The Goat Pen

Gator by God's Grace wrote:Sanford isn't near Tampa, it's East, between Orlando and Daytona. It sits on Lake Monroe, where the St. John's River originates. It was a key port city back in the day when freight was tendered to central Florida down the river by steamship (before there was a city of Orlando). It is the county seat of Seminole County, and sits on the Eastern edge of the County, before you cross the bridge on I-4 into Volusia County. iirc former Expos star and future hall of famer Tim "Rock" Raines went to high school there, as did former LA Angel David Eckstein. when i was growing up in central Florida in the 80's, the Sanford area was mostly occupied by poor blacks and rednecks, while the western part of Seminole County was occupied by middle class and wealthy Orlando suburbanites. I have no idea what the demographics are today, it's probably continued Orlando suburban sprawl i imagine. mostly people only went there when i was a kid to visit the Central Florida Zoo, which was the Orlando-area public zoo.

“I tell him, ‘Baby, my cash money,’ ” the woman said in her first public comments on a spat that would soon spiral into a full-blown scandal.

The dispute — he offered $30 for services she thought they had agreed were worth 25 times that — triggered a tense early morning struggle in the hallway of the posh hotel involving the woman, another prostitute, Colombian police officers arguing on the women’s behalf and American federal agents who tried but failed to keep the matter — which has shaken the reputation of the Secret Service — from escalating.

Just after seven-thirty on the morning of February 27th, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside Cleveland. It was a Monday, and the cafeteria was filled with kids, some eating breakfast, some waiting for buses to drive them to programs at other schools, some packing up for gym class. Lane sat down at an empty table, reached into a bag, and pulled out a .22-calibre pistol. He stood up, raised the gun, and fired. He said not a word.

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.

The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five.

Men are far more likely to own guns than women are, but the rate of gun ownership among men fell from one in two in 1980 to one in three in 2010, while, in that same stretch of time, the rate among women remained one in ten. Gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, higher in the country than in the city, and higher among older people than among younger people. One reason that gun ownership is declining, nationwide, might be that high-school shooting clubs and rifle ranges at summer camps are no longer common.

The day before T. J. Lane shot five high-school students in Ohio, another high-school student was shot in Florida. The Orlando Sentinel ran a three-paragraph story. On February 26th, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin left a house in a town outside Orlando and walked to a store. He was seen by a twenty-eight-year-old man named George Zimmerman, who called 911 to report that Martin, who was black, was “a real suspicious guy.” Zimmerman got out of his truck. Zimmerman was carrying a 9-mm. pistol; Martin was unarmed. What happened next has not been established, and is much disputed. Zimmerman told the police that Martin attacked him. Martin’s family has said that the boy, heard over a cell phone, begged for his life.

Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest. Martin did not survive. Zimmerman was not charged. Outside Orlando, the story was not reported.

Jungle Rat wrote:And I should care because? Because I really don't.

Bklyn wrote:

Jungle Rat wrote:And I should care because? Because I really don't.

Well, you asked why is there outrage from some people. I kinda explained it. You don't care...and a bunch of people don't. I'm just telling you why some do...especially those who run the Secret Service. They hate headline risk.

Jungle Rat wrote:I would say there is a big difference between a "white hispanic" man shooting a "black" kid after an alleged confrontation and a kid going into any school (no matter what his skin) and just opening fire for no reason. To even compare the two is idiotic.

Jungle Rat wrote:I think we have better things in this country to worry about than some SS agents blowing their wad on some Columbian hookers. Than again, it is an election year.