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  • Mass Shooting: 3 Dead, 2 Wounded, in Switzerland

    No assault weapon involved:

    A man armed with an old military rifle and a handgun shot and killed three women and wounded two men in a southern Swiss village, police said Thursday.

    Police shot and wounded the suspect after he threatened to also shoot officers who arrived at the scene after the shooting in the village of Daillon on Wednesday evening, said interim cantonal police chief Robert Steiner. The gunman was then arrested.

    Steiner said the suspect was using a military rifle that was once standard issue in the Swiss army during the first half of the 20th century.

    via Fox News.

    What?  The guy was using a 60 year old rifle?  How can that be?

    I mean, it couldn’t have a high-capacity mag., or a flash suppressor, or a multi-position stock.  So it would not have been banned under any “assault weapons” ban.

    Is it time to admit that banning assault weapons will not work?

  • Shot vs. Shot & Killed – The Miracle of Modern Medicine

    This post was originally drafted in April.  Bare with me… very current story cited below.

    I’ve mentioned before that the shooting to death ratio appears very low to me. Crime stats over at Crime in Chicago suggest that in 2011 2,217 were shot, with 441 dead – 19.9% (ratio of 5:1.)  So far in 2012 we have 2,670+ shot, 532 dead – 19.9% (ratio of 5:1.)  What I have been looking for, and cannot could not find, is what these numbers were in 1975, 1985, and 1995.

    In the book Can Gun Control Work, James Jacobs writes in a footnote on pg 8 that, “Nonfatal gun injuries are complicated to compute.  Gary Kleck reasonably estimates the ratio of nonfatal gun wounds to gun fatalities at 3:1 during the 1990’s.”  Jacobs suggest we see Point Blank by Gary Kleck.  A search of Point Blank on Google Scholar does not yield that ratio.

    In 1991 Chicago has 927 homicides.  If the 3:1 ratio Kleck cites is accurate that means around 2,781 people were shot in Chicago in 1991.  That’s damn near the exact number we had last year!!

    Neat speculation but nothing scientific.

    Enter today’s WSJ:

    The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent.

    Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.  …

    In other words, more people in the U.S. are getting shot, but doctors have gotten better at patching them up. Improved medical care doesn’t account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.  …

    “Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn’t save even 10 years ago,” said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.  …

    At the same time [that homicide deaths are declining], medical data and other surveys in the U.S. show a rising number of serious injuries from assaults with guns and knives. The estimated number of people wounded seriously enough by gunshots to require a hospital stay, rather than treatment and release, rose 47% to 30,759 in 2011 from 20,844 in 2001, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. The CDC estimates showed the number of people injured in serious stabbings rose to 23,550 from 22,047 over the same period.Mortality rates of gunshot victims, meanwhile, have fallen, according to research performed for The Wall Street Journal by the Howard-Hopkins Surgical Outcomes Research Center, a joint venture between Howard University and Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, 13.96% of U.S. shooting victims died, almost two percentage points lower than in 2007. (Earlier data used different standards, making comparisons useless.)

    GunsShotDeaths_WSJ

    So there!!  I knew I was on to something.

    So the next time Rahm and McCarthy are out running their gums about how “safe” everything is and that “crime is down, crime is down!” Now you know that maybe some crime is down… but the odds of getting shot in this town are just about the same as they were in 1991. … Which is not very good at all.

  • 5 Found Shot in French Alps

    NOTE:  This is a story from 09/05/2012 that was stuck in the “draft” folder.  Still as timely as ever.

    French authorities say five people, including a teenage girl, have been shot in a forest in the Alps. All five were initially reported to be dead. The teenage victim is now reported to be in critical condition in a hospital, according to a local prosecutor.

    An official with the regional administration for the Haute-Savoie region says three of the bodies were found in a BMW registered in Britain.

    The Sipa news agency says the girl was found alive with bullet wounds on a forest road.

    It happened in a forest near Chevaline, near Annecy lake, in Haute-Savoie.

    The initial reports said a cyclist discovered the girl, the three bodies in the car and a fourth body, of a cyclist lying nearby.

    The identity of the victims is unclear. The British Foreign Office says it is aware of reports of the incident and is looking into it.

    via Fox New York.

    Wait a minute… how is that possible?  I mean, guns are just about completely outlawed in Europe (the Swiss being the notable exception.)

    It appears that no matter how strict the gun laws become there will always be some nut who’s willing to break the “Gun Control” law.   i.e.  to rob or kill.

  • Obama Voters’ Gun Problem

    Obama voters are killing each other

    Chicago’s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore’s murder toll has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.  …

    … It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.

    Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war or decades of tyranny.

    But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be New Orleans which at an incredible 72.8 murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador.

    Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17.

    St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.

    Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.  …

    Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle which is agonizing over its 26 murders. That’s about the same number of murders as East St. Louis which has only 27,000 people to Seattle’s 620,000.So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell ahead of Zimbabwe and Rwanda?

    A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

    Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

    America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

    via Front Page Magazine.

    A fine read as to what’s really happening on the streets.

    The fact of the matter remains that Democrats cannot control their own.  They are crime ridden to the core; they do not believe in the rule of law.  Obama himself simply ignores laws he doesn’t like.

    Crazy.

     

     

  • Run, Hide, Fight — Have an Active Shooter Plan

    From the Alabama Dept. of Homeland Security.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ESNae7OoyM]

  • How Liberty Dies

    People who wanted a little bit of security in lieu of liberty.

  • Propaganda Alert from The Associated Press

    Shear propaganda as written by the White House in an attempt to create some news:

    President Barack Obama has signed into law a five-year extension of the U.S. government’s authority to monitor the overseas activity of suspected foreign spies and terrorists.   ….

    The law does not apply to Americans. When Americans are targeted for surveillance, the government must get a warrant from a special 11-judge court of U.S. district judges appointed by the Supreme Court.

    via The Associated Press.

    This is of course the White House trying to move the news off of Hillary not testifying on Benghazi, Eric Holder selling guns to Mexico yet Obama now saying those guns should be illegal anyway (I guess to prevent Holder from selling any more to Mexican drug cartels,) and the ever present fiscal cliff.

    Lest we forget, Holder is the guy who said that the U.S. government can kill you without so much as a hearing or trial.  So forgive me but it’s more than just a little out of place for the same people to now try to make a big deal over taping some phone calls.

    “Don’t worry.  We won’t read your emails and tap your phone without a court order. … But, we can drone bomb your ass to kill you and your entire family based on the opinion of some nameless person in the administration who thinks you’re a threat.  Ya, we don’t need a court order for that.”

  • Sea Turtle Meets A Scuba Diver

    Very cool video:

    Sea turtles do the cutest things. In this video posted to Reddit, a friendly sea turtle pays a surprise visit to a scuba diver. At first, the diver pushes the curious animal away with a big shove to its belly. But the turtle persists. The diver quickly comes around and starts to pet its head. Enya’s “Boadicea” provides some nice background music during the entire encounter.

    Researcher Lisa Belskis, a marine biologist for NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center tell us that the the turtle in this video is an adult or maturing male hawksbill turtle.

    The behavior is not unheard of, although it is less typical.

    “There have been many anecdotal reports of male hardshell sea turtles approaching divers attempting to mount them, particularly during breeding season,” Belskis wrote us in an email. “From my personal experience I have found that most often turtles go about their everyday business and ignore divers. If divers notice a nearby turtle it will likely stay still as if hoping its camouflage is working and if pursued by a diver they tend to flee.”

    via Business Insider.

    Click the link above; I’m sorry but WP will not let me embed this video.

  • Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control

    The U.K. and Australia:

    A media frenzy coupled with an emotional campaign by parents of Dunblane resulted in the Firearms Act of 1998, which instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison.

    The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

    Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: “In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.” Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.

    In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.

    -=-=-=-

    With new Prime Minister John Howard in the lead, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, banning all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns and imposing a more restrictive licensing system on other firearms. The government also launched a forced buyback scheme to remove thousands of firearms from private hands. Between Oct. 1, 1996, and Sept. 30, 1997, the government purchased and destroyed more than 631,000 of the banned guns at a cost of $500 million.

    To what end? While there has been much controversy over the result of the law and buyback, Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos, in a 2003 study published by the Brookings Institution, found homicides “continued a modest decline” since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was “relatively small,” with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.

    According to their study, the use of handguns rather than long guns (rifles and shotguns) went up sharply, but only one out of 117 gun homicides in the two years following the 1996 National Firearms Agreement used a registered gun. Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up. They reported “a modest reduction in the severity” of massacres (four or more indiscriminate homicides) in the five years since the government weapons buyback. These involved knives, gas and arson rather than firearms.

    In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.

    via WSJ.com.

    Gun “control” laws in the U.K. and Australia have not made those people safer.  It’s an illusion.  When emotion gets ahead of reason people sacrifice liberty  for the illusion of security — a la TSA — and get neither.

  • UK Doctors’ Called For Kitchen Knife Ban

    Yes, seriously.

    A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

    They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

    The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

    The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

    via BBC NEWS.

    Who’s crazy now?

    Anti-Gun laws in the UK have been an epic fail.

    Anti-Gun laws in Chicago have been an epic fail.

    Anti-Gun laws everywhere have been a failure.

    Yet the left continues to try to take away guns from honest law abiding citizens.  It’s never going to work.  It’s never worked.