I told you I was going to do something today that I've never done before.

I shot a gun!

I'm going to do something today that I've never done before.

Try to guess. If you begin with "I hope it's..." I predict somebody will get it quickly.

IN THE COMMENTS: The second commenter, Rockeye said:

Going shooting. A boy can hope.

That's the answer. I shot a gun!

I had 2 hours of training and practice at shooting range.

AND: Here's my new post with video.

"The decision to buy a handgun for the first time is typically motivated by self-protection. But..."

"... it also raises the purchasers’ risk of deliberately shooting themselves by ninefold on average, with the danger most acute in the weeks after purchase, scientists reported on Wednesday. The risk remains elevated for years, they said," the NYT reports.

Thanks, scientists, but did you exclude the people who bought guns because they'd already formed an intention to shoot themselves? Or maybe it's just the NYT that wrote it that way, making it sound as though there are a lot of people who buy a handgun for self-defense and then somehow — once they've got that handgun — embark for the first time into suicidal ideation.

Of course, it's easy to see that people who have a gun are more likely to shoot themselves than people who don't have a gun, but they're talking about first-time handgun owners. So the comparison is first-time handgun owners and longterm handgun owners? NO!

The study tracked nearly 700,000 first-time handgun buyers, year by year, and compared them with similar non-owners, breaking out risk by gender. Men who bought a gun for the first time were eight times as likely to kill themselves by gunshot in the subsequent 12 years than non-owners; women were 35 times as likely to do so.

Well, the non-owners number would be extremely small, so 8 times that and even 35 times doesn't sound so big.

Toward the end of the article, there's a reference to "so-called reverse causation." That's the situation that I mentioned, above, that the handgun was bought for the purpose of suicide, but the researchers had no way to tell the difference between these people and those who bought the handgun for self-protection (and the protection of others).

I got the feeling the article was written to inspire readers not to arm themselves lest the gun would change them into a person who'd commit suicide. This is the message that if you don't want to die, don't arm yourself because you'll be arming your most-likely murderer: YOU!

"Scrutiny of Social-Distance Policing as 35 of 40 Arrested Are Black/Mayor Bill de Blasio said the police had enforced rules properly..."

"... but other officials expressed concern about tactics similar to unfair 'stop and frisk' practices" (NYT)("Of those arrested, 35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white").

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has long denounced the unconstitutional “stop and frisk” practices of the Bloomberg administration, has found himself in recent days forced to explain why enforcement of social distancing in predominantly minority neighborhoods is different than “stop and frisk.”...

“What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”

Stop and frisk was aimed at the black community because that's where the incidence of gun violence was highest. Why is the enforcement of social distancing concentrated on the black community? I don't see how the difference from stop and frisk makes concentrating on black people better. It makes it worse!

I don't see de Blasio arguing that the coronavirus is victimizing black people disproportionately and that justifies the enforcement disparity. To say that would be to cite a similarity to stop and frisk, and how could that work for de Blasio? The pandemic is a bigger danger than gun violence? I don't know, but what he is saying doesn't cohere for me. It's a string of disjointed sentences — just nonsense.

Joe Biden, the tough guy, mixing it up with the hard hats.

Joe Biden to Michigan voter: "You’re full of shit."pic.twitter.com/zayU6gh2Ml

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 10, 2020

My biggest criticism? He's not taking coronavirus seriously! They're right up in each other's faces.