spirit than even the word that describes it.

**Technically, “molon labe” gets the same point across in only two words, but that serf language, like most serf things, is dead and irrelevant.

***#GunSense drones will almost always say “gun violence problem” when they actually mean “gun death problem,” as all of their citations will invariably focus only on deaths rather than total casualties. For the one antigun activist you ever meet that actually gives a shit about the people who dont die from their wounds, you might want to adjust this article’s math a bit. Obviously, this will not change the thrust of the argument’s general conclusions.

****I will stop***** ridiculing the French continent the moment its subjects sack up and wrest power back from the overlords that disarmed them.

*****Continue

I managed to tick off a South Florida Intellectual. As expected, he did not like what I had to say and soon enough succumbed to stereotype and I am now officially a Cracker. Must be the Pro-Second Amendment thing.

Actually, I’m not absolutely sure that this guy is in South Florida but if I were to take a guess, I would say Homestead/Redland or Western Palm Beach County.

Prejudice some? Do I have to be a White Guy that flies the Confederate Flag in his pick up truck with naked chick metal cut-outs in the mudflaps? The thought that I might be from Hialeah or Little Haiti or Doral never crossed your mind ? That happens when you do not take the time to find out about the person behind the blog or read the blog a bit or even care to check the About page. Then again I bet Rick spends most of his time trolling for dates between the Coconut Grove and Washington Avenue while trying to get a glimpse of the stars of Burn Notice.

Anyway, I wanna thank Rick for providing to my readers a living South Florida Intellectual for their examination and you may now return to your air-chin-hold.

Oh, and allow me to return the favor of a prejudiced visual: This should look like you.

And if you don’t like the fact that you have to share your breathing air with people that do not commune with your Hipster way of life (which incidentally are no Hipsters left , they mostly died of heroin overdose in the 50s) , there is always the recommendation by one of my readers:

Apparently I am insane if I kill somebody defending myself. Or defending my loved ones. Or if a Police Officer saves their miserable lives. And we already know what they think of our Military Service Men and Women.

UPDATE: The most hated piece of software for VPC and CSGV has to be Snipping Tool. VPC removed the Peter Druat’s comment….but a wee bit late.

Dear VPC: Just because you shooed away the flies, does not mean the turd is less disgusting.

Two Miami Dade Police Officers, one male and the other female died today while serving a warrant. Details are few at this time but the eventual media frenzy is at high pitch. At this time we only know that Officer Roger Castillo is dead and the female Officer’s name has not been released.

Earlier I saw a quick press conference with Miami Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez (MAIG) and I can swear I heard a reporter asking about the weapons used. Mayor Alavarez did not have information or was respectful enough to keep his mouth shut. If I was not a very suspicious person, I would leave it as curiosity but I have the feeling he was fishing for either the words “High Capacity Magazine” or “Assault Weapon.”

BOHICA.

UPDATE: The officers who gave their lives were Roger Castillo and Amanda Haworth. Say a prayer for them.

UPDATE 2: Watching a Press Conference now (4:15pm) According to MDPD Director John Loftus, the weapon used was a handgun. He refused to provide any details. Journalistic sails deflated. Loftus is obviously mad as hell and looks like he is 3 seconds away from beginning a general bichtslapping against journos. In his defense, every kind of stupid question has been asked and repeated over and over.