Gun Free Zone

J. Kb. sent me a hashtag to check out #TrumpKillsFlorida.

In case you don’t recognize the author/copier of the tweet, that is our Florida Grim Reaper who has been walking the beaches and open spaces of the state for over 6 weeks warning us of the upcoming mass deaths because freedom.

It is a mixture of President Trump selecting Florida for the Republican Nomination soiree and demonizing DeSantis because the Wuhan V infections detected have increased in numbers since testing has been expanded to every Floridian over 18.

So, are you as a Floridian ready to die? I mean, there must be some sort of Government conspiracy where Trump and DeSantis are injecting a new 99% deadly version of the virus in our systems while we sleep right? We were warned a month and a half ago when the state opened that we would be see dead dropping 2 weeks later!

From the Pro Trump & Ultra conservative Newsweek:

The thing is after six weeks of opening, Florida’s numbers have been steady with a slight tendency to drop.

Florida was never near in the neighborhood of critical for number of beds or ICU beds or ventilators with only 14,354 hospitalizations since this thing began.  But you will hear that we have less beds now than before the opening and that is true, but it also indicates that hospitals are back to doing regular business and taking care of non-emergency procedures that had been ignored and now have a huge backlog to take care of.

We are going to keep hearing more and more over-the-top things from the Democrats till the elections are over in November. You still run a 97% chance of survival if infected with Kung Flu and any horrifying end-of-the-world crap is just political grandstanding.

Tucker Carlson Tonight is the one media opinion show I’ll watch.  He is good about covering stories that nobody else in the media will.

That doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says, and for the last few days he’s been on a tear about Republicans who want to help revise the law on qualified immunity.

Tucker’s accusation is that they are closet Leftists or have been compromised by Koch Brothers’ money.

I don’t know about those politicians specifically, but I know that I have never taken a dime from the Koch Brothers and am not a closet Leftist and I want to revise qualified immunity.  My friends are generally not Leftists and they haven’t taken Koch Brothers’ money either, and they also are against qualified immunity.

I understand the point Tucker is trying to make about qualified immunity protecting officers who have to make tough decisions in the heat of the moment.  I also understand that qualified immunity doesn’t attach in criminal acts.

The problem is that there is a wide area in between these two scenarios where qualified immunity overprotects officers who have engaged in what can only be described as gross negligence.

Let’s start with the case of Leo Lech.  An armed shoplifter broke into his house and barricaded it against the police.  SWAT was called in and after a 19-hour stand-off, the SWAT raid did so much damage to the house that it was condemned and destroyed.  The damage was valued at $580,000 but insurance only paid $345,000, leaving Lech with $235,000 in uncovered damages.  He sued the police and lost.

In Georgia, an officer tossed a flashbang into a crib critically injuring a baby’s face and blowing a hole in his chest.  While the family settled with police, the officer who threw the grenade was acquitted and protected by qualified immunity.

I wrote about the Swatting of Andrew Finch before.  A jumpy officer shot finch at a distance of 35-40 yards with an AR-15 across four lanes of traffic a sidewalk and a front yard in the dark.  Multiple officers were screaming multiple directions without a loudspeaker at that same distance when the officer who had a bad view of the situation fired a shot in a clusterfuck of confusion failed command and control.  That officer was not charged and qualified immunity was attached.

The shooting of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky is another cluster fuck.  She was shot eight times by plainclothes police conducting a no-knock raid at 1:00 am.  Her boyfriend thought their place was being broken into and defended himself with a handgun.  He was shot and Breonna was killed.  Let me repeat, a no-knock raid by plainclothes officers at 1:00 am.  Anyone of us would have looked at three guys in civilian clothes kicking in our door as a home invasion.

Radley Balko of the Cato Institute has covered just how often police engage in no-knock raids and get the address wrong and shoot up innocent people.  The LAPD even has a special team to deal with these sorts of fuck-ups.

I believe that qualified immunity should not protect gross negligence.

As a PE, if I make a mistake of gross negligence and people get hurt or die, I will get sued and perhaps go to jail.

If your surgeon drops some piece of medical equipment on the floor, picks it up, says “five-second rule,” and puts it in you, and you die of an infection, he is personally liable.

Professional law enforcement should do due diligence before a raid and make sure that they get the address right and know if there are kids in the house before throwing stun grenades at babies, shooting innocent people, and burning the house down.

Police shouldn’t get a mulligan for killing someone because they went off half-cocked.

I don’t believe qualified immunity should protect “We shot up apartment 9b instead of 9d, oops.”

It’s not unreasonable to hold officers to a standard of professionalism that we ask other professionals to be held to, namely being personally responsible for major, life-ending fuckups due to carelessness or negligence.

That doesn’t make me some sort of closet socialist that wants to abolish the police.  It makes me someone who doesn’t want to die because some officer didn’t pay attention to the number on the mailbox before taking a battering ram to my door instead of my neighbors.

More news regarding the McCloskeys of St. Louis.

