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On the advice of my doctor, I had a Covid booster yesterday.Despite being fully boosted, I caught Covid19 the first weekend in May. They gave me the antiviral combo Paxlovid. The latter has all the same side effects as Covid itself, as far as I can see. But I was out of quarantine (and smelling/tasting again) by May 14.
Peace,
Michael
Human trial of mRNA universal flu vaccine begins
It’s still very early days, but the race to develop the first safe and effective mRNA-based influenza vaccine is gathering momentum.
The latest move sees a Phase 1 trial at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, get under way, testing the safety and immune response of H1ssF-3928 mRNA-LNP, developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Center (VRC).
Common usage says “African American” means black.
My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has documented 30 cases since January 2020 where a would-be mass public shooting was likely stopped by civilians legally carrying guns. During that time, there were 17 mass public shootings where four or more people were killed. These heroic actions rarely get national news coverage.
But they are just a fraction of the incidents stopped by legally armed civilians. The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But, as with mass public shootings, it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
The CPRC also undertook a search for news stories. We discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars.
Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.
While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. We had more lucky finding recent cases, and the proportion of cases stopped in 2021 was even higher – 49%.
In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the entire 2014 to 2021 period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases from recent years. The figure reaches a lofty 58% in 2021.
OK, here’s another idea. Let’s take everybody’s big military style guns away. If the killings and the mass shootings don’t go down, then we’ll give everybody their guns back.
The most common weapon used to commit mass shootings is a handgun. Eighty percent of all mass shooters used at least one handgun during their crime. A semiautomatic assault weapon is the next most used weapon with 28% of shooters using them. Seventy-three percent of shooters who used a semiautomatic assault weapon also used a handgun at the scene.
By the way, has anybody actually looked at the site I mentioned at the beginning of this thread of discussion?
Different people use different sets of information, maybe different time periods . Maybe they use different definitions of the events they catalog. That accounts for the difference in numbers used in various places. It ain’t rocket surgery to figure this out.
If I were preaching regularly today, I would use my pastoral authority and teaching position to oppose the fanatical romance with firearms in our nation and combat the sacralization of the Second Amendment.
P.S. to Peter:
American Enterprise Institute as a reliable scholarly source on this topic? You must be kidding.
Anthony Fauci Says Don't Blame Him for COVID Lockdowns and School Closures
Fauci says public officials should have listened to other advisers and made better decisions. That's true! It's also incredibly frustrating.
Just because a government agency said they followed the rules of procedure and based their conclusion science doesn't mean they did.
Just because some reporter claims that the agency didn't follow the rules of procedure doesn't mean that they didn't. Why should judges, with no medical training, (or reporters,) determine what are proper processes for testing the effectiveness of medical procedures?
Frankly, I will trust an agency that has everything to lose by fudging results and losing the people's trust in them, than biased folks who file lawsuits that fit their agenda.
Yes, cowardly anonymous one, again.
But let me tell you what I think is going to happen, and I do not believe folks in this forum can even begin to understand me.
The women of this nation are on the march and we old white males better get out of the way. The Mama Bears of this country do not want their cubs shot in schools and are pissed off. It took two women in Northern Ireland to cool that ideological conflict and they got a Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. You don't want to stand in the way of Mama Bears protecting their cubs. I don't know how limitations on guns will come, but I believe - and I pray - that the women of our land will put down the idiotic rhetoric that splatters through discussions about gun violence. Go, Mama Bears! Protect your cubs! We old guys sure can't do it. We're too in love with our guns which we treat like a substitute penis and want to wave around as we pretend to "protect" our property and family.
Nor do you want to stand in the way of African American women tired of seeing their men put down, tired of the put-downs they get because of their color or their economic condition. The Tennessee debacle was a sign of how sick this nation is with regard to racism and there will be consequences if old white Republicans do not wake up.
Furthermore, the women of this nation - and this is already supported by responsible polls - are damned sick and tired of having male-dominated political units control their health care issues. We may have whole states where women's health issues cause massive migration or where - until the men can be thrown out of office - women have to travel to another state for health care. Abortion is not the only issue. They hear the rumblings about birth control. Watch out.
