BHS - 7A – Georgia High School Shooting | Aging at Home

How about that? Yeah? And then it should start cooling down, but just not much, just a slight, slight cool down through the weekend. Phoenix north of one hundred degrees for what the third straight month, over one hundred days. Something

completely crazy. Now, yesterday, of course we receive the news and this is the big, big story, and I think not internationally, because you know, the world knows that shooting schools, shotings here in the United States are simply a matter of course, you know, it's a question of just counting. And we've had what more up to this point than all of last year, like in the hundreds. So yesterday four people killed at Appalachi High School in Georgia. Nine

hospitalized another mass shooting. The suspected gunman is in custody, fourteen year old student at the school, fourteen years old. Victims were two students, also fourteen years old, and then two teachers and the nine other people who were shot and were not killed. Eight students and one teacher were wounded. And I guess the good news, and it is good news. They're expected to survive and make a full recovery. So the gunman, identified as Colt Gray, he's fourteen and will

be charged as in a adult. Now fourteen years old and still being charged an adult is I think the youngest of any state where you can charge someone with an adult. Here in California you sort of have to be eighteen. I think under very special circumstances, seventeen year olds can be charged. Now here is a story that Okay,

let's look at this in depth. Gray was questioned by law enforcement last year regarding several anonymous tips about online threats he made to commit a school shooting at an unidentified unidentified an unidentified location in time, and there was no probable cause for a rest at that time. Can you imagine he was questioned. So here's how he came down. One of the students said that the shooter, Gray left his classroom at the beginning of algebra one around nine

to forty five am. He returns near the end of the class. He knocks to get back in the door. Another student goes to open the door, but notices that he's got a gun and refuse to open the door. Then what Gray does is go into the next classroom and opens fire. The Sheriff's department received the first report of reports of the shooting around ten twenty. I don't

know when the class actually when it ended. We know that he came in around nine forty five, don't know when the class was to end, so the exact time that he came in the Sheriff's department received around ten twenty the first reports. Now, a resource officer confronted the shooter. Remember this is after the cops were called immediately surrendered. He threw his arms up and surrendered, taken into custody

as they described, without incident. And as a result of the shooting, and this is now simply policy, all schools in the district were placed on lockdown. Police were sent out to all the schools and with an abundance of costume. They said, we're shutting it down, even though at that point they thought and knew that it was only gray and it wasn't another shooter, but another scene of students running out of classrooms, hands in the air because the cops don't know who has a weapon, who doesn't. At

this point, they don't know who did the shooting. They just have to get everybody out, hands in the air, and in this case, the students went out into the field, into the football field. And part of the story is that parents were running, as you can imagine, to the school because they heard. There were cell phone calls made to parents, mom, dad, there was a shooting at the school.

In one case, the student in one of the classrooms heard the shooting, knew that there was that bullets were flying, and said the last saying said was I love you now. That student survived. That student was not a victim. We don't know who the victims is. The victims are well, we do we have the names certainly of the ones that were killed, but we don't know what students were in which classroom, and we don't know who survived. How many witnesses there are. I guess can you imagine were saying, oh,

only four were killed this time around. It doesn't really become massive, massive news until what a dozen are killed. I mean, that's where we've come to. And so what we do know is a fourteen year old student leaves his algebra class, comes back at the end of the class, knocks on the door, which is closed. Student opens up the door, sees this kid, his name is Colt Gray, and he has an assault type weapon with him. Immediately shuts the door, locks it. I mean, we're no one's

coming in the door with that. And so Grey goes next door and opens fire and kills two students and two teachers. Okay, so now I want to go and we've heard this before, but I think all of this and depending on how old you are, let's start with one of the things that virtually every single news outlet was interviewing parents, not necessarily or not the parents who of the kids that were killed, but parents and saying, every time my kid goes to school, I'm wondering if

I'm ever going to see my child again. Students are saying every time I go to school, I'm wondering if there's someone coming in with a weapon and something that was unheard of. Now I grew up and I was in school at the end of the Cold War, when I was just a couple of years younger, and we

had what we call drop drills. I mean everybody has fire drills, but drop drills where the teacher would say drop and we would immediately dive under our desks and we would put our hands lock the hands over our necks behind us, and we were on our knees and our asses had to face although it's kind of hard for asses to face, but your butt has to face

the windows. And why did we have drop drills Because the fear that the Russians were going to unleash nuclear weapons and LA being a target, we were going to be attacked. And I guess that the drop drill was all about. I guess your butt being fried one hundredth of one thousandth of one nanosecond before the rest of you gets vaporized. That was the drop drill. Never even occur to anybody that someone would come a shooter would come into the school and start to spraying a classroom in,

killing students and teachers. Now it's active shooter drills. I don't think there is an elementary school, middle school, high school in the country that doesn't have active shooter drills. And we've reached the point where that's incidentally, that's the cost of doing business in the United States. Now, that's it. Live in the country. You're going to see mass shootings. That's it. You know, you wake up and you're just waiting for another mass shooting, and hopefully it's not a school.

