Tag Archives: red flag gun laws

Academics, authoritarian swine, gun control, Junk Science, Law, Violence-Enabling Victim Disarmers

California Red Flag Law Doesn’t Work

May 10, 2022 Carl Bussjaeger 2 Comments

You might think that headline is the big news. Not really. We already know red flag laws don’t work.

The news here is that Garen Wintemute, the victim-disarmament advocate who previously couldn’t find data he could not twist, finally hit a brick wall. And worse.

Firearm Violence Following the Implementation of California’s Gun Violence Restraining Order Law
VROs were not associated with reduced population-level rates of firearm violence in San Diego County, but this may change as the number of orders increases over time; the association between GVROs and firearm violence at the individual level cannot be inferred from our findings and should be the subject of future studies.

Wintemute is notable for crappy “studies” using bogus tools like synthetic controls (imaginary populations, because real populations wouldn’t support his predetermined “results”), tossing out most of the inconvenient data (because two-thirds of the subjects declined to kill themselves), and using personally identifiable data obtained through legally dubious means (so dubious that California tried to pass a bill to legalize it). He has also violated privacy rules with covert surveillance.

This paper was another example of a synthetic control; an artificial “San Diego.”

To estimate the association between GVRO implementation and firearm violence in San Diego, we used the synthetic control method, a quasi-experimental comparative case study design.

This was a particularly egregious example. To the extent that synthetic controls have any value, you build one by using data from populations (other California counties, in this case) with conditions and populations similar to the variable you wish to examine, except for the variable in question. That is, when studying the effects of a red flag law on a county, you would make up an imaginary comparison county from places that don’t have a red flag law.

All California counties were subject to the same statewide red flag law.

Properly, if you want to see the effects on San Diego County of the red flag law, you simply do a temporal analysis of per capita homicides and suicides in San Diego prior to law passage and after implementation. Wintemute didn’t need a synthetic San Diego to come to a conclusion; he already had real San Diegos without a red flag law (pre-2016) and with a red flag law (post-2016). You use a synthetic control when you don’t expect real world data to support your preculsion.

For example, one year after Florida passed a red flag law, homicides and suicides went up. That was especially nasty, because for two years prior to passage both rates had been declining.

Two years after the Florida law’s passage, and homicide and suicide rates were still increasing.

[Side Note: To anyone with an operational brain, this was… a no-brainer, so to speak. You have a potentially violent –to self or others — person. You piss him off, or depress him, off by stealing his property without due process. Then you simply leave him loose on the streets. WTH did they expect to happen?!]

So what was really happening in San Diego County?

Violent Crime Rate per 1,000*
2011: 3.49
2012: 3.75(up)
2013: 3.35 (down)
2014: 3.28 (down)
2015: 2.35 (up slightly)
2016: 3.3 (down) Red Flag Passes
2017: 3.41 (up)
2018: 3.42 (up)
2019: 3.4 (inch down)
2020: 3.45 (up)
2021: 3.74 (UP!)

The violent crime trend reversed post-Red Flag, to increase.

Suicide Rate per 100,000
2013: 12.9
2014: 12.5 (down)
2015: 12.0 (down)
2016: 12.0 (no change) Red Flag Passes
2017: 12.3 (up)
2018: 12.86 (UP!)

The suicide rate trend reversed post-Red Flag, to increase.

Such a surprise. Not.

Wintemute et al went with a synthetic control — showing no effect of the Red Flag law to hide the fact that no only did it have an effect, but it appeared to make things worse.

* Sorry; I had to go with Violent Crime Rate, which includes homicides, because multiple fast searches didn’t turn up homicide rates broken out separately. There’s only so much I can do without funding.

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Academics, Courts, Culture, gun control, gun grabbers, guns, mindset, Politics, Schools and campuses

Wise Judges, judgment and the lack thereof

November 5, 2019 Sheila Stokes 4 Comments

Admittedly, this column is a bit behind the times, I apologize. Parshah Shoftim was a few weeks ago. And part of the Parshah really hit home. Probably because if I spend any time at all listening to the news, all I hear is impeachment, impeachment, impeachment (said is the best Jan Brady whine). The secret Soviet style hearings which include only progressive #Demoncrats, the liar Adam Shiff-less., and lots of leaks, lots and lots of leaks.

But here’s the relevant portion of the Parshah that got me to thinking

This is from Deut./Devarim דברים

19:16.

Haven’t all of the women hired to attack Kavenaugh recanted? After they and their complicit media tried to ruin his and his family’s lives. Of course.

And the penalty for that?

