Gun Free Zone

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – A man was arrested after police said he robbed a woman at knifepoint and then locked her in a closet as she showed up to work at a Nashville school on Tuesday morning.

According to an arrest report from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD), the call came in for an aggravated robbery just after 7 a.m. on Tuesday, and officers were dispatched to Cameron College Prep on First Avenue South.

The woman told officers that she was approached by 65-year-old William Joe Buford, who was armed with a large butcher knife, as she arrived at work and was forced inside the school gymnasium, the report states. Buford then demanded she give him money, but when she told him she did not have any, he took her car keys, cell phone, earbuds, and watch.

The woman said that Buford told her, “I’m not going to hurt you, but if you were a white (expletive), I’d kill you.” He locked her inside a closet inside the gymnasium before leaving, according to the report. She banged on the closet door until students heard her calls for help and let her out.

Nashville teacher robbed, locked in closet, police say (wsmv.com)

He is just “oppressed.”

If the Liberals keep feeding the coals of racism, they are going to find themselves having to deal with a bloodbath of their making. The worse part is that in places like Nashville, the victims will probably be inside their voting block.

This is a 99.9% win for the good guys.
(750 Words)

Back in 2015, Maggie Smith filed a class action suit against the District of Columbia.

She alleges that the District had created a total ban on gun ownership and a total ban on carrying outside the home. She points out that the District did this in such a way as to avoid the appearance of a total ban.

The District first put into place laws that required all hand guns and ammunition to be registered. Then they created so many obstacles to registering a hand gun that it became a de facto ban.

In addition, the registration scheme was only available to residents of the District, meaning that it was impossible for people that didn’t live in the city to be able to carry a hand gun.

For those of you that don’t know, DC used to be 100 square miles, 10 by 10. 50 square miles came from Maryland and 50 square miles came from Virginia. When Virginia seceded from the Union, it took back its land. Most of the remaining 50 square miles is filled with office buildings, government buildings, public buildings and some apartments.

There are also the slums.

Most of the people that work in the District commute into the District. They drive to just outside the beltway and then ride the Metro into the city proper. Fast, easy, convenient.

What this means is that most of the people you see in DC don’t live in DC. Under the District’s registration scheme, most of the people who worked in DC had no chance to legal own a hand gun.

Yes, it was that difficult. It made getting a CCW in New York City seem easy.

On Monday, we got some great news.

This is that big of a win because it won’t be appealed. Since both parties agreed to the settlement there is nobody to contest or appeal.

Every so often the good guys do win.

I love this so much.

And they are right. Back in the early 90s, the most popular rifle in the US was the venerable lever action in 30-30. But America has one inherent “problem” in our cultural DNA and that is The Forbidden Fruit Effect:

The forbidden fruit effect describes just this – that items become more attractive simply because they have been forbidden. People are known to be curious about unpleasant or risky stimuli (Hsee & Ruan, 2016; Oosterwijk, 2017).

It was the Clinton’s Administration and Democrat congress who forced upon the country the so-called (and badly designed) Assault Weapons Ban which made gun owners everywhere go”Hey, if DC hates them that much, there has to be something about them I may like about them.”

And thus, suddenly millions of Americans became enamored of the AR platform. It now stands as the most popular rifle in the country and probably with more units floating around than over a century worth of production of lever action rifles.

Every time the Gun Control Clique in Government comes with announcements about how this time, they will pass the final legislation to ban AR 15 and other rifles, more ARs and components suddenly invade the shipping system on their way to private hands, to Citizens’ hands.

I really don’t see an issues with that.

Imagine you are hired to do a job and not only you fail, but you do so in a spectacular and embarrassing fashion. You would expect to be fired, right?

That does not happen if you are in the Gun Control Business:

They begged and got almost a third of a million dollars even after they knew they were dead in the water.

One is born every minute, and they vote and fund for the assholes above.

The alarm went off, I opened my blurry eyes and reached for my phone. Click… click… 03?!?!!?

I started looking. I log into my server from my phone, clicking away to get a status. The database engine is in a crashbackoff loop.

About that time, I noticed that Miguel had contacted me with a very polite 503? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

As I have talked about, I’m upgrading the infrastructure that GFZ uses. The previous round of downtime resulted in me opening tickets with Linode and escalating to the point where less than a week ago I got an update, “We resolved the issue you reported”. They had known about the issue for over a year. It just wasn’t important enough to fix until their client, me, raised a fuss.

One of the side effects of this upgrade process is that I’ve had to increase the number of nodes and the size of nodes. All of that is going well.

It is unclear to me why the database engine crashed, only that it did.

To that end, I have removed that database engine from production. Moved all the data to the larger, more stable, database engine. This database engine is using the new persistent (CEPH) storage engine. While it is not “crash proof” it is less prone to failures because of the way the data is now stored.

In addition, it is much easier to get backups of the data.

I’m going to take the plunge later today and move the assets from the storage it is currently using to the new storage system. This offers numerous benefits, not the least of which is that I can do rolling upgrades of the software.

Yesterday I upgraded ‘WordPress’ on multiple sites. With the new infrastructure being used by some of those sites, there was zero downtime. K8S started a new pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated one of the old pods. It then started a second pod with the new software. When it was stable, it terminated the last old pod. Zero downtime.

For GFZ, using the older infrastructure, the old pod was terminated, the new pod was started, once it was stable, service resumed.

Regardless, I’m hopping for a quiet day.

My wife was at work today at a mandatory staff meeting. They were going to be doing some team building, setting up team goals, and in general introducing management to the staff.

