Wheels coming off

My post the other day showed a student attacking a teacher for confiscating his cell phone. It is getting worse. Now we have students attacking a school principal in California, and 200 high school students mobbing up and attacking police in Allentown, PA.

We are fast approaching the point of mob rule. As disconcerting as that is, what worries me most is how the government will respond when things get out of hand.

Kids out of control

There has recently been a big deal made out of the South Carolina police officer who was caught on film, throwing a high school student to the ground. The officer was fired within 24 hours of the video being made public, which makes me believe that the firing had m ore to do with politics than the conduct of the officer.
Especially considering that in South Carolina, it is a crime to disrupt school, and against the law for a student to have a cell phone in class.

Law about disrupting class:

SECTION 16-17-420. Disturbing schools; summary court jurisdiction.
(A) It shall be unlawful:
(1) for any person wilfully or unnecessarily (a) to interfere with or to disturb in any way or in any place the students or teachers of any school or college in this State, (b) to loiter about such school or college premises or (c) to act in an obnoxious manner thereon

It isn't just me, the South Carolina Bar has this to say:

Other students have the right to be free from interference in their education. It is against the law for any person to willfully interfere or disturb students or teachers of any school. Disturbing school includes being uncooperative with a teacher or principal, fighting or using foul or offensive language toward a teacher or principal. 

Law about phones:

SECTION 59-63-280. "Paging device" defined; adoption of policies addressing student possession.
(A) For purposes of this section, "paging device" means a telecommunications, to include mobile telephones, device that emits an audible signal, vibrates, displays a message, or otherwise summons or delivers a communication to the possessor.
(B) The board of trustees of each school district shall adopt a policy that addresses student possession of paging devices as defined in subsection (A). This policy must be included in the district's written student conduct standards. If the policy includes confiscation of a paging device, as defined in subsection (A), it should also provide for the return of the device to the owner.

Again, lets see what the Bar has to say:

It is illegal for a student to carry a cellular phone or pager on school grounds or during school events. There is an exception for students needing to carry a cell phone or pager for a legitimate medical reason. There is another exception for students over 18 years old if the student is an active member of a volunteer firefighting organization or a volunteer emergency medical service organization. 

You can disagree with the law all you want, but the law was passed and is in the books, and police are charged with enforcing the law. They are not there to interpret the law, that is the job of the legislature and the courts.

The officer saw a person breaking the law. He told asked the person to comply. She refused.
He then ordered her to comply, and she refused. He tried to take her into custody, and she punched him. All of those things are crimes as well. He didn't do all that much to her, and it appears to me that he did it with the minimum amount of force.

There are those who say that the high school student in question was just a child, and the disagreement was only over a cell phone. Look at the following video to see what happens when one of these "children" doesn't want his cell phone taken away:

That is a video of a 16 year old boy taking down a 62 year old teacher for confiscating his cell phone in class. Why isn't the press reporting on this? The answer is simple: the criminal is black, and the victim is white.

Seen on Facebook

Lesson learned

- How did marijuana get approved for medicinal use in states? The advocates were active, vocal, and visible
- How did that expand to recreational marijuana in  states? They were active, vocal and visible about it.
- How did the civil rights movement gain equal rights for blacks? They remained active, visible, vocal, and did not back down.
- How did the gay rights movement gain rights, including the right to marry? They wee visible, vocal, and active. They never gave in, and didn't remain in the closet.
- How did we get concealed carry in all 50 states? By being visible, vocal, and active
The advocates for marijuana, gay rights, and equal rights for blacks were FAR more likely to be arrested (or worse) by cops than gun owners are at risk of being robbed, yet they remained active and visible. They eventually prevailed. There is a lesson there for gun owners: Remain active, visible, vocal, and do not back down.

Lead paint?

In 1991, the United States had an incredibly high murder rate. There were 9.8 murders for every 100,000 residents. Just the previous year in New York City, 2,245 people were killed. In 2014, just 328 people were murdered, which is an 85% drop. The rate of violent crime in the entire world has been dropping since 1991. The US murder rate is now lower than any year since 1963.

In 1963, the US murder rate was the same as it is now: 4.6 per 100,000. This is less than half the rate from 1991. That year, there were 8640 murders, with the US having a population of 188.4 million. It is important to note that in 1963, it was possible to order firearms through the mail from places like the Sears catalog. Compared to today, firearms were nearly unregulated.

