Buffalo Shooter Could Have Been Prevented From Buying a Gun, Gov. Botched Paperwork, U.S. in New Armed Conflict in Africa, Baby Formula Shortage Easing? (The Five for 05/17/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Let’s dive into the news.
[one]
In 2015, mass murderer Dylan Roof was allowed to buy a gun, despite being legally ineligible, due to the FBI’s system’s failing to flag him as ineligible. Roof murdered nine members of a church in Charleston, SC with the gun he should have been prevented from buying.
Currently, it appears that this weekend’s mass murder event in Buffalo, NY was also the result of botched governmental paperwork and processes.
Less than a year before he was accused of opening fire and killing 10 people in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store, 18-year-old Payton Gendron was investigated for making a threatening statement at his high school.
New York has a “red flag” law designed to keep firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, but Gendron was still able to legally buy an AR-15-style rifle.
The “general” threat at Susquehanna Valley High School last June, when he was 17, resulted in state police being called and a mental health evaluation at a hospital. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told Buffalo radio station WKSE-FM that Gendron had talked about murder and suicide when a teacher asked about his plans after school ended, and it was quickly reported but the threat wasn’t considered specific enough to do more. No request was made to remove any firearms from the suspect, New York state police said Monday.
In other words, the laws on the books could have prevented this tragedy. Like Roof’s slaughter, this wasn’t a case of bad laws, but bad execution by various government bodies.
[two]
A new study from the Trafalger Group found that 87.1% of Americans are likely to stop doing business with a company that supports political agendas they find to be offensive.
Three possibilities here.
A. Companies become less political (most likely: already seeing this with Disney).
B. Parallel economies emerge (already happening: Black Rifle Coffee Company is the “anti-Starbucks”)
C. Another step closer to Civil War (certainly hope not).
[three]
Many potential medical breakthroughs are held back by the fact that the successful study can’t be replicated, which means life saving treatments never get to the public.
Turns out, that could be due to the conditions lab rats are kept in.
The Conversation reports:
Our study – like many others before us — also found evidence of methodological problems and poor reporting of experimental details. For example, the rodents used were male-biased, with few studies using female animals.
Furthermore, despite investigating housing effects, two-thirds of the studies in our analysis did not fully describe animals’ living conditions. Our findings support many previous suggestions that rats and mice living in barren cages that lack stimulation may not be suitable models, for several reasons. Research animals are typically male, as well as often overweight, sometimes chronically cold and cognitively impaired.
We suspect that the reliance on “CRAMPED” animals — cold, rotund, abnormal, male-biased, enclosed and distressed — could help explain the current low success rates of biomedical research. There are already examples of research studies generating quite different conclusions depending on how their animals are held, and we now aim to assess the extent to which this occurs.
That housing is critical for rodent biology, yet often poorly described in papers, could also help explain the “replicability crisis”: that at least 50 per cent of preclinical research results cannot be replicated when other scientists re-run a study.
To summarize, it’s possible we’ve thrown away major medical breakthroughs due to false evidence they don’t work…due to sloppy lab conditions.
[four]
President Biden has redeployed special forces into Somalia, reversing a Trump order to pull 700 ground troops out of to fight terrorism.
It was an odd (and tragic) reversal from the isolationist policy that handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban, who have ended the country’s human rights council, canceled girl’s education after 5th grade and banned women from leaving home without a male family member and caused an economic situation so dire mass starvation is rampant and families are selling off daughters. Oh, and there hadn’t been a combat death in Afghanistan for two years and only 2,000 peacekeeping troops were able to keep the new Afghani democratic government functioning.
Now that Afghanistan is hell on earth, and allied with China and Iran…the U.S. is going back into a country that’s been in perpetual civil war (more or less) since 1991, with Somaliland being kinda-sorted recognized as a quasi-independent country in the north of Somalia.
The New York Times reports on the controversial move:
Asked to square the return to heavier engagement in Somalia with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, following through on a deal Mr. Trump had made with the Taliban, the senior administration official argued that the two countries presented significantly different complexities.
For one, the official said, the Taliban have not expressed an intention of attacking the United States, and other militant groups in Afghanistan do not control significant enclaves of territory from which to operate and plan.
Given that Al Shabab appears to pose a more significant threat, the administration concluded that more direct engagement in Somalia made sense, the official said. The strategy would focus on disrupting a few Shabab leaders who are deemed a direct peril to “us, and our interests and our allies,” and maintaining “very carefully cabined presence on the ground to be able to work with our partners.”
Some outside analysts criticized the move, including Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who is the lead author of an upcoming report on U.S. policy in Somalia. The United States had been trying to curb Al Shabab using military force for 15 years, and it had not worked, she said; it might have even prolonged the conflict.
In some way, shape or form…the U.S. is almost always involved in military conflict somewhere in the world. The fact that this operation took weeks to come to light is evidence of that.
[five]
The baby formula shortage, which has left parents of newborns and infants scrambling and desperate to find life-sustaining nutrition and driving hours each week to track down available stock, could ease in the coming weeks.
The shortage began due to a plant shutdown after a bacterial outbreak in an Abbott facility…which may be resolved.
The baby formula manufacturer at the heart of a nationwide formula recall said Monday that it has reached an agreement with the US Food and Drug Administration to enter into a consent decree, a legally binding agreement that would require the company to take certain steps in response to violations found at its Sturgis, Michigan, facility.
If a court approves the agreement, the company says, it could restart the site within two weeks. It would first resume the production of its specialty metabolic formulas EleCare and Alimentum, followed by Similac and other formulas.
After Abbott restarts the site, it will take six to eight weeks for the products to reach store shelves, it said.
The Justice Department said Monday that it had filed the proposed consent decree in federal court.
Until the next one,
-sth