No matter the crime, gun control is the answer. Knee-jerk gun control response to deadly shootings

Honest law-abiding gun owners, judged guilty for the acts of criminals.

And as Sammy “The Bull” Gravano points out, the mob will always have guns. You only have to listen to the first couple minutes if you want.

Well, the mob and #Bozo’s armed guys he would have sent in to make sure American Citizens complied with his rules, so they could “recover” the AR-15s and AK-47s. Recover? Were they missing before they were stolen by #Bozo?

The murderer of Kate Steinle went free, he literally got away with murder. And posters put up at a liberal Kalifornia college campus honoring her and reminding people of the cost of illegal un-checked invasion have been deemed racist my the college administrators. Color me shocked.

This is wise judgment?

But the real hypocrisy of liberals is on full display in a fairly recent bill proposed by Sen. John Cornyn -Rep of Texas. He proposed a bill to “combat mass shootings”. He proposed to do this by

It would expand resources for mental health treatment, facilitate the creation of “behavioral intervention teams” to monitor students exhibiting disturbing behavior and offer new tools for law enforcement.

The bill’s school safety proposals are a response to years of school shootings perpetrated by young people described as isolated and troubled.

What is their objection you ask?

Privacy experts and education groups, many of which have resisted similar efforts at the state level, say that level of social media and network surveillance can discourage children from speaking their minds online and could disproportionately result in punishment against children of color, who already face higher rates of punishment in school.

“This is all very frightening,” an education policy consultant, who has been tracking the legislation, told The Hill. “There’s no real research, or even anecdotal information, to back up the idea … that following everything [kids] do online is really a way to determine that they’re going to be violent.”

Now, I’m not a fan of monitoring or big brothering anyone. But this is hypocrisy at it’s finest. And if you don’t believe me, you could ask Alexandria Keyes. She was suspended from school for five days after she posted a picture of herself with her brother.

The two are shown holding guns and the photo is captioned, “Me and my legal guardian are going to the gun range to practice gun safety and responsible gun ownership while getting better so we can protect ourselves while also using the First Amendment to practice our Second Amendment.”

Oh the shock, the horror, the carnage! Oh, wait there wasn’t any. The girl and her brother just went to the range practiced marksmanship and harmed no one. But panties were being twisted into a bunch at a rapid rate, and Alexandria was suspended for disrupting school. Huh? She wasn’t at school, she didn’t use a school computer to post the picture. Sen. Cornyn’s bill only monitors online activity while the students are using school computers.

Abbe Smith, Chief Communications Officer for Cherry Creek School District, told me that the decision to suspend Keyes “involved multiple social media posts that concerned the school community and resulted in multiple parents keeping their kids home from school out of concern for safety.” Smith said that federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protections prevent her from discussing the details of the case, including disclosing the other photos the district allegedly considered in Keyes’ suspension.

More about this

The school’s policy references Colorado law, which defines the grounds for suspension as “behavior on or off school property that is detrimental to the welfare or safety of other pupils or of school personnel, including behavior that creates a threat of physical harm to the child or to other children.”

… According to Cherry Creek School Board policy, the school district reserves the right to suspend students who “[repeatedly interfere] with a school’s ability to provide educational opportunities to other students.” Over the phone, Smith noted that since multiple parents kept their children home after becoming aware of the post, Keyes’ photo could be viewed as an impediment to the school’s ability to educate, even if the district didn’t ultimately make its decision based on the chances that Keyes posed a physical threat. Does this mean parental fears can be a mechanism for the school district to veto a teen’s extracurricular activities?

Is Cherry Creek not worried that this is going to prevent Alexandria from speaking her mind online? Maybe Cherry Creek never got the memo from the educational policy consultant that monitoring online activity of children is not effective in determining if they are going to be violent later?

And those sanctimonious sniveling parents that bullied the school into suspending her? They have accused her falsely. She has done nothing wrong. They have left a mark on her school record because of their hoplophobic tiny minds. They have allowed their lack of education and knowledge to deprive her of five days worth.

What should then be their sentence?

False statements given to police because someone wants someone’s guns seized in a storm trooper operation because they are A) mad at their uncle B) don’t like how someone voted C) don’t think people should be allowed to own guns D) ___________________ for whatever reason. Police show up, guns are seized and sometimes, sometimes, people die. Red Flag laws, the height of hypocrisy coming from progressives.

What then should be their sentence? And what should their sentence be if it results in the death of an innocent gun own, exactly as they intended it would?

"News Media", gun grabbers, Junk Science, mindset, Politics, So Much Stupid!, You can't fix stupid

That’s just crazy!

