Friday, June 3, 2022

You Can't Win

 Doctors prescribed opioids too freely because hospitals get evaluated on pain.  But patients in pain decide it is too hard to take the pain.  6/2/22 KOCO:

On May 29, Louis bought a semi-automatic handgun at a pawn show, according to Tulsa police. He also bought an AR-15-style rifle around 2 p.m. from a Tulsa-area gun store the day of the shooting.

Police said officers found a letter on Louis making it clear that he wanted to kill Phillips and anyone who got in his way. He blamed Phillips for causing the pain following the back surgery.

As a realtor I knew many years ago put it, back surgery should always be a last resort.  (He tried to pick up a VW Beetle while very drunk, assigned to the DEW Line.  What else do you do when assigned a place that remote?)

Perhaps we should reconsider the reduce opioid prescriptions idea?  Addiction is bad; so is pain.  When pain is severe enough that murder-suicide makes sense, I will side with increased risk of addiction.  After heart surgery, I used opioids for a week or two; I found the dreams about a primitivist political cult so disturbing that I dropped them, used Tylenol, and dealt with the pain.  I suspect it was nowhere near what this guy was going through. 

He passed the background check, so there is no "gun show loophole" that he circumvented.  Not a ghost gun.   

He shot and murdered four people.  This is well within any ten round magazine limit, even if he missed with half of his shots.  All they have left to push is restrictive licensing.  For the 100 million owners of magazine-fed handguns, this could be the straw that gives Republicans veto-proof majorities in November.

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