Puerto Rico is a US territory. Until June of 2015, gun laws in Puerto Rico were very strict. They had all of the gun laws that the Brady campaign asks for: permit to own a firearm, heavy restrictions, etc. The Puerto Rican murder rate is among the highest in the world at  26.5. In June, a Federal judge struck down nearly all of Puerto Rico's gun laws as being a violation of the Second Amendment. it will be interesting to see what happens to the crime rate there.

It isn't just murders. The US violent crime rate is now 367.9 per 100,000, which is the lowest it has been since the FBI began keeping track of that statistic in 1994. The entire world has been seeing a drop in crime since about 1990. What is fueling this?

There are numerous theories as to why crime is falling, but many of them fail under scrutiny when you consider that there are many differences between nations. Not all nations have increased their police forces. or have aging demographics. There are a couple that jump out at me: The widespread use of antipsychotic medications, and the banning of lead in gasoline and paint. Levels of lead found in human blood were reduced more than 80 percent from 1976 to 1999.

The effect of lead on children’s brains has been well documented: Exposure to the chemical causes aggressive behavior and cognitive delays. Economist Jessica Reyes estimates that phasing out lead was responsible for 56 percent of the reduction in violent crime (although she could find no relationship between lead and property crime). Experts still disagree about how plausible it is that lead alone could have been responsible for such a massive portion of the crime drop on a worldwide basis.

I think the lead theory has some validity. What say ye?

Anti gunner quote of the day

OcalaMari • 4 hours ago
Hoping their guns back fire right in their blood thirsty faces.

Common Sense • 2 hours ago
If they get enough of them in one area, they'll prob end up shooting each other. Hopefully they don't shoot campers or anyone else.

OcalaMari   • an hour ago
That is my wish for these bloodlust maniacal sickos.

These comments were in response to this news item. We  gun owners are supposed to be the bloodthirsty ones.

Bias of the press

According to multiple news sites, there was a black boy who was suspended for staring at a white girl during a 'staring contest,' the implication being that the school didn't want black boys looking at white girls.
Except that most of the story is a fabrication. The girl wasn't white, she was Asian. There was another boy who was suspended for participating in the same incident. That boy was white. It wasn't a staring contest, because the girl had not agreed to be a part of it. If you walk up to someone and begin staring at them, you are not in a contest. A contest implies that the behavior is mutual.

According to at least one version of the story, the girl was backed into a closet by the two boys during the incident. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati issued the following statement:

“The disciplinary action taken by St. Gabriel Consolidated School a year ago against two students has been widely mischaracterized by a parent who unsuccessfully sued the school. Two seventh-grade males, one white and one black, were suspended for one day because of actions that far exceeded ‘staring.’
The student whose mother sued acknowledged in an apology note, and under oath at trial, that his actions intimidated the female student and made her uncomfortable. That student also admitted that he was not friends with the female student, that he never told her they were playing any kind of game, that he approached her without saying anything, and that when she backed away from him, he moved closer to her. Once that student stopped, the other boy continued with the same routine.
The incident was investigated by the school and all three students were interviewed by two seventh-grade teachers and St. Gabriel’s principal. Ultimately, the boys were given a one-day suspension. St. Gabriel’s parent-student handbook, which the male student and his parents signed and agreed to follow, explicitly lists intimidation as conduct that may result in a suspension.
The parents of one of the male students sued the school in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas. That student, his mother, and St. Gabriel’s principal all testified. Each of the arguments raised by the student’s mother to have the one-day suspension removed from her son’s attendance record were rejected by Judge Patrick Dinkelacker.
It is highly regrettable that some have sought to introduce a racial element into a situation where none existed. The female student involved has been described in some accounts as white. She is, in fact, Asian, a point which the mother of the student who filed the lawsuit learned in November of last year. The other male student (who also received a one-day suspension) is white.”

The parents sued the school and lost, so now they are out there in the media, trying to get some sort of win that way.There are comments to these articles that say staring isn't intimidation or aggression, and that a suspension is an overreaction. I disagree. Watch a lesson of staring intimidation from Mike Tyson:




Yet you hear the left complain that Fox news, Breitbart, and Drudge are all right wing shills for the Republicans, and that the rest of the MSM would NEVER lie to advance an agenda.

Armed guards instead of cops?

The county commission of Orange County, Florida has approved the spending of $150,000 to hire armed guards to patrol neighborhoods. Not police, but armed mercenaries. I have a REAL problem with this.

Only ones

A cop uses his service weapon to win an argument in traffic.

