US Gun Statistics

US Gun Statistics Various Sources 2-2-05

Physicians
(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.
(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.
(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171. (Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept. of Health Human Services)

Guns
(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. Yes,that is 80 million.
(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is1,500.
(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is 0.000188.

Statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerousthan gun owners. Remember, "Guns don't kill people, doctors do."FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE HAS AT LEAST ONEDOCTOR.

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!

Out of concern for the public at large, I have withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.
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Police to Experiment with Microwaves to Stop Car Chases

Most cars built since 1982 have computer chips that operate many functions in a car, including fuel injection. Police and scientists have long dreamed of using a source of energy that when aimed at a car, would disable the electronics in that car, causing it to stop.

While in theory this is possible, the problem has always been how to make a device that is portable enough to be used within a police car or helicopter, which would allow the police to pursue and then stop, a fleeing suspect. Well, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will begin to experiment with just such a device later this summer. The device will reach out 300 feet and cause a car to simply stop accelerating. This would be much safer than present methods of using spike strips, which can cause a driver to loose control of a fast moving vehicle.

Another advantage for the police is that they could use the device whenever a suspect would be in a limited position to bolt and run, such as on an overpass. How the device will be aimed (it is still rather large) and its affect on other cars in the immediate area, are still unknown.

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That’s the way the cookie crumbles

Frightened neighbor sues teens over late-night gift — and wins

DURANGO, Colo. - Two teenage girls who surprised their neighbors with homemade cookies late one night were ordered to pay nearly $900 in medical bills plus court costs
	Taylor Ostergaard, left, and Lindsey Zellitti on Thursday display cookies the two made for neighbors last summer.

for a woman who says she was so startled that she had to go to the hospital.

La Plata County Court Judge Doug Walker declined Thursday to award punitive damages, saying he did not believe the girls acted maliciously but that 10:30 was fairly late at night for them to be out.

Taylor Ostergaard, then 17, and Lindsey Jo Zellitti, then 18, baked the chocolate chip and sugar cookies one night last July. They made packages with a half-dozen cookies each and added large red or pink construction-paper hearts that carried the message, “Have a great night” and were signed with their first initials: “Love, The T and L Club.” Then they set off to make their deliveries.

The Denver Post reported Friday that the girls had decided to stay home and bake the cookies rather than go to a dance where there might be cursing and drinking. It reported that six neighbors wrote letters entered as evidence in the case thanking the girls for the cookies.

‘Shadowy figures’ and no answer to ‘Who’s there?’
But Wanita Renea Young, 49, said she was at her rural home south of Durango around 10:30 p.m. when she saw “shadowy figures” outside the house banging repeatedly on her door. She yelled, “Who’s there?” but no one answered, and the figures ran away.

The teens said they did not answer when the woman called out because they wanted the treats to be a surprise.

Frightened, Young spent the night at her sister’s home, then went to the hospital the next morning because she was still shaking, had an upset stomach and feared she had had a heart attack.

Apologies called insincere
The teenagers’ families offered to pay Young’s medical bills, but she declined and sued, saying their apologies were not sincere and were not offered in person.

The girls declined comment after the ruling. Taylor’s mother said her daughter “cried and cried.”

“She felt she was being punished for doing something nice,” Jill Ostergaard said.

Young said the teenagers showed “very poor judgment”

“The victory wasn’t sweet,” Young said. “I’m not gloating about it. I just hope the girls learned a lesson.”

The two were ordered to pay $871.70 plus $39 in court costs. They paid the judgment Thursday, a court clerk said Friday.

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American Media - I can't take it anymore

When is our media going to get it? I can’t take it anymore. We are fed bad news about the war in Iraq all day long. Here are some of today’s headlines:

44 Die in Attacks!

Bush Hails Iraqi Vote, but warns of more fighting ahead

Iraqis defied threats of violence and calls for a boycott to cast ballots in Iraq’s first free election in a half-century Sunday, and insurgents struck polling stations with a string of suicide bombings and mortar strikes.

However, we didn’t hear about the 14.2 MILLION voters who turned out. 44 (including bombers) people out of 14.2 million is about .00003%. (Less than our margin of error for elections)

How many Americans voted in our last presidential election? About 53%!

Try this on for size:
The total number of votes cast (in the US 2004 Presidential election) was 115.7 million…(out of)…213.8 million eligible voters. (source: US Census Bureau)

There was also no confirmation of voter turnout among the country's 14 million eligible voters, but officials said they thought it

appeared higher than the 57 percent that had been predicted.

