Former Democratic Mayoral Candidate Mark Green equated gunowners to child molesters on MSNBC. Green said he believes there should be a registry where people can go to see if their neighbor is a gun owner, just as “Megan’s Law” allows for individuals to see if there is a convicted sex offender living in their neighborhood.
See the video here.
Debate is raging over whether a 6-year-old Maryland boy should have been suspended from school for pretending to shoot someone with his finger.
Mary Bubala reports school officials say the boy did it to three students at Roscoe Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring.
A gun shooting gesture by 6-year-old Rodney Lynch to fellow students — just days after the Connecticut school shootings — got him suspended.
“I went into my desk and then I got scissors and then I just pretended it was a gun,” Lynch said.
He was sent to the office and the school called his parents about the behavior. The school warned he could face suspension if it happened again. It did…twice.
“Just pointing her fingers like this. She did the ’pow’ sound and I just went like that. And then I got sent to the office again,” said Lynch.
Read more here.
Gun sensitivity is certainly on the rise. And if you needed an example, look no further than Belleville, Ill., where a battle is brewing between local police officers and a Denny’s Restaurant after an on-duty detective who went inside was told that she either had to leave her firearm in the car or exit the establishment. In addition to voicing outrage at the alleged treatment, the Belleville police chief has since banned officers from eating at the diner.
The drama unfolded on New Year’s Day when the detectives were eating at the Denny’s. The restaurant’s manager came over to tell a female in the group that she had to take her gun to the car or leave. Her request was purportedly based on a complaint from another customer. While, at first, the detectives assumed that the mandate was a joke, they quickly learned otherwise.
The manager explained the Denny’s only allows officers in uniform to carry guns, however the detectives had shown their badges, thus substantiating their identities. When they got up to leave, a general manager, who purportedly noticed the officers refusing to pay for their meals during the dispute, came over and told them that they could stay after all. But the damage was done.
Read more here.
Providing health care to younger people offers “better value” since the elderly are “not going to live very long anyway,” contended a blogger for the liberal Slate magazine.
Prior to joining Slate in 2011, Matthew Yglesias was a fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is deeply tied to the White House and has been heavily influential in informing Obama administration policy.
Yglesias authored a blog posting on Monday titled “The Case For Death Panels, In One Chart.”
Yglesias’ piece was based on a graph that purported to show how American per capita health care spending goes from marginally higher than Germany or Sweden to much higher. The graphs show the vast majority of the spending increase takes place when Americans reach their late 60s with the costs being shifted to the public sector under Medicare.
That same day, Yglesias posted a correction to his blog piece, admitting the graph he used was “badly flawed.”
Still, his article goes on to make the case for rationing public health care for the elderly.
Writes Yglesias: “On the one hand, older people have more need for health care services which militates in favor of allocating spending to them. On the other hand, providing health care services to younger people generally offers better value in terms of years of life and quality of life saved.
“A 25-year-old who’s in a bad car accident can, if found in time and treated, still live a very happy and healthy life. If you’re 95 and get into the same car accident, then treatment is going to be much more difficult, recovery will be much less complete, and in the grand scheme of things you’re not going to live very long anyway.”
Yglesias argued that not only is health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, “our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system.”
Read more here.
U.S. Constitutional Free Press 