This cop arrested a woman who refused his request for a date, after he approached her in a bar. (Yes, I know this one is two years old) Here is video:




This begs the question: When is it OK to use deadly force to stop an out of control cop?

Laws and cities

There are about 14,000 homicides per year, or about 38 per day, in the US. If you eliminate just ten cities from that total, it becomes just 30 per day.

Those ten cities are: New York with 333 killings, Chicago 415, Detroit 332, Philadelphia 246, Los Angeles 578, New Orleans 150, Baltimore 234, St Louis 159, Washington DC 104, and Indianapolis 135 means that of the approximately 14,000 murders in the US in 2014, nearly 2700 of them- about 20%- occur in just those ten cities.
These ten cities account for just 8 percent of the US population, but account for 20 percent of the murders.

I have blogged about this before. The problem in this country is not with guns- it is with the culture that prevails in certain densely populated cities. Los Angeles alone is responsible for one out of twenty of the murders in this country. It makes as much sense to say that we could reduce murders in this nation be 5 percent, simply by making it illegal to live in Los Angeles as it does to say that we can reduce murder by making it illegal to own firearms.

Secrecy

Normally, I am not a fan of Federal solutions to state problems. I do, however, think that the public has a right to know when and how its police officers are using deadly force. Government should always be transparent when it uses force against its citizens.
That is why I think that police departments in New York and elsewhere should be required to report whenever a police officer uses lethal force against a citizen. They currently do not do this, and I think that a Federal law would be required to make it happen. Let the public that grants the police their powers decide whether or not that power has been wisely bestowed upon those officers. 

Men are the real victims

There is a 17 year old boy at my school. He was at a party a month ago, and he wound up seeing a 14 year old girl there. They committed a sexual act. with the girl being a willing participant. The girl's mother eventually found out, and is furious. She contacted the police and is pressing charges. The boy is being charged with sexual battery, and is facing a possible 10 year prison sentence and a lifetime label as a sex offender.

Florida law says that minors cannot legally consent to have sex. Since both are minors, they are each guilty of sexual battery. Even though the girl cannot legally give her consent, she was a willing participant. I just don't see how society benefits from ruining this boy's life, when both of them were guilty of performing the same act.

FICO lies?

A couple of days ago, I read this post over at Graybeard's place about subprime auto loans. I have blogged in the past about the scam that is credit scoring, and it has been a while since I have revisited the topic, so I figure it's time to do so again.

A prime rate to purchase a new car, according to the car makers, requires a FICO score of around 720 or better. This shouldn't be a problem, since Fair, Isaac, and Company, the company that generates FICO scores, claims that the average score is 695. 

The problem lies in the fact that FICO keeps their scoring algorithm a secret, and there are more than 19 different formulas that provide different scores to rate a borrower's suitability for different products, ranging from buying car insurance to buying a home. Each scoring model places emphasis on different factors. The system isn't as much a rating of your likelihood of paying back a loan, as much as it is a measure of how likely the company is to make money off of you. Big difference. All of this makes understanding the system nearly impossible. 

For lenders, there are different levels of risk. From least risky to most risky, they are: super prime, prime, nonprime, subprime, and deep subprime. Each one has different amounts of risk, and pay different rates and terms. To qualify for a prime auto loan, your score needs to be a 720 or higher. 

In fact, according to this article, loans break down like this:

Super prime: Score above 740
Prime: Score 680-739
non prime: Score 620-679
sub prime: Score 550-619
Deep subprime: score below 550

If 83% of Chevrolet's loans are to customers with a 619 or less, how likely is it that the average credit score is a 695? My opinion is that the average is much, much less than 700, perhaps as low as 600.  As evidence, I bought a car last December, and I got a loan at 2.9% interest, with a 680 credit score. At the time, it was Nissan's best offer. Why would a credit score that is below the stated average garner a prime rate?

Once happenstance, twice coincidence...

Of the three men who stopped the terror attack on the train in France back in August, one of them had the college he was attending attacked by a spree shooter. In fact, had he not agreed to do an interview on the Today show, he would have been there that morning. Skarlatos said he was supposed to be present that day in Snyder Hall, the same building where the shooting took place.

I wasn't the only person to make that connection. The American Thinker did as well.

Now comes news that Spencer Stone, the second American hero who thwarted the attack and was stabbed by the terrorist in the process, has been stabbed again by two unknown assailants.

We are supposed to believe that these two attacks are a coincidence. If I were Anthony Sadler, the third American involved in stopping that attack, I would be watching my back right now.

