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Bloomberg School of Public Health: No Evidence ‘Assault Weapon’ Bans Reduce Mass Shootings

A new study from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that there is no evidence that “assault weapon bans” have any impact on “the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, named after notorious anti-Second Amendment activist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, released the results of its study last week.

The study “did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.”

The study, which analyzed fatal mass shootings in 45 states between 1984 and 2017, did find that “firearm purchaser licensing laws that require an in-person application or fingerprinting are associated with an estimated 56 percent fewer fatal mass shootings in states that have them.”

Bloomberg, who is running for president as a Democrat, has a history of trying to destroy Second Amendment rights. His anti-gun organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, has a history of using misleading or outright false statistics manufactured by gun control groups that he has financially backs to assist in his efforts.

The most recent example happened during the Super Bowl when Bloomberg aired a one-minute commercial that was full of false information.

The emotional ad claimed in writing: “2,900 CHILDREN DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE EVERY YEAR.”

The claim from Bloomberg was categorically false at the cited number included adults and counted suicides as examples of gun violence.

Reason Magazine reported:

According to to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FactCheck.org notes, the average number of firearm-related deaths involving Americans 17 or younger from 2013 through 2017 (the period used by Everytown for Gun Safety) was about 1,500, roughly half the number cited by Bloomberg. Furthermore, nearly two-fifths of those deaths were suicides, meaning the number of minors killed each year by “gun violence,” as that term is usually understood, is about 73 percent smaller than the figure cited in Bloomberg’s ad.

The Daily Wire highlighted Bloomberg’s views on guns in an extensive profile piece on him last September:

Bloomberg’s anti-gun advocacy is perhaps the single most defining issue of his recent private citizen activism — and perhaps the single most defining issue of his 2020 presidential bid. He is very closely affiliated with and has helped fund Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which are both groups deeply hostile to Second Amendment rights. He also co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns while he was mayor of New York City. Bloomberg supports “universal” background checks, which often serve as a rhetorical euphemism for the government serving as an intermediary in all private firearms transfers. Bloomberg believes that every gun owner should need a permit before making a gun purchase. He supports a ban on the undefinable sub-class of firearms referred to as so-called “assault weapons” — a line of thought that, if taken to its logical conclusion, could lead to the banning of all semi-automatic firearms in America.

In addition to promulgating false information about guns, Bloomberg has also repeatedly displayed ignorance on the issue, both on how guns operate and on what gun laws exist.

Bloomberg told Rolling Stone in 2014 that he did not know whether a minor was allowed to own a rifle, and later claimed that anyone who owns a gun is “pretty stupid.”

In a 2012 interview with ABC News, Bloomberg demonstrated that he does not know basics when it comes to guns, including what the difference between a semi-automatic and fully-automatic firearm is.

Democrat presidential candidate billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who spends tens of millions of dollars pushing for extreme gun control laws, demonstrates that he knows literally nothing about firearms.pic.twitter.com/SCjpNdQm6h

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra)

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-school-of-public-health-no-evidence-assault-weapon-bans-reduce-mass-shootings

Sheriff: Prison Reform Advocate Planted Guns for Jail Break
Tennessee authorities say a longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Feb. 19, 2020, at 4:43 p.m.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A longtime prison reform advocate was preparing to stage a jail break when he hid loaded guns and ammunition in a new jail that was under construction, Tennessee authorities said Wednesday.

Alex Friedmann, a former prisoner turned crusader against private prisons and a longtime editor at Prison Legal News, was charged last month with attempted burglary. He was accused of gaining access to the new jail by dressing as a construction worker and stealing keys.

As the investigation continued, “it was discovered that Mr. Friedmann, over many months, had developed and implemented an extremely deliberate and, in my opinion, evil plan,” Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall said during a Wednesday news conference announcing Friedmann’s re-arrest on upgraded charges.

Friedmann is now charged with vandalism of $250,000 or more, with his bond set at $2.5 million.

Friedmann's attorney, Ben Raybin, issued a statement late Wednesday.

“I am currently unable to comment on any of the factual allegations,” Raybin said. “Mr. Friedmann is presumed innocent and will respond through the appropriate legal processes.”

