(all these photos, and more, can be found on Rob's Instagram and Facebook pages.)
Here is a story of love and devotion between a terminally ill dog and the man, a marine veteran, who loved her and spent her last months taking her on the journey of a lifetime. Here is the story of Rob and Bella.
Over a year ago, doctors gave Bella, diagnosed with terminal cancer, she had a leg amputated because of bone cancer and the cancer had spread to her lungs. She was given 3-6 months to live. Rob decided to take Bella with him on a trip to Chicago so he could spend as much time with her as to spend as much time with her as he could. It didn't stop there, next thing you know, they were an epic journey around the United States together.
He gained thousands of followers on his instagram, facebook and twitter accounts. People from around the world were following the journey of Rob and Bella.
Rob and Bella traveled the country
Thursday, October 27, 2016, Rob took Bella on a ride, not knowing it would be her last.
That night Bella's breathing became labored and, as Rob snuggled in next to Bella at the vet, he posted to his instagram followers that that the end was near.
Sadly, Bella passed away Friday, October 28 with Rob by her side. Through the sheer force of Rob's love, Bella lived much longer than the vets thought. On Friday, October 28, 2016 Rob posted this picture of Bella to his instagram/Facebook
Goodbye my Love. Thank you for never abandoning me...never judging me...never giving up on me... Thank you...for Loving me with every beat of that beautiful heart. Now go, become one with all...dance in the wind, flow in the ocean, and give warmth to the hearts of all you've touched...for your Love is now eternal and immeasurable. To my brother Mike, sister Charity and all my grandparents... give this girl some tummy rubs, would you? For all the spirits young and old who were brought to the other side far too soon due to some type of ailment or disease that took you before your time... welcome this girl as I'm sure she's greeting you with a wagging tail.
R.I.P. sweet Bella.
Our thoughts and prayers are with Rob at this difficult time.
Author’s note: I reached out to a respected expert on gun control statistics, Dr. Gary Kleck, professor of criminology at Florida State University. He was kind enough to send me the chapter The Great American Gun Debate:What Research Has to Say from The Criminal Justice System, 10th edition, Edited by George F. Cole and Marc G. Gertz. Wadsworth. (Published January 2012). [Note: the copy of the paper I linked to had been hacked at one point and nasty, unrelated stuff added, at this time I don't have a reliable link to the paper.] He also sent me a copy of National Vital Statistics Reports Volume 60, Number 3 which is the final report for 2009 which he says “provides the most recent final mortality data, showing numbers of deaths from all causes, with separate counts for gun deaths.” There is no problem with guns, there's a problem with people. People are the ones committing heinous crimes. These criminals and terrorists don't follow laws. They don't care if there are gun laws. If someone is going to commit murder, a crime that has the death penalty/life imprisonment, do you really think gun laws will deter them? Terrorists and insane people who want to hurt people will find a way. If not guns, explosives, planes, cars, or other means to cause harm. This is because it's not the weapon that is causing the death, it's the person bent on causing death. The way to prevent these types of incidents isn't to regulate or ban guns, it's to help identify and treat those with mental illness who are a danger to themselves and others and to identify terrorists before they commit heinous acts. People are the problem, not their weapons of choice. Remember, no guns were involved in the 9-11 attacks.
1. Gun control doesn't work. None of the worst attacks would have been prevented by any form of gun control and likely it was gun laws which prevented people from being armed defending themselves and others. 2. People misuse the term "assault rifle." There is a specific type of rifle, fully automatic that is called an "assault rifle." Fully automatic rifles are illegal for most people other than military or police and a few select people to possess. None of the recent attacks involved fully automatic rifles. Media, either intentionally or because they are ignorant, mistakenly call rifles used in the recent crimes "assault rifles." "AR' does not stand for 'assault rifle' or 'automatic rifle' it stands for ArmaLite rifle, the company that developed it. In case you don't know what an assault rifle is and what it isn't, here is an explanation:
Some have included semi-automatic weapons that are capable of switching to automatic in the definition of "assault rifle" but they all have the characteristic of being able to fire automatically. Guns that are strictly semi-automatic are not "assault rifles." Some people also confuse "assault rifles" with "Assault Weapons" which are something completely different.
3. Guns are not the problem, people are the problem 4. We must do a better job at preventing terrorism, preventing terrorists from entering the country by improving vetting people who come into the country. We must also do a better job identifying terrorists who are in the country.
5. Most importantly, the government should not make laws that make people incapable of protecting themselves. It is not feasible for police to be everywhere. What is feasible and what would be the best way to protect ourselves, our families and our children is to be armed and trained. School staff should be properly trained and armed like they do in Israel.
Israeli Elementary School
We train teachers and staff how to perform first aid/CPR and use an AED to save kids, why not train them to use firearms? this is just another way to protect our precious children. People in the nightclub in Orlando were sitting ducks, being murdered while waiting for police with guns to come and save them instead of being armed and saving themselves.
So, what does research and statistics say about gun control?