Agree to disagree? I'd rather not.

With the latest spree shooting, the anti gun forces are out, and gleefully dancing in the blood of the dead, happy for this incident, so they can use it for political advantage, despite the fact that most of what they are pushing for wouldn't have prevented the shooting.

The biggest call I have seen is for background checks. I started by pointing out that there ARE background checks in place, this man owned 13 guns, and according to police, all 13 were legally purchased from a dealer. This means that the man passed 13 background checks, and not one of them caught that he was a potential killer. Oregon already has Universal background checks, which is the exact law that the antis are telling us would have prevented this killing. Background checks just don't work.

He then came back with the statement that, if we had gun registration and purchase limits, the shooter would not have been able to have 13 guns. I responded by asking him how many guns one needs to carry out a massacre, and pointing out that in this case, the shooter only had four guns with him during the rampage. Four is not a large number, so setting the limit that low is rather silly. Such limits would prevent nothing.

He then responded with the old standby of "you have to report to the state when you sell a car, why not a gun?" Here was my response:

 So you say that you want to regulate guns like you do cars, eh?
Registering:
I have to register a car ONLY if I plan on operating that car on public roads. As long as that car stays on private property, I can buy, sell, or trade them without registration or title as often as I please.
Motor vehicles:
I can own as many cars as I want. I can buy them where ever I want. I can buy a Trans Am in Illinois today, and a Corvette in California tomorrow. I can travel to New York and buy a truck.
Even if there IS a title, all the law says that I have to do is sign it over, there is no requirement that I go down to DMV and actually register it, unless I want to operate it on public land or roads.
I can make my own automobile. I can give it the engine I want, the fuel tank I want.
The car I own can be a race car, it can be automatic, it can be manual, it can have 100 seats, or no seats.
That car can have a small fuel tank or a large one.
Licensing:
Licensing is only required to OPERATE a car on public streets, not to OWN a car.
Any 16 year old in the country can get a license to drive a car.
The license that I get in Texas allows me to drive a car on any street in the country, even in New York. It must be accepted by all 50 states.
The license allows me to drive on school grounds, on government installations
I don't even need a license, as long as I only operate the car on private property.
If I get caught driving without a license, I only pay a small fine.
No criminal background check is required for a license- felons, child molesters, all sorts can get a license.
Guns are FAR more regulated than cars.

The reason that I am against so-called universal background checks is that this would outlaw a person selling his or her own guns, loaning them to a friend or family member, or any other means of transferring ownership, no matter how temporary. Meaning that I would then have to pay a dealer to handle the transaction, assuming any of them would.

Currently, if I want to send a gun to someone out of state if I sell a gun on the Internet, that is how it has to be done. The two dealers involved (one in this state, one in the receiving state) each charge $50 on average to handle the paperwork. The person on the receiving end has to fill out the same forms and go through the background check. No loophole there. This would still not prevent gun ownership by criminals, who get their guns on the black market. The only way for such a scheme to work, then, would be nationwide registration. There is only one way that this would then go: confiscation.

He then said, so the only reason you don't want to register guns is personal inconvenience and a little money? That isn't a good reason. He then said that we would have to agree to disagree.

I refuse to "agree to disagree." That is stupid. Suppose I came out and said that men should be able to freely rape women, or we should be able to own slaves. Would he still want to "agree to disagree?" When someone says that to me, it comes across as some smarmy, superior attitude that basically says "I am smarter than you, and I am your better, but since you, with your obviously inferior intellect, cannot see reason and agree with me, I will simply smile at you, and tell you that you have a right to your opinion, you simpleton."

I won't “agree to disagree” in this conversation or in others, because “agree to disagree” is an incredibly lazy tactic. It ranks up there with “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” among the pantheon of dishonest and self-defeating statements made in lieu of actual argument. I cannot heap enough contempt on the idea of “agreeing to disagree.”

The argument could be useful, I suppose, if it meant no more than what it says – mutual recognition of a disagreement. Some arguments are intractable – issues of personal taste or the subjective importance of certain values cannot be resolved empirically. In an argument like that, once both sides have expressed themselves as clearly as possible, if there is still no agreement then there is nothing left to do but acknowledge there is a disagreement, and leave it at that.

That is not, however, the sense in which I most often hear the phrase “agree to disagree” used. What is usually meant is “we’re both equally right, both equally wrong.” It is an arch-liberal dodge, invoking the most ludicrous type of relativistic equivocation. If I am holding a flamethrower and you are holding a lit match, it is true that we can both start fires, but pretending that we can just “agree to disagree” about which is better suited to the task of lighting a candle is nonsense.

