Here We Go Again

Monday 2nd October

There is nothing to add to what went on today … the other chap and I had a line - we decided it was too soon - maybe another time …. Meanwhile - allow me to highlight two articles that crossed this chap’s feeds today.

Serious Post From Vox, some highlights

• America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world
• There have been more than 1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook
• Since the shooting of Michael Brown, police have killed at least 2,900 people
• In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

Nevada was already an outlier! Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts

Serious Post From McSweeney, with serious humour, some highlights

Things more heavily regulated than buying a gun in the United States ….

• Having a fucking bake sale
• Pumping fucking gas
• Disposing of fucking batteries
• Cutting fucking hair for a living
• Holding any sort of public fucking performance
• Xeroxing and distributing copyrighted fucking material
• Transporting a bottle of opened fucking wine home from a restaurant
• Buying unpasteurized fucking milk

Get the whole list on McSweeney’s

And Another Thing Just one last thought, in the insult-to-injury section: the harm may not be over. The LV shooter may yet destroy financlally the victims he wounded physically. From The Intercept

The hundreds wounded are being tended to in Clark County’s network of hospitals in Nevada. But because this is a country that has never had guaranteed universal health care, they will soon be besieged by a second tragedy: enormous medical bills…. Asking strangers for charitable donations to tackle medical bills is ubiquitous in the United States. A report by NerdWallet released in 2015 found that $930 million of the $2 billion raised by GoFundMe since its 2010 launch have been related to medical bills. Yet NerdWallet’s comprehensive survey of crowdfunding sites found that barely 1 in 10 medical campaigns raised the full amount they asked for. In the Manchester attack, American Kurt Cochran was killed. His wife, Melissa Cochran, returned to the U.S. with the need for continuous care. With no American NHS, she had to set up a GoFundMe to finance her treatment. Thankfully, this one both met and exceeded its goal, having raised $83,512. It’s the price of a free-market approach to health care.

Still, better than socialized medicine, yes?

Or, as Bill O’Reilly put it, The Price Of Freedom

Particularly liked “The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned.” … implication, no retardspublicans want gun control and no dems want easy access to weapons … douche.