Speaker 1: You're listening to bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
Speaker 1: six forty and this is KFI bill Handle here. It
Speaker 1: is a Thursday morning, September the fifth, going to be
Speaker 1: very hot today. If you happen to be in the
Speaker 1: San Fernano Valley, be prepared for something saying heat Woodland
Speaker 1: Hills where my daughters live one hundred and fifteen degrees,
Speaker 1: even the beaches are going to be ninety degrees. So
Speaker 1: man is hitting big time. Amy, is today the hottest day?
Speaker 1: Is this going to be it? Today? And tomorrow? Wow?
Speaker 1: How about that? Yeah? And then it should start cooling down,
Speaker 1: but just not much, just a slight, slight cool down
Speaker 1: through the weekend. Phoenix north of one hundred degrees for
Speaker 1: what the third straight month, over one hundred days. Something
Speaker 1: completely crazy. Now, yesterday, of course we receive the news
Speaker 1: and this is the big, big story, and I think
Speaker 1: not internationally, because you know, the world knows that shooting schools,
Speaker 1: shotings here in the United States are simply a matter
Speaker 1: of course, you know, it's a question of just counting.
Speaker 1: And we've had what more up to this point than
Speaker 1: all of last year, like in the hundreds. So yesterday
Speaker 1: four people killed at Appalachi High School in Georgia. Nine
Speaker 1: hospitalized another mass shooting. The suspected gunman is in custody,
Speaker 1: fourteen year old student at the school, fourteen years old.
Speaker 1: Victims were two students, also fourteen years old, and then
Speaker 1: two teachers and the nine other people who were shot
Speaker 1: and were not killed. Eight students and one teacher were wounded.
Speaker 1: And I guess the good news, and it is good news.
Speaker 1: They're expected to survive and make a full recovery. So
Speaker 1: the gunman, identified as Colt Gray, he's fourteen and will
Speaker 1: be charged as in a adult. Now fourteen years old
Speaker 1: and still being charged an adult is I think the
Speaker 1: youngest of any state where you can charge someone with
Speaker 1: an adult. Here in California you sort of have to
Speaker 1: be eighteen. I think under very special circumstances, seventeen year
Speaker 1: olds can be charged. Now here is a story that Okay,
Speaker 1: let's look at this in depth. Gray was questioned by
Speaker 1: law enforcement last year regarding several anonymous tips about online
Speaker 1: threats he made to commit a school shooting at an
Speaker 1: unidentified unidentified an unidentified location in time, and there was
Speaker 1: no probable cause for a rest at that time. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine he was questioned. So here's how he came down.
Speaker 1: One of the students said that the shooter, Gray left
Speaker 1: his classroom at the beginning of algebra one around nine
Speaker 1: to forty five am. He returns near the end of
Speaker 1: the class. He knocks to get back in the door.
Speaker 1: Another student goes to open the door, but notices that
Speaker 1: he's got a gun and refuse to open the door.
Speaker 1: Then what Gray does is go into the next classroom
Speaker 1: and opens fire. The Sheriff's department received the first report
Speaker 1: of reports of the shooting around ten twenty. I don't
Speaker 1: know when the class actually when it ended. We know
Speaker 1: that he came in around nine forty five, don't know
Speaker 1: when the class was to end, so the exact time
Speaker 1: that he came in the Sheriff's department received around ten
Speaker 1: twenty the first reports. Now, a resource officer confronted the shooter.
Speaker 1: Remember this is after the cops were called immediately surrendered.
Speaker 1: He threw his arms up and surrendered, taken into custody
Speaker 1: as they described, without incident. And as a result of
Speaker 1: the shooting, and this is now simply policy, all schools
Speaker 1: in the district were placed on lockdown. Police were sent
Speaker 1: out to all the schools and with an abundance of costume.
Speaker 1: They said, we're shutting it down, even though at that
Speaker 1: point they thought and knew that it was only gray
Speaker 1: and it wasn't another shooter, but another scene of students
Speaker 1: running out of classrooms, hands in the air because the
Speaker 1: cops don't know who has a weapon, who doesn't. At
Speaker 1: this point, they don't know who did the shooting. They
Speaker 1: just have to get everybody out, hands in the air,
Speaker 1: and in this case, the students went out into the field,
Speaker 1: into the football field. And part of the story is
Speaker 1: that parents were running, as you can imagine, to the
Speaker 1: school because they heard. There were cell phone calls made
Speaker 1: to parents, mom, dad, there was a shooting at the school.
