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Nowhere in Warren's letter to BlackRock did she recommend divestment. She is talking about engagement as one of the largest shareholders and owners of gun securities, which BlackRock's Fink claims he will do anyway. Also, there is a real question now from a corporate governance perspective whether manufacturing AR-15s and other assault rifles is good for gunmakers' businesses. There is increasing legal liability and potential permanent damage to their brand from making those specific kinds of weapons. So why not engage with the gun manufacturers? At least if you're going to attack her position, get it right before doing so.And is Sen Warren's solution of divesting the right one?
As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.
In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.
I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?
The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.
A year ago, when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, hitting 11 people in 90 seconds, I was also on call. It was not until I had diagnosed the third of the six victims who were transported to the trauma center that I realized something out of the ordinary must have happened. The gunshot wounds were the same low-velocity handgun injuries that I diagnose every day; only their rapid succession set them apart. And all six of the victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.
Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and the victim does not bleed to death before being transported to our care at the trauma center, chances are that we can save him. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different: They travel at a higher velocity and are far more lethal than routine bullets fired from a handgun. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than—and imparting more than three times the energy of—a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.
I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. Years ago I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.
With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun-shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to the trauma center to receive our care.
I think a CD ladder is a good choice now. I've got a bunch sitting in MM but might switch it over to CDs. I'm still about three years from actual retirement.If you are a retiree and think it is prudent to have 1-5 year piece of your investments in a rather safe place for annual or emergency needs, how are you positioning this money? Suggestions or opinions appreciated.
A Target date fund is as diversified a portfolio as you can get, likely more diversified than yours or mine. Not one basket at all. They are actually like holding 25 or so baskets (funds) with plenty of eggs (stocks or bonds) in each of those baskets. I do think your analogy is a misconception most people share though.Agree, all your eggs in one basket doesn't work for me.
My nearterm bucket, bonds and cash, is in rollover IRAs, and a brokerage account (with big losses in it, so no prob there); and when I take money from the former it is all taxable. (Same with the latter if I ever ever have capital gains again before I die, which looks unlikely.) Oh, and also a checking-savings account, of course....4-5y worth. Taxable, alas.
@davidrmoran, what do you mean by that? My 4 year bucket #1, MM and CDs, would remain tax deferred if that was what you referred to.
@davidrmoran, what do you mean by that? My 4 year bucket #1, MM and CDs, would remain tax deferred if that was what you referred to....4-5y worth. Taxable, alas.
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