Your Tax Dollars At Work In Ottawa County Kansas

 In March, 2016, an under-sheriff named Russell Thornton, according to the government information site of Ottawa County, Kansas, determined that a ninety-one year old man suffering from Alzheimer's disease should be tased at a nursing home, when he refused to keep a medical appointment with a doctor. The vdeo was made available to the public in December. The staff at Minneapolis Good Samaritan Center, in Minneapolis, Kansas, called the police on the patient. Thornton waited until the man got up and began walking away, then pointed his taser at him and shot. The sheriff, Keith Colman, referred to this action as "the best possible alternative."

Couldn't the appointment have been rescheduled? What happened to the directive policemen were once given concerning the use of physical or brute force, and not using it unless absolutely necessary?

In Case You Skipped Church This Sunday

The first thing that a certain undersheriff here in Marshall County, Kansas, and I disagreed upon was actually a lot more universal than it was personal. It concerned the presence of weapons in Northeast Kansas schools, and the fact that rifles and shotguns occasionally tag along to school in vehicles driven by students who hunt on mornings before school starts. The cop thinks that because he goes to church and votes republican most of the time, a gun in the hands of a younger student (mind you, many of the schools in Northeast Kansas go from kindergarten to high school because the schools are not consolidated and there are not many students) would not create the mayhem here that the same weapon would create in the hands of a younger student opening an older student's vehicle and finding a loaded gun in a "blue" state. I reminded him that religion and politics would not affect the outcome of such an incident, and that if anything like that ever happened, I would be on the phone with all the major newspapers immediately, informing them of the conversation he and I had just had. This was before this happened, involving my effort to help a Marshall County mom get her mother to care for her children after she had been arrested, and also before this incident, when the county attorney wanted all of the witnesses for a case she wanted to try in court to testify her way, instead of telling the truth. Would you have heard a message from the pulpit, if you hadn't skipped church, about Jesus voting republican and telling concerned parents to relax about children taking guns to school?