(Source: MSN.com)

Why do we focus on the negative? Why are we not asking, “why do more Iraqi’s vote, with terrorist threats no less, than American’s?”

Why do we focus on “44 Die In Attacks” rather than “14.2 Million Iraqi’s Vote!”

How many American’s die each day in our own country in car accidents? Drug overdoses? Random acts of violence?

Think about this:

The human cost of medical errors is high. Based on the findings of
one major study, medical errors kill some 44,000 people in U.S.
hospitals each year. Another study puts the number much higher, at
98,000. Even using the lower estimate, more people die from medical
mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or
AIDS.

Moreover, while errors may be more easily detected in hospitals, they
afflict every health care setting: day-surgery and outpatient clinics,
retail pharmacies, nursing homes, as well as home care. Deaths from
medication errors that take place both in and out of hospitals - more
than 7,000 annually - exceed those from workplace injuries.

Let’s encourage our American media to be shallow and continue to feed us the bad news of the work of our soldiers and the regrowth of the Iraqi society. Let’s allow them to ignore the problems of this country to criticize the Commander In Chief of the World’s most powerful nation.

Could our media, as a whole, withstand being in a giant sandbox instead of our soldiers? Could they operate a country 24 hours a day? Could they live in the limelight day in and day out without being called a failure?

A beautiful part of this country is the ability to protest against the things you disagree with and advertise those you do agree with. Stop using your RIGHTS to complain about the very tool that gave you those rights in the first place.

Let’s hear some equal coverage of what is ACTUALLY happening around the world and in our mighty Country.

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Jilted Man Begs for Wife's Return in $17,000 Ad

Yahoo! News - Jilted Man Begs for Wife's Return in $17,000 Ad: "MIAMI (Reuters) - A Florida man has tried to win back his estranged wife with a full-page, $17,000 newspaper ad begging her to give him another chance.

Dubbed 'Lonesome Larry' by the Florida Times-Union, the man told the newspaper that his wife of 17-1/2 years had moved out, changed her cell phone number, refused to return his calls, barred him from entering her parents' gated community and ignored the five dozen roses he sent.
So Larry took out an ad addressed to 'Marianne' on Tuesday.
'Please believe the words in my letter, they are true and from my heart. I can only hope you will give me the chance to prove my unending love for you. Life without you is empty and meaningless,' the ad reads. 'Please, please, please call me. I love you with all my heart!'
The ad prompted calls from readers curious to know how things turned out, the newspaper said on Wednesday. It did not identify the man because of an advertiser privacy policy, but contacted him to learn what prompted the ad and whether Marianne had relented.
Larry told the newspaper that he knows his wife saw the advertisement because a relative is still speaking to him.
'She said my wife read the ad and started crying. But so far I've had no response from her,' the newspaper quoted Larry as saying."
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Devious New Phishing Attack

PCWorld.com - Privacy Watch: Devious New Phishing Attack Outsmarts Typical Defenses

A vulnerability in Windows lets phishers hijack your browser--even when you type the URL yourself.

Andrew Brandt
From the March 2005 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Friday, January 21, 2005

You might think that you know how to protect yourself from phishing: Don't click the links in e-mail that purports to be from banks or other institutions. But that defense is no longer ironclad: Phishers have found a new way to snare data without your clicking a link.

Anyone with an inbox has seen a standard phishing attack: You get an e-mail warning you that something terrible has happened to your bank account and asking you to go to the bank's site to reenter your personal data. If you click the link in the e-mail, however, you go not to your bank but to a server run by a criminal who gathers all the data you enter. The best advice has been to ignore the link in the e-mail and instead type the URL of your bank's site into your browser. But that was then. Now--without protection--you can't even trust your browser when you type the address yourself.

Here's how the new phishing scam works. You receive an HTML e-mail message, and you open (or even just preview) the message in your e-mail client software. Windows PCs lacking one particular Microsoft security patch (available here) will run a tiny JavaScript applet as the client renders the HTML. The QHosts Trojan horse applet modifies the PC's Hosts file so that when you type in a bank's URL you actually go to a site controlled by the fraudsters. Since phishers have gotten very good at mimicking real sites, you may never know you're at the wrong one.