Two positions, one demonstrably true and the other based on nothing more than feelings, do not share the same level of validity. If we can agree on some basic definitions like “true” and “evidence”, and if we can agree that it is important to have true beliefs rather than false ones, then we can and should examine different ideas. While it might be nice to pretend that this kind of dispute is simply a difference of opinion, it most certainly is not. I refuse to pretend that a poorly-argued position, based on straw men refutations of legitimate questions, holds sufficient validity to be granted any more respect than belief in aliens or the Loch Ness monster.

When a person claims that they wish to "agree to disagree" is really saying is, “I want you to agree that my position has just as much merit as yours”, and I am certainly not interested in engaging in masquerading a clear true/false dichotomy as a simple difference of perspective. Truth is not established easily, and that’s a good thing. In a universe where an infinite number of explanations for a given phenomenon are conceivable, we must scrutinize and test to see which ideas are worth keeping and which can be discarded safely. “Agreeing to disagree” is simply asking to lump the good ideas in with the fanciful or debunked ones in some misguided sense of fairness.

Some things are simply so repugnant, and so against freedom and decency that I cannot agree to disagree. The point here is that we live in society that claims to value freedom. There are always those who would abuse those freedoms and hurt others. We do not punish the innocent and take away the freedoms of the 99.9995% who didn't break the law last year and shoot someone illegally in order to stop that 1 person in 500,000 who might. So instead we, as a nation, wait for someone to commit a crime and then we punish them. This principle is the rock upon which we build our society. The alternative is to become the sort of totalitarian regime that we have always fought against, and begin punishing people based upon our belief of what they MIGHT do someday.

There are more than 99,988,000 gun owning people every year who do NOT use their firearms to commit murder. We don't punish the innocent in order to catch the 12,000 who are guilty.

It has been demonstrated again and again that gun control doesn't work. Background checks don't work. So why continue to do something that doesn't work and deprives people of liberty, instead of looking for real solutions? In this situation, no amount of background checks would have prevented the shooting. The person in question went through those background checks 13 times, and not once was he denied. Background checks failed, as they usually do.

There is no way to predict when or if a person will snap and go crazy. There is no department of precrime, and we are not in the land of the movie "Minority Report" and I would not wish to be.

It isn't about inconvenience, it is about FREEDOM and LIBERTY and the very ideal upon which our nation is based. We have freedoms and liberties, and anyone who would take those away for an ideal Utopian idea that we can prevent murder, an ideal that can never be reached, is against the very foundation of this nation, and is a person with whom I have no hope of ever having a common ground or rational discourse, for we each view the world though a fundamentally different lens.

I refuse to agree that it is OK for you to demand that I give up my freedoms, so that we can agree to disagree. You see, what you are wanting to do is NOT agree to disagree. If you get your way, a law will be passed that REQUIRES that I do things your way, on penalty of imprisonment or death, if I resist. That is hardly "agreeing to disagree."

Justifiable homicide?

Watch this video, beginning at the 54 second mark:




Now imagine for a second that you are the one who walked into that convenience store, saw what appeared to be a dead body, and were then confronted with a man wearing a clown costume, covered in blood and carrying a bloody axe, who then chased you through that store into the corner.

You can look at this video:






Now imagine that you are in this convenience store and are faced with a person who is obviously, to you, an armed robber.

Would you draw and fire? I know I would, and you know what? I would be completely justified in doing so. You are presenting me with a situation where I am in reasonable fear of my life, where I reasonably believe that I am facing an imminent forcible felony. After all, you are after the fear reaction from your victims in order to obtain a few laughs.
In fact, since the people making this video have not secured a release from the "victims" of their prank in advance, I submit that they are committing a crime. A felony, in fact. Several of them. The European prankster filmmakers think that putting people in mortal fear for their lives is funny.

This is a warning to you idiots: pull a prank like that in a concealed carry state, and you are likely to be shot, and the shooter will be blameless. The members of the film crew who survive will be charged with murder for the death of their accomplice.

There are people who will claim that shooting them would be morally wrong, because it is a prank and no one was harmed. I say to you: bullshit. People are not put on this earth to be your playthings, you sadistic pieces of trash.

Hypocrisy

Within hours the kid that built a clock that looked like a bomb had an invite to visit the White House.

How long will Chris Mintz Have to wait before the president picks up the phone and declares him a hero?

Seen on Facebook.