Wake Tech lockdown lifted after report of armed intruder

RALEIGH, N.C. — Wake Technical Community College lifted its lockdown around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, about 90 minutes after someone reported an armed man on campus.

Wake County sheriff’s officials said they got a call about a man with a gun on school property just before 9 a.m., but Sheriff Donnie Harrison said there was no gun on school property.

Classes will resume at 1 p.m, according to Wake Tech spokeswoman Laurie Clowers. No other information was released.

This. This right here is the cost of the policy of creating colleges as gun-free zones. Zero tolerance paranoia that involves a law enforcement scramble and a campus paralyzed with fear. I wonder what the cause will turn out to be. Prank call? Last time, it was a man with an umbrella mistaken for a gun.

This reminds me of that joke about a concealed carry permit holder who gets stopped by a cop and tells him he’s got a gun on his hip, another in the console, a third in the glove box and a shotgun in the trunk. “Jesus, man, what are you afraid of?” the officer asks.

“Not a damn thing, sir.”

Haha, funny story. But it’s a good thing we don’t really rely on horses for math calculations, right? Well, it turns out the same thing can happen with drug-sniffing dogs.

The shortages [of Ritalin and Adderal in pharmacies] are a result of a troubled partnership between drug manufacturers and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with companies trying to maximize their profits and drug enforcement agents trying to minimize abuse by people, many of them college students, who use the medications to get high or to stay up all night.

. . .

While the Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety and supply of the drugs, which are sold both as generics and under brand names like Ritalin and Adderall, the Drug Enforcement Administration sets manufacturing quotas that are designed to control supplies and thwart abuse. Every year, the D.E.A. accepts applications from manufacturers to make the drugs, analyzes how much was sold the previous year and then allots portions of the expected demand to various companies.

(Emphasis mine.)

So if the use of no-knock raids (which criminals are starting to take advantage of) wasn’t enough, now we’ve gone to central planning to fight this drug war. Wow.

Still chuckling at calling the arrangement a “partnership.”

The latest in this series in brought to you by A Game of Thrones, which reminds us that “turnkey” was originally a derogatory term for a jailer, attempting to deride him for the fact that he simply turned the key. Compare that prison context of the word with the modern meaning of a “turnkey solution” which requires little to no setup or customization (but could be said to lock you in to the standard configuration).

Aren’t words fun?

Surely if electronic gadgets could bring down an airplane, you can be sure that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, which has a consuming fear of 3.5 ounces of hand lotion and gel shoe inserts, wouldn’t allow passengers to board a plane with an iPad or Kindle, for fear that they would be used by terrorists.

Huh. Yeah, pretty much. So why is the policy still in place? “There was no evidence saying these devices can’t interfere with a plane, and there was no evidence saying that they can.” No one wants to take the bullet and say “we’ve been wrong for years”.

This point is particularly relevant given EconTalk’s recent podcast with Gary Taubes where he talks about how government dietary guidelines are almost certainly wrong, but nobody is willing to step up and say “We’ve been killing people for decades with bad nutrition recommendations” and change them.

So what happens when you offer a short-term, multi-thousand dollar incentive to purchase a new durable good, as the FedGov did with Cash for Clunkers? People shift their buying forward by buying sooner rather than later. So although a ton of cars were bought under the program, an estimated 45% of those cars would have been bought anyway (which works out to a billion dollars of wasted incentives).

Check out page 28 of that PDF for the graph of the new car sales, and note the jump during Cash for Clunkers and the immediately following fall. And then note that the graph is on a log scale.

This year’s plummeting peanut production has caused several peanut butter makers to raises prices. Peter Pan and JIF raised their wholesale peanut butter prices 20 percent Monday, while Smuckers introduced 30 percent price hikes Tuesday.

. . .

“It’s a matter of supply and demand,” Sutter said. “Cotton prices were high this spring, and that prompted farmers to plant cotton instead of peanuts this year.” That, plus a bad drought in Texas, caused peanut supplies to be down 13 percent from last year.

Hopefully our government will let the price system work to equilibrate the problem. And, speaking of prices…

“Just because (consumers) are paying what they think is a high price for peanut butter, I promise you the farmer isn’t getting any of that increase,” [farmer Jerry] Hamill said.

So you have a scarce good but aren’t getting paid any more for it? Sure smells like price manipulation…

A man trying to stop a robbery in Canyon Country was shot to death Monday afternoon.

The 30-year-old Good Samaritan [sic] was trying to help a robbery victim who was being beaten up at a parking lot of a strip mall on the 18000 block of Soledad Canyon Road, according to authorities.

Short version: a guy agrees to meet someone outside a post office to sell them a Nintendo DS. He gets there, and the buyers turn out to be four thugs who start robbing and beating him. A nearby sheepdog sees this happening, grabs his baseball bat, runs over to break it up, and gets rewarded with being shot in the chest. He died.

See how much safer the world is without civilians legally carrying guns?

There’s one step missing: proof that the average man on the street can actually use cheap CNC tools to build firearms.

Even with out a first amendment, samizdat would ensure that the data would be out there…but given that the legislature and the executive do have to respect our right to speak (even if it has to be reminded somewhat rudely by the courts and the people from time to time), it’s relatively easy to find folks to talk to about home CNC production of firearms.

And remember that thing about information wanting to be free? In our glorious jetcar-free, but peer-to-peer-laden future, collecting and swapping is no longer just for baseball cards; it’s also for plastic printing your own AR-15 magazines and lower receivers.

My only comment is to add that the lower receiver of an AR-15 is what is considered to be the “gun” part of the gun (and is therefore serial numbered and controlled) and is also what determines whether the AR-15 is semi-auto or full-auto. Since 1986, it has been illegal for a civilian to own any full-auto weapon not registered as such before 1986. As an anecdote, I recently saw someone trying to sell a pre-1986 M16 for $18,000, where that gun, semi-auto, brand new today (i.e. of higher quality) would run for $1,000.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are samizdat plans for full-auto AR15 receivers floating around on the internet.