We in the churches are hardly worth noting. The Roman Catholic church has squandered whatever moral authority it had. Evangelicals sold their souls for Trumpism and political power and way back in time Jerry Falwell learned how stupid that was. Liberals have been sidetracked in silliness about pronouns and we have "affirmative actioned" ultra-liberals into office or made celebrities of those who had some good ideas and ran to the nutty side of the street.
The day of the conservative/moderate aging white male is over, I think. And that will not be a bad thing.
Required background checks and waiting period for all gun sales.
A licensing program like for driving cars, where gun purchasers have to show that they have the knowledge and skills to properly use a firearm. (I know that many gun owners have gone through hunter's safety training before purchasing, but I don't believe it's a requirement.)
Perhaps even a step-type program, e.g., regular driver's/gun license for ordinary guns for hunting and sport, something like motorcycle endorsement, or CDL for those who want a more powerful weapon. Our military have to pass a gun course before they are authorized to carry a firearm. (All Marines, regardless of position, e.g., an office secretary, are required to pass gun training. I don't think that's true in the other branches.)
Perhaps, like I know the LEOs in our town are required to do, periodically they are tested on their gun skills.
Perhaps, there can be stiff fines (and gun confiscation?) for being in possession of a (loaded) firearm while impaired, i.e., like a DUI. (I've talked with hunters who are quite afraid of a drunk in the woods with a loaded gun.)
I've heard of putting a code on the bullets so that those that had murdered someone could be traced.
Seems to me that one thing that makes the current gun control wrangle so intractable is a misunderstanding of just what the goal is. The stated goal is that we, and especially our children, be safe from gun violence. What comes out in the rhetoric more often is the goal that we feel safer. Especially after a school shooting, children are paraded before cameras complaining that they want to feel safe. Is this wise? Further traumatizing already traumatized children by subjecting them to that media circus and using them as props for a political agenda. Do we really think that children know best about what will make them safe? At a time when they should be helped, their grief and fear is being exploited by those claiming to care for them.
A further indication that the discussion is not as much about promoting safety as it is about making people feel better is that actual facts and statistics matter little. Claims are made that have minimal basis in fact but 1) make people feel even more unsafe than they perhaps realistically need to be, and 2) then offer a panacea to make them feel better.
We need to be concerned about the level of violence in America. But guns are not like enriched uranium that when you reach a certain density, they will spontaneously undergo a violent reaction. It is not the number of guns in a community that is the problem, such that if you take the guns away from responsible people who could be expected to obey laws restricting gun ownership and give up their guns, one lowers the community gun density below the threshold at which gun no longer promote violence. The problem is the number of criminals with guns, and unstable people who turn violent and express their violence with guns. Those are problems that just taking guns away from ordinary people will not solve. But under the theory that SOMETHING Must Be Done, Taking guns away from people is SOMETHING, therefore, we must take guns away from people.
Which leads directly back to my question posed on the thread a little while back that was closed down (correctly, I believe, because the conversation was once again leading toward shouting instead of discussion), which hopefully I can pose again here and may lead to better discussion: why do we feel the need to "do something," especially something very disruptive that will quite likely have far-reaching ramifications? Would not an honest appraisal of our fallen human nature lead to the conclusion that we should not trust our own intellect to be able to see, let alone fix, all possible problems, and to propose smaller changes that might in time lead toward a stated end, while hopefully minimizing unforeseen collateral problems?
There is the need to "do something" whenever there are death-causing events. We've been "doing something" to combat cancer for decades. We've discovered more and more ways to keep cancer from killing people. People "did something" when AIDS was killing everyone infected with it. We found ways to stop the virus from killing people. Over my nearly 60 years of driving, I've seen many improvements in automobile safety to try and reduce the number of fatalities from auto accidents. Seat belts, shoulder belts, padded dashes, airbags in front, and now on the sides, adaptive cruise control, beeping when drowsy drivers get out of their lanes, automatic breaking when there is something in front or in back, etc.
It is in our best interest to "do something" to try and reduce unnatural deaths.