Hopefully it's well, hopefully it's not any place, and you hope the cops take down whoever it is that does the shooting. I mean, it is a totally different world, all right. Two things. One, you're not going to hear gun control talked about it anymore. I mean you occasionally hear something called sensible gun control, which California has most restrictive gun control, and that no assault weapons and the number of bullets in a magazine is limited. Southern states

do not have any of that. It's basically year done open carry. You can carry guns. And there's all kinds of evidence on both sides saying it's safer, it's not safer, and sayings, you know, an armed society is a polite society, and we can go crazy with that. Now, as I said in my last segment, is there anything that would we the limit the possibility of a shooter coming into school? Yeah, make the school effectively a TSA checkpoint. That's it. You come in well and works. It's so far. They open

up all the backpacks. There are stadiums that you can only have clear plastic bags so the security can see whatever you have. You're not allowed purses, and so you go through a metal detector. If people have some kind of metal, boom, the wand comes out. And every single school has to be secure. And on top of that, every single shopping center, every market would have to be secure, which of course is impossible. Schools, I think you can do. I think taxpayers would vote in the kind of security

that is needed. It has come to a just craziness. And this has been going on for a while. I went back to the high school that I graduated from, and I was invited by a teacher that I had who was just about to retire. And we're walking down the hallway and I see a door with LAPD seal on the door, and I asked him, I go, what the hell is this about? And he goes, oh, we have a substation with two cops assigned to the school. This was not resource officers, this was LAPD. And he said,

it's a different world. It is a totally different world. When I went to high school. I mean open gates, you know, you could go in and out. Nothing was locked down. And now we look at what's going on. And by the way, and I want to say something, and you know, I have advocated control my entire broadcast career, my entire adult life. The point is it's over. Critical mass has already happened. It's like climate change. You can

slow it down, but you're done right. We're past the point of no return, and we certainly are passed the point of no return with weapons. There was a time during George W. Bush's presidency where there was a federal law that you couldn't buy an assault weapel, you couldn't own an assault weapon. If you had grandfathered in you could. But that sunset it after ten years, and since then,

I think twenty or thirty million assault type weapons. And I know there's an argument saying assault weapons are no more dangerous than a, for example, a semi automatic pistol. But the bullets from what I understand, an assault weapon does far far more damage by just its design and the kind of bullets that it has, so be prepared. Okay, let's calendar this one and this is the fifth, and we're going to have a football pool. I'm telling you right now, guys on the morning team, We're gonna have

a football pool. And we're simply going to guess when the next one is and whoever wins the next one in terms of the closest to the date, you get a prize. All right, I want to switch gears for a moment and talk about something that came out of the Wall Street Journal. And this is going on, and this is a growing issue, and that is let's start with baby boomers. Eleven thousand people in the US are turning sixty five every day. That is a huge number.

Baby boomers are an enormous part of the population, and we are retiring. I'm a boomer. And one of the things that baby baby boomers want to do, and that is grow old in their own homes. That's just something we want to do. The problem is we're growing old because of medical advancements, We're living longer, and most people have a two story home, and how do you stay home when you're old and decrepit and you have a

two story home. I will probably the next segment talk about what I did and it made a lot of sense, and both with my mom and what I did in my house. All right, So a couple of examples. Nebraska. This is Nebraska, Okay. Christine Saalhany was interviewed. She spends about two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year for twenty four hour in home care for her husband, who has Alzheimer's. That is a problem because you have soaring costs to be in homecare. It's gone just astronomical, so

medical advances, baby boomers, more of them. So you've got spouses, adult children, siblings, Well, they're putting their lives on hold. It's as simple to care for relatives, sleep deprivation, constant worry. Families draining their savings. I'm not talking about the old people. I'm talking about their kids, siblings, draining their savings, their life savings, their retirement to take care of mom. Now

what happens when they get old? Does that continue on? Well, you reach a point where sometimes someone in your family goes you know, I'm sort of done you know, enjoy yourself. Seventy seven percent of Americans age fifty and older want to live as long as possible in their home. Three quarters don't want to move. They want to grow old.

And unfortunately that means someone has to take care of them, and that means in home care or a combination of in home care and relatives taking care of mom or dad. Typically it's the children taking care of mom or dad. Now, the problem is if it costs that much money for twenty four hour care in the case of Christine Salahany and by the way, this is not unusual two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year. Well, how many people have two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year after taxes?

I mean, I think there's some deductions, but nothing like this. So the bottom line for a lot of people is they have to augment the in home care. Instead of twenty four hours, it's twelve hours or even eight hours. And I'm going to tell you about my mom and she had let's just say a big issue because I had to take care of her, and I'll share that experience with you in a moment. The statistic is when

a loved one needs round the clock care. And when someone is really old, decrepit Alzheimer's, it is twenty four hour care. Family members provide about half the care about twelve hours. And if you're a child, you are well, your life is put on hold. How about your kids? How about their college education? Because that you can put on hold. Kids can always borrow money, all right, Kids can always go for pel grants, They can do all

manner of things to go to school. Well, when you're a white first of all, school is too expensive for anybody today, so that's crazy. But you can put that off. You can't put off helping mom or dad who is sitting there with Alzheimer's in the home because they don't want to move out. And I can see that, I can, actually I can see that now. When I built the Persian Palace, and this was the year two thousand, I put an elevator in the house for exactly this reason.