Spybot Search & Destroy lets you "lock" the Hosts file, preventing any other program from changing it. The Options tab in WinPatrol causes that program to pop up a dialog box if software attempts to change your Hosts file. And in the paid ZoneAlarm Pro firewall or ZoneAlarm Security Suite, you can enable an option in the Privacy Settings menu called Hosts File Protection that both locks the Hosts file and alerts you when something tries to change it.

While the impact of QHosts has been limited so far, phishers are likely to use this new technique much more in the near future. The fact that the Hosts file is easy to protect will be cold comfort to future victims who get hit with the next QHosts-like phishing scam.

--Andrew Brandt

Andrew Brandt is a senior associate editor for PC World. You can send him e-mail at consumerwatch@pcworld.com.

L.A. train crash suspect charged with murder

GLENDALE, Calif. - The suicidal man who authorities say caused the chain-reaction train derailment that killed 11 people has been charged with multiple counts of murder and could face the death penalty, the district attorney said Thursday.

Why does it seem dumb to punish a suicidal man with the death penalty?
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MSNBC - 2 many txt msgs bad 4 yr health, doctors say

MSNBC - 2 many txt msgs bad 4 yr health, doctors say:
Furious typing could lead to acute tendonitis

"ROME - Excessive text messaging may be bad for you, or at least for your fingers.
advertisement

That's what some Italian doctors think. They are telling people, particularly the young, that furious typing on mobile phones could lead to acute tendonitis.

Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Messaggero dedicated about half a page each to the problem on Monday.

A 13-year-old girl in the northern Italian city of Savona needed treatment from an orthopaedic specialist after typing at least 100 short message services (SMSs) a day.
She was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine and ordered to rest her hands.

According to a recent study conducted for children's rights group Telefono Azzurro, some 37 percent of Italian children are "cell phone addicts." Irritability and mood swings were other symptoms linked to very frequent cell phone use among the young.

The message is clear: MayB U shd stop B4 its 2 L8."

Apprentice 3 - Coming Tonight

MSNBC - Can Apprentice 3 rescue the concept?:
By Sarah D. Bunting
MSNBC contributor

Despite what series star Donald Trump might try to tell you about the ratings for Season Two, the show didn't do nearly as well in its second season as it did in its first, for a number of reasons first among them the casting. Part of the attraction of reality TV is its frequent resemblance to a human train wreck, it's true, but in order to make said wreckage compelling, a reality show needs to give audiences someone to root for.
The first season's merry band of Boardroomians had its share of the obnoxious (Heidi), the tactlessly inept (Jessie), and the downright certifiable (Omarosa). But it also had Troy forthright, innovative, folksy, and almost universally beloved and a final two, Bill and Kwame, who knew how to get things done and behave professionally at the same time. Viewers who rooted for one of them could still get behind a victory for the other.

By contrast, the second season's final two came down to a choice between the lesser of two evils: smug micromanager Kelly, or manipulative idler Jennifer M. The contestants fired before them didn't exactly cover themselves with glory either, between orchestrating the catty and groundless firing of Stacie J. (all the women except Jen M.), dissolving into tears over perceived slights (Elizabeth and Maria), and not knowing how to pronounce Carolyn's name (Bradford). Oh, and dropping trou on the street (oh, Ivana).

"The Apprentice" did well in its first season because it at least faintly resembled a real job interview; the performance of the competitors on tasks and in the boardroom had some relevance to who did or didn't get fired, and we viewers loved armchair-quarterbacking the process from the perspective of our own work experiences.

[...]

Viewers often root for the plain-spoken, results-oriented "street smarts" type of contestant; Troy and Sandy both became audience favorites. But Trump is biased towards book-larnin'. So what happens if street smarts consistently beats book smarts?

Because it's not just a question that comes up on the show; it's a question that comes up in real life, too, all the time. It's a question job applicants have to prepare an answer for: why they should be hired instead a more qualified, or more educated, candidate.

Constructing the teams this way brings the hiring/firing process of the show back to something viewers can relate to, and how Trump reacts to the result is going to govern the show's fate.

If street smarts mops the floor with book smarts, but Trump still finds an excuse to favor the Ivy Leaguers, any credibility "The Apprentice" still had will be destroyed.

If he pays attention to actual accomplishments, and favors contestants based on ability and performance instead of interpersonal melodrama, he can once again call his show the best program on TV.

But only if the season finale is a manageable length next time. Dear Donald: One hour, no Regis, or you're fired.