Hall said he believes Friedmann was designing a massive jail break that would endanger “every inmate, every visitor and our entire community.”

“Virtually everything I’m telling you is on video” Hall said, noting that investigators have poured through hundreds of hours of video to identify the areas of the building that were compromised.

Hall currently serves as president of the National Sheriff’s Association and said no one there has ever seen anything like this before.

“It will forever change how correctional facilities are built,” he said.

Prison Legal News is a project of the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center. Friedmann resigned as editor after his earlier arrest in January, executive director Paul Wright said in a telephone interview.

[ED: What this AP story doesn’t mention is that this celebrated “prison reform advocate” had spent ten years in a Tennessee prison for attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery.]

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2020-02-19/sheriff-prison-reform-advocate-planted-guns-for-jail-break

Don't you just love those liberal activists? Is it necessary to state the obvious? Non-violent, non-dangerous offenders locked up for weeks or months for being bad don't even WANT weapons. It would only be dangerous, violent offenders who are looking for weapons.

And, I almost missed the romanticized side of things. Attempted murder, armed robbery, and attempted aggravated robbery - much the same thing that Patty Hearst was involved in. Awwww, to bad he's not an heir to some rich old bastard, huh?

Did you know that SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team? It has been a long while since status on our team's progress has been provided to the community, so here goes!

What IS Folding@Home?

First off, what is Folding@Home? Here is an extremely brief synopsis of F@H taken from Wikipedia:

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of hundreds of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems.[citation needed] Its main purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of interest to medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases. To a lesser extent, Folding@home also tries to predict a protein's final structure and determine how other molecules may interact with it, which has applications in drug design. Folding@home is developed and operated by the Pande Laboratory at Stanford University, under the direction of Prof. Vijay Pande, and is shared by various scientific institutions and research laboratories across the world.[4]

The Very Beginning:

Our F@H team got its start when Sir Finkus posted an entry to his journal. He announced (on 2016-02-09 04:04:00 UTC) that team SoylentNews.org had been created. There was an initial flurry of activity, which eventually settled down to a core group who have been contributing ever since. Of late we have had a couple members upgrade their rigs and graciously donated them to the cause. This made a much-appreciated impact on the team's productivity.

Team Rankings Over Time:

At the time of its creation we were team number 230,319; since we had not yet earned any points that made us tied for last place. I could find no records of the team' score before 2016-04-12 at which point we were at 1125th place in the world. Back when F@H got started, all work was done on CPUs and they were much slower, then. By the time we joined, it was much easier for a current-day CPU or GPU to complete a work unit and thus advance a team's score. So, in the early days, we were skipping right by those who gave it a try, saw their very slow progress, and quit. We were gaining hundreds of places in each of those first days! For the curious, here are our rankings on the first day of each month for which I have a record:

Current Ranking:

Team SoylentNews.org, at the time of this writing, (2020-02-16) is at 213th place in the entire world!

Woo Hoo!

There are two places on-line where one can get the latest statistics on our team. (1) On the official F@H team status page (2) Any of the different views compiled by ExtremeOverclocking.com such as their team summary page.

Our Team's Top Ten:

For posterity's sake, the 10 top folders on our team are:

1. cmn32480
2. LTKKane
3. Runaway1956
4. tibman
5. warlord
6. phred420
7. Booga1
8. EricAlbers
9. ealbers
10. malloc

Joining Up:

Are you interested in joining our team? Reply in the comments here and one of our team will help you get started.

Once long ago, I was given this SOAP API to interact with.

Now I have no love of SOAP, but at least it fairly rigidly defines the API across different programming languages and technology stacks.

The well defined API consisted of a single function that accepted and returned a string. You passed it JSON and it returned JSON.

But it is a real SOAP API!!! Yes!, it really is SOAP I tell you!

It also had no real provision to return or deal with errors. How about an error field in every result that I can check? And with a numerical code AND a meaningful message that I can pass on to the end user? (And record in my server logs.)

