Gun Free Zone

I do believe I have never seen Chuck with a Glock.

David Roberts is a climate writer for Vox, so you know his grasp of science is tenuous at best.

He also goes by the Twitter handle @drvox while fully admitting he’s not a doctor.

The other day he Tweeted this:

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1114243958127775747

Before we get to the post he’s linked to, can we just take a look at what he said.

First, gun ownership to him is a hobby and not a Constitutionally protected civil right.  Being a hobby and not a right, make it easier for him to justify taking it away.

Second, being a social justice Leftist, his use of “rural & suburban white guys ” is clearly intended to be dismissive.  We’re at the bottom of the victim hierarchy, so our rights are effectively null and void

This is an ugly, and historically and Constitutionally illiterate opinion, and I’d expect nothing less from Vox.

So what is the post he linked to?

I’m having a hard time believing that this is real.

If it is real, holy hell, this isn’t the result of normal drills.  This is the result of a 24/7 news cycle and political activism that takes what is still a very unlikely event and turns it into an all consuming nightmare.

Compare the Parkland shooting to this tragedy.

51 killed, including 20 children, in Moore tornado

A powerful tornado roared through Moore and south Oklahoma City on Monday, killing at least 51 people and leaving rescue workers frantically searching for survivors at the devastated Plaza Towers Elementary School in the Moore school district.

The state Medical Examiner’s Office reported that at least 51 people were dead and said the number was expected to rise. At least 20 children were reported dead among the confirmed 51 fatalities.

The high number of deaths was because the building was not structurally rated for an F5 and had insufficient hard spots for children to hide in.

It took a lawsuit for the school district to put in community shelters in the rebuilt school.

Why have we not seen a year long protest in Oklahoma and the rest of the Midwest, led by students and survivors, demanding that FEMA approved tornado shelters be put in schools to provide cover for every teacher and student?

Because CNN doesn’t run a town hall saying that school administrators who didn’t build tornado shelters in structurally unsound school in the the dead center of Tornado Alley have blood on their hands.

Going back to the post, I have a hard time believing it.

There is a laser tag place near us in Huntsville.  The wait to play laser tag is long and the place it is in is doing booming business.

The popping chips bag and door slamming causing kids to cry and dive for cover sounds more like the stereotype of combat veterans with PTSD than kids who have never experienced a shooting reacting to an active shooter drill.

Where this post truly become surreal to me is “you stand up with a group of freshmen and realize that you’re the oldest, you know that you’ll have to die for them.”

What the hell?

Students and teachers crying, telling them they love one another, promising to sacrifice themselves for one other is bizarre.

The end of the past about having notes to be given to your parents if you die or having your cell phone make a noise and that getting your history class killed, again sounds more like what you see soldiers in a WWII movie do before storming the beaches of Normandy or Guadalcanal.

What I feel I should point out is how many of these teachers are supposedly armed with makeshift weapons, e.g, staplers, baseball bats, and prop swords from drama class.

I’m assuming this person doesn’t believe in actually arming teachers, but deep in their heart knows that such makeshift melee weapons are ineffective, which is quite revealing.

“At age of 12 I was told I needed to know who I would die for and that it was okay if it was nobody, that was my decision to make.”

That never happened, I can just about guarantee it.  Absolutely nobody is telling 12 year olds that they have to sacrifice themselves for a friend or classmate.  The whole point of a drill is to practice not dying, not drawing straws to see who would play hero.

Let me say this, I have two children.  I would die for my children if I absolutely had to, but to paraphrase the great General George S. Patton said about war, the object of training is not do die to protect your children but to make the other poor dumb bastard die to protect your children.

This is so over the top I can’t believe it’s real.

But it does fit in perfectly with Dr. Vox’s narrative.

7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children

Schools are now treating mass shootings like tornadoes and earthquakes — disasters beyond their control that students must be prepared for at all costs.

I can’t terribly disagree with that.

A new survey from the Education Department found that 70 percent of schools practice school shooting drills, up from 53 percent in 2008. They’re most common at suburban schools, although they’re generally widespread: 75 percent of suburban schools held a shooting drill in 2013.