What are the statistics of guns used for violence versus gun use for protection and,
“Perhaps what is most striking about the patterns of gun ownership in the US is that ownership is generally highest in those groups where violence is lowest.” (Kleck 1997, Chapter 3). “It is well known that guns are used in many violent crimes in the US. [However] The best available evidence indicates that guns are used by victims in self-protection considerably more often than crimes are committed by offenders using guns.For example, victims used guns defensively about 2.0-2.5 million times in 1993, compared to fewer than 600,000 violent crimes committed by offenders with guns (Kleck and Gertz 1995).”
“Defensive gun use is effective in preventing injury to the victim and property loss.Research based on interviews with large nationally representative samples of crime victims consistently indicates that those who use guns during crime incidents are less likely to be injured or lose property than those who either adopt other resistance strategies or do not resist at all. These effects are usually produced without shooting the gun or wounding a criminal -only 24 per cent of gun defenders even fired the gun (including warning shots), only l6 per cent tried to shoot the perpetrator, and at most 8 per cent wounded the offender (evidence summarized in Kleck and Kates 2001, Chapter 7).”
“There is also evidence indicating that some criminals may be deterred from making some criminal attempts in the first place by the prospect of victim gun use against them. Criminals interviewed in prison indicate that they have refrained from committing crimes because they believed a potential victim might have a gun, and crime rates have dropped substantially after highly publicized instances of prospective victims arming themselves or being trained in gun use, or victims using guns against criminals. (research summarized in Kleck and Kates 2001, Chapter 7).”
Information I had not even considered, “that when criminal aggressors possess guns in a crime incident, they are substantially less likely to attack and injure their victims in the first place. At least nineteen studies have found that offenders possessing guns are less likely to injure their victims than offenders with other weapons or no weapons. The explanation appears to be that possession of a lethal weapon enables aggressors to intimidate victims without actually attacking them, in crimes where the offender’s goal is not to kill the victim.” Kleck 2011
Many gun control proponents state that having stricter gun control laws that restrict who can purchase guns will prevent criminals from obtaining guns. Studies show that most criminals do not obtain their guns from a conventional retail dealer of guns.
Eight four percent, of 943 felon handgun owners surveyed, did not purchase the gun from a conventional retailer.
Since many use death rates to defend their anti-gun agenda we must compare the mortality rates related to gunshot wounds as compared to mortality rates by other mechanisms. Why do people focus more on gun injury related deaths? Why guns when more people have died from poisoning and motor vehicle accidents individually and followed closely by falls? There are restrictions on some types of poisons, but that didn’t prevent 41,592 deaths by poison in 2009. There are even less restrictions on motor vehicles which caused 34,485 deaths in 2009.Both of these cause more deaths than guns. All of these can be used by in the commission of murder. It's about an anti-gun agenda, controlling the population through gun control has long been used by governments. Anti-gun advocates have believed the government's use of emotional brainwashing that guns are evil and kill people. They use 'crime stats' to back up their position. Let's look at crime stats.
Choose your own crime stats:
According to: National Vital Statistics Reports Volume 60, Number 3 December 29, 2011Deaths: Final Data for 2009 (Table 18) in 2009, a total of 177,154 deaths were classified as injury related Four major mechanisms of injury in 2009— poisoning, motor-vehicle traffic, firearm, and fall— accounted for 75.1 percent of all injury deaths.
Mechanism
Number of Deaths 2009
Percentage
Poisoning
41,592
23.5%
Motor-vehicle traffic
34,485
19.5%
Firearm
31,347
17.7 %
Fall
25,562
14.4 %
If you want to see more statistics, you can check out the Explore the Wallstreet Journal's interactive murder database of killings committed in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010 where can limit your search by criteria. For example: There were 28 drowning murders in 2009. I'm not sure how accurate the interactive database is, the database does not include Florida. The CDC's 2009 vital statistics report, Table 18, says 41 drowning murders in 2009. If the interactive database is correct, 13 occurred in Florida. That seems a little high to me, but it's possible. Still the interactive database lets you get a feel for the numbers and gives you the ability to compare different categories. Why then are guns singled out as needing restriction or banned? Could it be, perhaps, a matter of politics? Though there are gun proponents and gun control advocates on both ends of the political spectrum, it seems as though it is mostly the liberals and progressives that want gun control and the conservatives and moderates that defend the second Amendment right to bear arms. That this topic has become entrenched in people’s political belief system, it is difficult, but not impossible, for people’s minds to be changed on the topic of gun control.
Research shows that gun control will not help prevent gun related crimes, nor will it prevent people from obtaining guns. In fact, stricter gun control would cause an increase in crime, increase gun related crime, and victim injury/death.
In response to the question: What is the defense of those that would try to discredit this study?
Dr. Kleck responded: "I have thoroughly rebutted all of the criticisms of my and others' survey estimates of the frequency of defensive gun use in one convenient source, a chapter in the 2001 book Armed, by Gary Kleck and Don B. Kates."
Dr. Kleck stands by the data in the study. Thank you Dr. Kleck!
REFERENCES
Kleck, Gary. 1997. Targeting Guns: Firearms and their Control. N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter.
Kleck, Gary, and Marc Gertz. 1995. “Armed resistance to crime: the prevalence and nature of self-defense with a gun.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86:150-187.