And this is before I decided, okay, kids are gone, and frankly I changed my mind. But I put an elevator in the house. And why because I thought I was going to grow old in that house. As a matter of fact, my kids made me grow old in my house. By the time it was in my forties, I was very old with my children. And now you can only put the kind of elevator I had when you build a house, and not too many people were doing that. But there were two reasons. One in case

of a medical issue. Remember it was a two story house, and most of us do have two story houses because one story houses take up too much of the footprint, take up too much of a lot. So what do you do. You simply put a story on top of the other one and you deal with half the square footage on the ground, so you can you have more house for less acreage if you will, for less ground space.

And so I did it for two reasons. One was going to grow old in the house, and frankly, when you're old, going upstairs is a real drag that reaches the point where you just can't do it or it's too difficult. So do you move everything downstairs? Or in my case, I put in an elevator because I anticipated growing old, and for medical reasons, And that one turned out to be a good call. Why because Marjorie broke her femur. She took a spill and had to have surgery on her hip and her leg and all that,

and the surgeon said, you can't go home. You've got to be several weeks in a rehab at least. And she said, I have an elevator at home. And he said, oh, okay, you're fine. Congratulations, you don't need a rehab. Those are the two reasons I did it. And growing old in our home and we're being longer means we need more care. And that is a reality. And the cost of and when you're really a mess and you want to live in your home and you need twenty four hour care.

Just to give you an example, the average, okay, the median cost of round the clock in home care is two hundred and ninety thousand dollars per year. Boy, that's impressive, isn't it. And about a third of retirees don't even have the resources to afford even one year of minimal care. I mean, it is absolutely crazy. No one could afford it. So what do you do? Well, family members make up a lot of that. When mom, dad, brothers, sister need twenty four hour care on the average, even people who

can afford it, I really care. Can you imagine three hundred thousand dollars, so they'll come up with one hundred and fifty one hundred and twenty thousand, and then the family takes over the rest of the time and it wipes out savings. I mean, it destroys families got to take care of mom. You got siblings, they split up the time. I mean, it is completely crazy, it really is. And so what do you do. I'm going to tell you about my mom's story. All right, My mom died

at ninety eight. She had a house that we basically forced the stale of because she was an assisted living which costs less than and we put her up assisted living and then bored and care at the end of her life. She ran out of money at ninety three, and that's with selling the house. If she didn't have a house, it would have immediately been impossible. And so she had a pension, she had Social Security, and she ran out of money at ninety three, so then I

had to pick up the bill. After that, she lasted another five years just to screw with me for no other reason, and it cost me one hundred thousand dollars a year until she died five years. And that's with Social Security, and that's with her pension, and it still cost me that much money. I could not go visit her in the last five years of her life. I wouldn't well, I couldn't go visit her alone. I would not walk into her room alone because I knew I I was gonna grab a pillow. It was that simple.

And so she ended up dying at ninety eight. When we went to the funeral, nobody was there except family. Because when you're ninety eight and you die, everybody you know is dead already. So there's just immediate family. And so people are going completely broke. Why because they want to stay in their homes longer, and you know the average And here's the problem that the workers themselves. And by the way we ended up, I ended up having to pay for twenty four hour care towards the last

of her life. Now, what happens if you don't have any money, Well, I mean, the county comes in and Medicare will pay for part of it. And the county is not going to park people in a Walmart parking lot, so they will put you in some kind of a facility. Can you imagine a county facility? And thank goodness, two things. One, I had the financial ability. By the way, one hundred thousand dollars a year, you have to make a whole lot of money, where one hundred thousand dollars a year

does not hurt. That is a big hit. I mean, I don't care for you're insanely wealthy one hundred grand a year. So I had to pay one hundred thousand dollars a year for my mother for five years. She didn't know who I was, She zoned out, she was basically a vegetable. And I hated her on top of that. So what a combination that is? You hate your mom, You're paying a fortune. You know what kind of car I could have gotten for five hundred thousand dollars over

those years. You know I'd be driving a Lamborghini or a Maserati or a McLaren. So when I see a one of these sports cars at worth half a million dollars driving down the street, it was I literally look at that, and it's my mother that doesn't let me have that. Okay, I'm done. I'm a dutiful son, aren't I. I still did it, all right, guys, that's enough of that now. Am I particularly a bastard today? Or more so than I? Usually am, and have I reached new

levels of complete a holiness? Pretty much? You're going to be haunted by your mother? Yeah, thank god. I don't believe in ghosts, although I took care of her. I mean, I you know I did. I came to the table, so I mean, what do you say? KF I am six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.