They might be doing more harm than good. American schools are safer than they’ve ever been. If the worst happens — someone shows up at a school intending to kill dozens of students — there’s no evidence that having conducted mass shooting drills actually helps.

Note what I have put in bold.  Schools are safer but Dr. Vox says ban guns anyway.

As to the evidence of the drill working, that can only be established through empirical evaluation, which is rare and not something anybody wants to see happen.

Meanwhile, school employees and parents are beginning to complain that the drills themselves can be traumatizing.

Than figure out why the program is doing that and fix it.  We didn’t have kids crying, terrified they would burn to death during fire drills.

Great news: going to school is very, very safe

School shootings seem scarily common. In the two years after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in December 2012, there were 49 shootings at K-12 schools in the US, according to a report from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group; 15 of those shootings killed at least one person.

News coverage gives the impression that schools have become more violent, not less, since the Columbine mass shooting in 1999. But federal data shows the number of students killed at school has actually dropped since the 1990s, even as public school enrollments climbed.

Holy shit, is Vox admitting that the trauma isn’t the risk of the shootings but of the God-Damned, activist, click bait, media filling a 24/7 news cycle with fake news school shootings that never happened.

The risk of a child getting killed by someone else at school in 2011, the last year for which there’s final data, was about 1 in 5 million. That’s slightly less likely than being struck by lightning. (In 2012, Sandy Hook drove up the homicide rate, but it doesn’t seem to have changed the overall trend, according to the Education Department. The Everytown study appears to back this up.)

Wow, that is rate.  So all the gun control pushed after a school shootings isn’t about school shootings at all, it’s just another excuse for gun control (Everytown appears to back this up.)

It’s possible that new safety measures after Columbine, including drills, contributed to the quick drop in the murder rate. But it’s more likely that it’s part of a bigger trend of declining crime and violence at school. The rate of “serious violent victimization” among students — rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault — was about 1 in 1,000 in 2011, down from 1 in 100 in 1995. In 1995, 10 percent of students were victims of some kind of crime at school; in 2011, just 4 percent were.

Most schools.  Florida’s Promise Program schools are just not reporting it.

Still…

Since Newtown, an industry has sprung up to assuage schools’ and parents’ fears: bulletproof whiteboards and classroom door barricades.

And they say the gun industry stokes fears to sell guns.  These people create fear bonfires to sell snake oil and dowsing rods.

An Alabama middle school principal asked students to bring in canned food so that they’d have a weapon if an armed intruder broke into their classroom

That was fucking stupid.  Valley, Alabama is a city of 9,500 people in the middle of nowhere by the Georgia border.  They would have to import a school shooter.

A substantial amount of time, money, and energy is being spent preparing kids to deal with a threat they’ll almost certainly never have to face.

I’d love to know just how many of these active shooter consultants are buddy-buddy with some administrator.

Preparing for something unlikely is the point of disaster preparedness. Most schools don’t burn down or get hit by tornadoes, either, but parents accept fire and tornado drills anyway. The difference is that sheltering in the basement in a tornado or evacuating a burning building in a fire are proven strategies. They don’t always succeed, but they’re the best guidance available.

Tell that to students in Moore, Oklahoma.  Maybe they need to march on Washington to demand funding for tornado shelters in schools.

Students and teachers used to be taught to lock the door, stay away from windows, and wait for help to arrive. Now more than 1,600 schools have been trained on the ALICE method, which suggests fighting back against the shooters instead.

Or we could let teachers who want to carry be armed?  I’d rather one teacher with a 38 in an ankle holster than all the students armed with Succotash.

Teachers have complained that they’ve been physically hurt or emotionally traumatized by the ALICE drills, the Wall Street Journal reported in September.

Students are one thing, but teachers need to be prepared for emergencies.  They can say “I didn’t become a teacher to defend my students.”  Well, flight attendants didn’t become flight attendants for the unlikely chance they will be in an airplane crash, but they all get trained in how to respond just in case.  Well trained flight attendants save lives, even if 99.99% of them will only ever serve drinks and snacks their entire career.

National groups of psychologists and school police say the more active, theatrical drills should never be required for all students, and that they can be disturbing for students who have experienced violence in the past.