My went to sit down and managed to crush her finger in the moving parts of the folding chair. Instant pain and blood.

Being a trooper, she snuck off to the restrooms, cleaned up the bleeding, bandaged her finger from her IFAK. She reports it was “a lot of blood.” When she got back to the staff meeting, they were doing a team build exercise that required a bunch of standing and sitting.

She decided it wasn’t a good idea to do it. Her supervisor noticed her not participating and asked why. My wife told him that she felt a little woozy. Like she might faint.

Staff noticed my wife turning white, rushed and got her to the floor safely and her head on padding. No clunks. No head bangs. She did pass out/faint.

EMS was called, she came around to EMTs doing their thing. EMTs asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, but they didn’t see anything that required an ER visit. Told her about the local urgent care.

She declined the ambulance trip. Her supervisor sent her home. Which actually meant that I went to get her and youngest child drove the car back.

That’s the end of the setup.

We got the wife into see her doctor. X-Rays done. No broken bones. But she needs the finger splinted. The X-Ray doc wasn’t in to read them, so she was sent home to wait for a call.

At home, we dive into the “comprehensive” medical kit to grab the SAM finger splints. No joy. The medium and large are there, along with the wrap and everything else required. No small splints.

We next hit up the hiking FAK. It is smaller than the comprehensive but still more complete than IFAKs Sure enough, it has the medium and large SAM splints, no finger splints.

Ok, I’m getting irritated. I grab my EDC bag. This bag has an IFAK in it with blowout support. It is not “just” a blowout kit, as it has single dose medications and band-aids and the like. It has a C.A.T. on the top of the kit and an Israeli bandage in the side pocket. Both quick access. The SAM splints are right there. In medium and large.

At that point, I just gave up. Did the Popsicle stick splint, picked up the real deal from the local CVS. Her finger is properly splinted now.

And I have two sets of 3 on the way from Amazon.

The damaged finger was in the in-between space. It wasn’t big enough to be part of my standard inventory process. It wasn’t so small that all the kits had the right gear. It was in the evil Goldilocks zone.

To be clear, if this had been an “emergency” I would have just cut a finger splint from one of the larger SAM splints. That’s an excuse for why I didn’t notice the missing finger splints.

The splints were used when a friend really messed up her thumb. The SAM splints were the only thing that gave the right support, comfortably. We handed her the 3 or 4 we had on hand and expected the replacement. The replacements never showed up.

There is a great deal of thought that goes into our medical kits. They are designed to ramp up. The IFAK on my ankle is not there for anything except blowouts. Stop the bleed, plug the hole, get the victim transported.

The next step-up has more. While the ankle kit has a SWAT-T style of Tourniquet, the blowout kits have CAT TQs or equivalent. ALL name brand and all from a reputable supply house, NOT Amazon.

The next step-up is the car kits. Above that is the group hiking kit. Finally, there is the house kit.

Each step adds more capability and more duplicates. The house kit has a box of gloves instead of the one or two pairs in the smaller kits. It has bottles of OTC medications instead of single dose packets. It has the suture kit and the gear to make a semi sterile work environment.

Am I qualified to use all of that gear? No. Do I know people who are capable and qualified? Yes.

Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul, and Mary told a story about going to Russia with a tourist group. One of the guys in the group approached her and asked, “Should I bring my guitar?” He didn’t intend to offend her by assuming she would be singing songs with them, but wanted to offer. Mary said “sure.”

They make it to Russia and the group is having a fun night and the singing starts. Guy hauls out his guitar and goes to hand it to Mary. She looks at him and says, “I don’t play guitar.”.

She didn’t play guitar, neither did the guy. He just assumed she would be able to use the tool he brought to the rumble.

There are things that are in my kits that I don’t know how to use. That’s fine. If there is somebody that can, I have the tools. There are a remarkable number of highly trained medical people that don’t have the medical gear I have on hand. They know that they will just go to the office/hospital and the gear will be there.

I also have the manuals on how to use these things and the practice gear. If I have to, I’ll learn damn quick.

So go take the time to inventory your medical gear. Replace the batteries while you are at it. Test that all the battery-powered things still function. Compare that list with what you think is in that kit. Update the list to what should be there and restock.

If there are meds that expire, make sure you replace the expired meds.

Then put a reminder to do it next year, this same time. And every year thereafter.

Oh, when you find gear that is expired and needs to be replaced, that is a good time to use the expired gear for training purposes.

Gridlock between House and Senate leadership continued as the Tennessee legislature began the second week of the special session.

The week started much like the last one ended: the House continued passing bills into Monday evening, while the Senate once again adjourned without taking up legislation.
…
Only one bill has been passed by both chambers after more than a week of work: a measure that would require the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations to create a new, updated report on the state of human trafficking in Tennessee. Representatives from the TBI told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that the agency already reports the data to be contained in the new report. The bill is now headed to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk.

Monday evening, after the Senate again adjourned business without considering any legislation, Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, R-Franklin, declared the Senate effectively closed.

TN special session: House, Senate deadlocked as Lee tries to intervene (tennessean.com)

There were the usual demonstrative fireworks brought by the Mommies Demanders and their legislative Liberal Pets, but even they know this session “delenda est.” There are 12 bills (none anti-gun) that the House is pushing with the apparent blessings of the Governor, but short of a legislative miracle, they are going nowhere.

Again, it is a pity that the couple of good bills did not make it, but there is always the next regular legislative session for that. And rest assured the Disloyal Opposition is planning on coming back with the same bull we saw on this session.