September 15, 2019 Sheila Stokes 5 Comments

I heard an interesting interview on the Mark Levin show a couple weeks ago on my way home from class. The interview involved Dr. Bandy X Lee.

Bandy Xenobia Lee (born 1970) is an American psychiatrist with Yale University and a specialist in violence prevention programs in prisons and in the community who initiated reforms at New York’s Rikers Island prison. Her scholarly work includes the writing of a comprehensive textbook on violence. In 2017 she organized a conference on the mental health of Donald Trump at Yale and was the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book of essays that has contributed to the debate about Trump’s mental stability and within the psychiatric profession in the United States about the interpretation of the Goldwater rule.

It seems Bandy has co-written a book with Judith Lewis Herman.

Judith Lewis Herman (born 1942) is an American psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and author who has focused on the understanding and treatment of incest and traumatic stress.

Herman is Professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective.

She was the recipient of the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the 2000 Woman in Science Award from the American Medical Women’s Association. In 2003 she was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

How distinguished! But it seems these two distinguished doctors are afraid. There is a huge problem. They along with 25 35 or 36 of their fellow psychiatrists realized the imminent danger our country is facing because we elected a seriously unstable Republican as President.

So Mark’s interview begins with asking Bandy about her political leanings. Is she a Demoncrat? She denies she is, though she did vote for Hillary. Is she a liberal? Yes, and a conservative. Has she ever voted for a Republican? Yes. Who? She’d rather not say. Then it really starts to get interesting. In what ways is she a conservative? She is a devout Christian, she believes in the founding principles of this nation, she’s a great patriot if you will, says she. By later in the interview I’m thinking she had to be a member of Jeremiah Wright’s church. Mark inquires if she believes in private property rights. Well, to an extent, she feels private property rights have gone too far. WTHeck? Does she believe in limited federal government? This made her nervous. Why was he asking her such things? She declares first and foremost she is a medical professional! She is not a very political person! She declares she has no conflicts of interest. Do you believe all the Bill of Rights? Ummmmm. Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

“Ummmmm…..I actually don’t really know the exact ummmm, meanings of the Bill of Rights. What I studied was enlightenment literature.”

So she and 36 other “mental health experts” have written this book. As many as thirty-six out of the, as she admits, hundreds of thousands of other mental health experts in this country, have written a book on the dangerous mind of President Trump.

Where did she get her information? Had she ever met the President? No. Had she ever spoken to the President? No. Did she watch TV, read newspapers, listen to the radio? No, she did a “fairly intimate analysis of him due to the information that was on him in the Mueller Report.” She said, well, its observations from outside the President’s head. As Mark points out, her book was written before the Mueller report came out. She says the alarm for herself started in early 2016. She was triggered by the interaction between the Presidential candidate DJT and his rally attendees. She said this is real time interaction, and response in real time, as recorded of course. She was disturbed by the things the Candidate said and that people were applauding and cheering. Mark points out she did no scientific diagnosis, as that’s not possible from a distance. She counters that is not true, she brought her scientific knowledge and psychiatric training as well as her experience in public health. So she was quite aware of what these signs represented, and they have born out to be true with time. A danger she says. That’s why it’s ok she wrote this book without a diagnosis. Mark points out you can’t have a diagnosis from afar. She says “that’s not true either”. With certain conditions, a diagnosis is more accurate from a distance, without a personal interview. And this is mainstream thought. Today diagnosis is based on no interaction, just on observing the person. But she insists she never diagnosed, she is only interested in the public health effects of DJT. Then she insists she can’t diagnose from afar. And she doesn’t want to, where upon Mark tells her the book is filled with speculation on such things. Mark asks if she analyzed Hillary Clinton? She insists dangerousness is about the situation, not the person. Huh? Ok, is she dangerous?

“Hillary Clinton never raised alarms for me”.

I guess she could do a internet search on the Clinton body count. She insists it’s not about political party, it’s about standards. Mark reiterates he’s read her book. On what page are the standards listed? They aren’t. He further points out, she only watched TV. She never actually went to any of his rallies, never talked to any of his people, never talked to any of his supporters.

Why does this outrage me so? Red Flag laws. Not only can a person accuse you without evidence it appears the medical profession, or at least the mental health profession (some of whom wanted nothing to do with Bandy or this book) are willing to make judgments affecting your property, your rights and your life based on some undocumented, unspecified standards. Will these be the same “professionals” helping to write legislation in an advisory capacity? Now I understand why Professor Quack thinks personal property rights have gone too far. Not that she can tell you about the Bill of Rights.

If you want to hear the whole interview, it’s available here