I can see that.

And nobody knows if any of this will really work in the event of an active shooter. Schools now go into lockdown all the time, usually for threats much more removed than a gunman in the hallway — a nearby bank robbery, or a domestic dispute between two parents. Lockdown drills seem to reliably produce more lockdowns. It’s not clear if they really make schools safer.

So lock downs have been come the boy who cried wolf.

I wanted to go through this article because it so directly contradicts Dr. Vox.

Schools are safer, the problem is the training is crap, driven by media driven hysterics and unscrupulous consultants.

But according to Dr. Vox, the problem is rural and suburban white guys and their hobbies.

See, it’s never about the real issue, it’s about demonizing the gun community and taking away the guns.

Down here in South Florida, we had our Celebrity Behaving Badly moment. Pablo Lyle, a Mexican telenovela actor on vacation with the family, was involved in a road rage event, knocked somebody out and got arrested for battery. He claimed he was defending his family, posted bail and was let go with permission to return to his country. Last I read, he is in Mexico right now.
(I got the wrong info, he is still here. My apologies) But then there was a twist in the case.

The man he hit, died.

And then, video surfaced of the confrontation.

In what should have not surprised me, the video shows the road rage was not targeted at him but the driver. By the information I had heard on the news, I assumed he was the driver, but that is not correct.

The SUV was not left on park or the brake set, so it starts moving forward. You can see Lyle’s feet and what it seems for him to be doing the effort of trying stop the SUV and failing. The argument between drivers STOPS. The drivers turn around and head to their vehicles. THE CONFRONTATION IS OVER. At that time Lyle comes around the car, addresses his driver and goes AFTER the other driver and knocks him out 5 seconds after the initial confrontation was over.

In my IANAL opinion, Lyle is now facing at least manslaughter. And he is lucky the victim was 63 years old or he would have been automatically upgraded to the next felony charge for crimes against the elderly.

If anyone of us would have done that, we would be told by our lawyers to throw ourselves to the mercy of the court.  But Lyle being in Mexico and with the tradition being that the Mexican courts are notoriously reluctant to extradite citizens to the US and Lyle being a celebrity in his country, I do believe he will not be facing the music.

He has not left the country as I originally read so, he is under house arrest. He was brought to court and prosecutors are asking one million bucks worth of bail, surrendering of his passport, GPS monitor and he signed a waiver of extradition (which truthfully, it ain’t worth the paper is printed on for Mexican courts). His lawyers are arguing it is too much and he is not a flight risk. The judge will make his decision soon, apparently.

Stolen from Alan A.

I am going to tell you  little secret: In politics, OPTICS MATTER.

It strikes me as amazing that the Civil Rights group that was first successful to use the Internet to network and coordinate the fight for gun rights, is now so behind when it comes to Web design.

I am just going to address Florida Carry  and Florida Sport Shooting Association because they are both local and I belong to both.

These are their main pages:

.

I am pretty sure that whomever designed the sites, has since then graduated from high school and probably is married with kids by now. Both pages need a serious makeover as soon as this legislative session is over.

And yes, I  know: Social Media is more important and blah-blah. But people will always end up visiting website for the substance of the organization. We cannot afford to look as if we are a forgotten site from GeoCities or MySpace, specially when domain names and hosting packages are so cheap nowadays.   If Dudley’s clone page for Florida looks halfway good, the true Gun Rights organizations have no excuse to look like After-School projects from the Clinton Era.

Come on! Even this blog looks better!
No wonder we are not being taking seriously. We are the internet equivalent of the weird old uncle still wearing his 70’s leisure suits for Thanksgivings.

For a group of people whose biggest joy would be to buy almost every single new gun and gadget that is presented during the SHOT show, we seem to have no problem with decades old web design  still representing us.

Exaggeration is not a new thing when it comes to guns.

From April 7, 1994 till July 1994, an estimated 600,000 human beings were massacred with mostly farm hand tools. Possibly the biggest failure of the United Nations and in my opinion it killed whatever credibility they had to ensure or at least try to stop evil in the world.

“We are as Peace Keepers, not as Peace Makers.”