There were a lot of actual underlying API calls present. (in JSON form) (But it's really SOAP I was told.) These API calls were somewhat documented; mechanically from PHP. The real implementation didn't always comply with the documentation however. Results sometimes were, ahem, loosey goosey. (like php maybe?) Over time the returned JSON structures changed from what they originally once were -- without any notice to anyone that might be using this API. There was clearly nothing rigidly enforcing the format on the other end.

Definitely not maintained in the more formal way I would have done it. With API version numbers for newer versions of the official API.

Eventually this other thing fell into disuse.

安倍 晋三
        Why is the Japanese Prime Minister's name spelled “Abe”?
        Written Japanese has a completely different alphabet than ours, so any Japanese speech written in English must be the sounds of that words “translated” into English.
        But in English, Abe doesn’t spell his name. It spells Abraham Lincoln’s nickname. It would be the correct spelling in Spanish, but not English. So why are we not spelling it “Ahbay”?
        Seriously, does no one THINK any more??

goog removes video of Rand Paul speaking on the senate floor

https://www.salon.com/2020/02/13/rand-paul-rips-youtube-after-it-yanks-video-of-him-naming-alleged-whistleblower-this-is-dangerous/

Paul is playing dumb and saying he doesn't know who the "whistleblower" is, but in this situation why not? If you musn't say X then dare the censors to clarify what X is.

Wanna hear a network joke?
 

Background

Microsoft suddenly realizes . . . OMG . . . the internet is NOT just a fad, as Bill Gates had famously said.

OMG, web applications on browsers could make non-Windows platforms competitive! OMG!

Microsoft scrambled. Needs a browser. (classic) Mac already has good internet connectivity baked right in, and a couple good browsers (at that time). Microsoft finds company SpyGlass that makes the SpyGlass browser for Windows. Microsoft buys SpyGlass for $100,000 up front, plus royalty percent of sales. Renames the product Internet Explorer. Guess how many copies of IE are ever sold? Zero.

Microsoft then, over coming years, spends $150 million on IE to develop it into a 'great' browser, if you're a Windows only developer. With addictively great features (if you're a Windows developer). To create a Microsoftized "internet" that excludes non-Windows systems from running web applications. Windows developers (the monopoly) will naturally target IE as their favorite browser. Especially since it has such addictively great sugar coated features.

To further cement a Microsoft-only internet, there is IIS and Front Page.

(aside: Front Page has a four page license agreement, among its terms is that if you create a web site using Front Page, you cannot ever disparage Microsoft, Expedia, and a list of other Microsoft properties. Thus if you visit any web site, and it has tags in the html header section indicating it was created by Front Page, then you know just how credible that web site is when it comes to Microsoft.)

It's like a story of evil, upon evil, upon evil.

Fast Forward

IE loses. Standardization wins. At some point FireFox share goes over 50% and suddenly Microsoft is in panic mode again. IE share is declining. Also this new upstart Chrome browser is gaining market share. So in panic mode a 'kinder gentler' IE that is a bit more standards compliant: IE7.

But not good enough, so IE 8, IE 9, etc. Each becoming more standard compliant. But Microsoft find this is hard to do when the very purpose of IE was to break standards compatibility.

Then Edge, which is an admission that IE has failed. A humorous TV ad by Microsoft about how IE sucks and Edge isn't quite so terrible. You should try it.

Recently

Then Microsoft throws in the towel on Edge, and change its guts to Chromium.

Wow.

Rewind 20 years

Edge is based on Chromium. (Microsoft's doing)
Chromium is based on WebKit. (Google's doing)
WebKit is based on . . . (Apple's doing)
Konqueror.

Remember KDE 3? About 2000. (Before the pooch screw of KDE 4?) It had this cool browser called Konqueror.

In about 2000 I remember reading this on the green site.

First comes the Navigator.
Then comes the Explorer.
Then comes the Konqueror.

Wow. How true those words turned out to be!

How many billions going forward would be saved by cutting SLS from the budget? Maybe that's a good place to start?

And get Mexico to pay for the wall! He vowed to do that in his campaign.

And don't build a wall along the Southern border. Build a Wal-mart along the length of the entire Southern border. Workers can come in from the south. Shoppers can come in from the North to buy foods high in fat, salt and sugar at low, low prices.

Remodel the current SLS hardware into a novel restaurant.