We had an incident, decades ago, long before concealed carry became an issue. This guy held up a Mom and Pop convenience store. Mom was alone behind the counter at the time, she gave him all the money without an argument, and then he shot her dead in cold blood. They eventually caught the guy and he got life without parole, which is the most he could get because Michigan has no death penalty. Pop was devastated and closed the store. It sat vacant for years until somebody bought it and demolished the building. Every time I drove past that vacant store I thought, "Too bad Mom didn't have a gun behind the counter." There's no guarantee that it would have saved her life, but at least she would have gone down fighting. You're right, though, every situation is different, and there's no guarantees about anything in life.
I looked up the Flint water crisis on Wiki yesterday and it's way more complicated than I realized. Flint is about one tenth the size of Detroit but, like Detroit, it lost over half its population after the auto plants pulled out. Flint had always gotten its water from the Flint River but, with the loss of industry and population, they were using a fraction of the water that they had previously, and it was decided to shut down their water system and buy their water from Detroit. A few years ago, Flint and some other communities formed a consortium that planned to lay a pipeline to Lake Huron and set up their own water authority. Detroit tried to stop them in court, but Detroit lost the case. When Flint and Detroit's water contract expired, Detroit declined to renew it, but the new system wasn't ready yet, so Flint went back to getting their water from the Flint River. This was supposed to be temporary until the new system was up and running, which might explain why nobody was too concerned about running the appropriate tests. I don't think we can blame the Emergency Manager for this, he only approved what the city council had voted on, and the city council was assured by the Michigan EPA that the water was safe.
The city water mains are cast iron, the only lead pipes in the system are the feeder lines that connect individual buildings to the water mains. People had stopped installing lead pipes back in the 60s when it was first discovered that lead was bad for you, but older buildings were never retrofitted with new pipes because it was found that a plaque had spontaneously formed inside the pipes, which prevented the lead from leaching into the water. The Flint river water is more acidic than Detroit River water. It's not enough to be a health issue in and of itself, but it apparently dissolved the plaque inside the pipes, exposing the water to the lead. The Michigan EPA falsely claimed that they had tested the water in all the buildings that had lead pipes, and it was just fine. Turned out that nobody even knew which buildings had lead pipes, and no attempt was made to find out. It was discovered later that there were indeed records of that, but they were on 3X5 index cards stashed away somewhere in City Hall. Now they are in the process of digitalizing all that information, and they claim they can't do anything until that effort is completed. It was not explained why they couldn't just take those index cards and, like, read them. Some heads have already rolled, lawsuits have been filed, and the Attorney General is investigating. Meanwhile, Flintites are drinking bottled water, some of which is being donated by civilian groups as far north as Traverse City.
You know, I don't remember ever seeing a lead pipe in my life, but maybe I did and didn't know what I was looking at. Our house on 51st Street was over a hundred yeas old, and most of the plumbing was visible in the basement and adjoining crawl space. I remember those pipes as being rusty on the outside, and always assumed they were iron or steel. Lead doesn't rust like iron, does it? My father had a substantial collection of old plumbing pipe and other building materials. Some of those pipes were black, but some of them had a gray color and weren't so prone to rusting. Somebody must have told me that those gray pipes were galvanized steel, but I don't remember who. Any lead that I have seen is pretty soft, you can make scratches in it with your fingernails, and those old gray pipes were nothing like that. I have heard the expression "lead pipe cinch" but I though that was just a figure of speech. Do you know anything about this?
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