Remember that the mob broke down the locked wrought iron gate to their gated community and down a private drive that was marked as a private street with a no trespassing sign.

The McCloskeys claim that the protesters threatened them.

“One fellow standing right in front of me pulled out two pistol magazines, clicked them together and said you’re next. That was the first death threat we got that night,” Mark McCloskey said.

The mob was estimated to be about 500 people, so the McCloskeys were outnumbered roughly 250 to 1.

Given what other mobs have done, not just in other cities but in St. Louis too, I will give the McCloskeys the benefit of the doubt that they were right to bear arms to protect themselves.

One “recovering libertarian” with the Niskanen Center saw this and decided that citizens exercising their Second Amendment right to protect themselves was too much.

He’d like to think that he would be a tough guy because he knows that he’s not a tough guy.  He’s a God-damned, yellow-bellied, dickless, chicken-shit, fucking coward.

But lets for one-second humor him and pretend his fantasy is real.  The second he charged up the McCloskey’s lawn at them with murderous intent, he absolutely justified one or both of the McCloskeys dumping several rounds into him.

This piece of shit, in his bluster, doesn’t’ realize he completely justified the McCloskeys’ actions on Sunday.

The mob and their supporters want you disarmed and submissive.  If you refuse, they absolutely want to kill you for it.

From CBS News:

Los Angeles County closes beaches for July 4 weekend, citing coronavirus risk

Beaches in Los Angeles County will be closed over July 4 weekend to prevent “dangerous crowding that results in the spread of deadly COVID-19,” the county’s public health department said in a Monday statement. Fireworks will also be prohibited, the county said.

The closure begins just after midnight on July 3, and ends July 6 at 5:00 a.m., the department said. It applies to all public beaches, piers, public beach parking lots, beach bike paths that cross sanded parts of the beach and beach access points.

July 4th.  Independence Day.  And the government shuts down the beaches and all public gathering places near the beach.

Anyone who violates the rule can be fined up to $1,000.

On Independence Day.  For using a public beach.

I don’t see this going over well at all.  It might be time for just a little bit of the ol’ “sic semper tyrannis” thing.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Couple points guns at protesters marching to St. Louis mayor’s home to demand resignation

“Private property!” Mark McCloskey shouted repeatedly at the crowd, as he held a rifle. “Get out! Private property, get out!” Patricia McCloskey pointed a small handgun.

To access Portland Place, the crowd entered through an iron pedestrian gate. The McCloskeys told police the protesters broke the gate to get in.

St. Louis police said the couple had called police for help once they saw the large crowd enter Portland Place. The McCloskeys had been at home and heard a loud commotion coming from the street; they went to investigate and saw “a large group of subjects forcefully break an iron gate marked with ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘Private Street’ signs,” police said.

“The group began yelling obscenities and threats of harm to both victims,” police said. “When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves and contacted police.”

Here is the good news:

Anders Walker, a constitutional law professor at St. Louis University, said that although it’s “very dangerous” to engage protesters with guns, the homeowners broke no laws by brandishing or pointing weapons at them because Portland Place is a private street. He said they are legally protected by Missouri’s Castle Doctrine, which allows people to use deadly force to defend private property.

“The protesters thought they had a right to protest,” Walker said. “But as a technical matter, they were not allowed to be there … It’s essentially a private estate. If anyone was violating the law, it was the protesters.”

Ultimately this might go before a judge, and we know how political they’ve gotten.  But for now it seems like they have a very solid case for their actions being legal.

Let’s hope the rule of law still applies.

Miguel did a follow up to my post about the couple that stood defense of their property from trespassers.

While I complete and totally support training for firearms owners, this is exactly why I abhorre the idea of mandatory training for firearms ownership.

Some of the comments I saw said that it looked like neither of them had actually used either gun before.

That may be true.

We have no idea how long they owned these guns.  They very well may have been emergency purchasers following the riots less than a month ago.

Putting up roadblocks to gun ownership only harms those who need guns now.

The woman who was threatened by an ex should get training, but it’s more important that she has a gun right the fuck right now to defend herself than after she takes a class next week or next month after she’s been murdered.

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.

We should encourage training.

We should not be condescending and mean to people who for all we know have been gun owners for a handful of days or weeks because their eyes were open to the reality of “you are on your own” since last month.

If you are just concern trolling, please jam you opinion wrist feel up your asshole.

If you are really concerned, find someone who is a new panic buyer and offer to train them for free.

What you shouldn’t do is be “that guy” because you’ve spent years practicing for this moment and they haven’t.   The point is to encourage more law abiding gun ownership and self reliance.  Not shit on people for not looking like a professional fireteam.

I have been curious about knowing if I am the member of the Wuhan V Club and now that the antibody test is available and free in drive-thru places in South Florida, I was ready to take ah hour or two listening to music in my truck waiting for the test.

But with the assholes in the Media using easy-accessible-for-all tests and the obvious raise in positive cases (yet deaths remain low) I figured fuck them if my stats are going to become fodder for their hatchet job.

Then again, the Wuhan V crisis will disappear come November 4, right?