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from the have-you-ever-seen-a-single-mump? dept.
Kami Altenberg Schaal has been a professional nurse for 22 years. She is pro-vaccine. She gets the flu shot every year as a requirement for her employment, and she vaccinates her family.
[...] Her entire family has been vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, and yet 4 out of 5 members of her family came down with the mumps. Her daughter is a freshman in college, and got the mumps from school.
[...] She isolated her daughter for 5 days ("I know how to isolate a patient, I'm a nurse"), and reported her case to the department of health.
All the members of her family also got booster shots of the MMR vaccine.
17 days after her daughter's exposure, her husband and son woke up with mumps.
After notifying the health department, Kami notified her son's school district as well.
What happened next was apparently something she had not anticipated. Even though her family was fully vaccinated and she followed all the proper medical protocols for dealing with the mumps, many people in her community began to blame her, including some of her medical colleagues, for not vaccinating their children (even though she had!)
[...] Finally, Kami herself woke up with the mumps. She had been tested and was supposedly immune. She had taken the booster. But she ended up getting the mumps anyway.
[...] The department of health nurse was required to send out another letter to the school district, so Kami asked the nurse if she could "put the truth" in the letter to the school district that her son was vaccinated, because she feared being blamed in error, once again, for not vaccinating her children.
The nurse allegedly replied "no."
They will not put that in a letter, because it could give the anti-vaxx movement some fodder.
So they would not protect my family by saying we did the right things, so I had to protect my family. I'm the one who has to defend my family.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 30 2019, @02:04PM (4 children)
The obvious question to ask then, is were Australian mass-shootings primarily committed with "assault weapons" in the first place? I would assume so for those results to be seen, and it probably illustrates some quirk of Australian psychology. In the US (last time I checked), handguns are the weapon of choice for most mass shooters, and thus it would seem extremely unlikely that banning "assault weapons" would have a significant effect.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 30 2019, @06:54PM (2 children)
If you're truly interested, I suggest you research what went down, down under, wrt gun ownership laws and subsequent results.
I briefly considered making myself an independent armed state after Hurricane Andrew demonstrated the dysfunctional potential of the "just dial 911" system. On balance, even in the middle of a gun-crazy metropolitan area, I consider myself net-safer without readily available side arms, and I would consider myself safer still with increased restrictions on who can get guns, what kinds of guns they can get, and how they can get them. I don't think we should aspire to Great Britain's zero tolerance of firearms rhetoric, but I do believe that gun owners should be licensed and tested annually to demonstrate their knowledge and ability of safe firearms handling. If it's that important to you, it should be worth at least as much of your time as an annual smog check on the cars.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @08:30PM
Yes, that and they should also be subjected to regular mental health evaluations. In addition, their friends, family, and co-workers should be interviewed to see if there are any red flags. For example, does the guy have anger management issues? (Yeah, let's not kid ourselves; we are typically talking about men here.) If they are going to style themselves as "militia ready" then, by God, they better be someone I could trust with a weapon if and when the next revolution comes! Just sayin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @12:34AM
Note that voting for the president is NOT in our constitution. States can use other methods to choose electors. Guns on the other hand, are a constitutional right.
So you say that "I do believe that gun owners should be licensed and tested annually to demonstrate their knowledge and ability of safe firearms handling. If it's that important to you, it should be worth at least as much of your time as an annual smog check on the cars."
Hmmm...
How about for voting? We could test that people are able to match up candidate names with party affiliations. We could test that people be able to match candidate names with candidate faces and voices. We could require a passing score on the citizenship test. We could even throw in a bit of a quiz on probability and statistics, and maybe a quiz on basic understanding of the federal budget.
If voting is that important to you, it should be worth at least as much of your time as an annual smog check on the cars.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Friday May 03 2019, @03:21AM
Australians need to have a very good reason to own a gun (and self-defence is not one of them) - and as a result guns are a rarity. Citizens are not permitted to own assault weapons.
There had been increasing discomfort with violence involving firearms, but the watershed event occurred in 1996 [wikipedia.org] where an half-wit killed 35 people and wounded 23. Within five months new laws [wikipedia.org] were in place.
On the contrary, the Prime Minister at the time; John Howard; went on to serve another decade. He is generally well regarded for those actions.