Speaker 1: In one case, the student in one of the classrooms
Speaker 1: heard the shooting, knew that there was that bullets were flying,
Speaker 1: and said the last saying said was I love you now.
Speaker 1: That student survived. That student was not a victim. We
Speaker 1: don't know who the victims is. The victims are well,
Speaker 1: we do we have the names certainly of the ones
Speaker 1: that were killed, but we don't know what students were
Speaker 1: in which classroom, and we don't know who survived. How
Speaker 1: many witnesses there are. I guess can you imagine were saying, oh,
Speaker 1: only four were killed this time around. It doesn't really
Speaker 1: become massive, massive news until what a dozen are killed.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's where we've come to. And so what
Speaker 1: we do know is a fourteen year old student leaves
Speaker 1: his algebra class, comes back at the end of the class,
Speaker 1: knocks on the door, which is closed. Student opens up
Speaker 1: the door, sees this kid, his name is Colt Gray,
Speaker 1: and he has an assault type weapon with him. Immediately
Speaker 1: shuts the door, locks it. I mean, we're no one's
Speaker 1: coming in the door with that. And so Grey goes
Speaker 1: next door and opens fire and kills two students and
Speaker 1: two teachers. Okay, so now I want to go and
Speaker 1: we've heard this before, but I think all of this
Speaker 1: and depending on how old you are, let's start with
Speaker 1: one of the things that virtually every single news outlet
Speaker 1: was interviewing parents, not necessarily or not the parents who
Speaker 1: of the kids that were killed, but parents and saying,
Speaker 1: every time my kid goes to school, I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: I'm ever going to see my child again. Students are
Speaker 1: saying every time I go to school, I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: there's someone coming in with a weapon and something that
Speaker 1: was unheard of. Now I grew up and I was
Speaker 1: in school at the end of the Cold War, when
Speaker 1: I was just a couple of years younger, and we
Speaker 1: had what we call drop drills. I mean everybody has
Speaker 1: fire drills, but drop drills where the teacher would say
Speaker 1: drop and we would immediately dive under our desks and
Speaker 1: we would put our hands lock the hands over our
Speaker 1: necks behind us, and we were on our knees and
Speaker 1: our asses had to face although it's kind of hard
Speaker 1: for asses to face, but your butt has to face
Speaker 1: the windows. And why did we have drop drills Because
Speaker 1: the fear that the Russians were going to unleash nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons and LA being a target, we were going to
Speaker 1: be attacked. And I guess that the drop drill was
Speaker 1: all about. I guess your butt being fried one hundredth
Speaker 1: of one thousandth of one nanosecond before the rest of
Speaker 1: you gets vaporized. That was the drop drill. Never even
Speaker 1: occur to anybody that someone would come a shooter would
Speaker 1: come into the school and start to spraying a classroom in,
Speaker 1: killing students and teachers. Now it's active shooter drills. I
Speaker 1: don't think there is an elementary school, middle school, high
Speaker 1: school in the country that doesn't have active shooter drills.
Speaker 1: And we've reached the point where that's incidentally, that's the
Speaker 1: cost of doing business in the United States. Now, that's it.
Speaker 1: Live in the country. You're going to see mass shootings.
Speaker 1: That's it. You know, you wake up and you're just
Speaker 1: waiting for another mass shooting, and hopefully it's not a school.
Speaker 1: Hopefully it's well, hopefully it's not any place, and you
Speaker 1: hope the cops take down whoever it is that does
Speaker 1: the shooting. I mean, it is a totally different world,
Speaker 1: all right. Two things. One, you're not going to hear
Speaker 1: gun control talked about it anymore. I mean you occasionally
Speaker 1: hear something called sensible gun control, which California has most
Speaker 1: restrictive gun control, and that no assault weapons and the
Speaker 1: number of bullets in a magazine is limited. Southern states
Speaker 1: do not have any of that. It's basically year done
Speaker 1: open carry. You can carry guns. And there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of evidence on both sides saying it's safer, it's not safer,
Speaker 1: and sayings, you know, an armed society is a polite society,
Speaker 1: and we can go crazy with that. Now, as I
Speaker 1: said in my last segment, is there anything that would
Speaker 1: we the limit the possibility of a shooter coming into school? Yeah,
Speaker 1: make the school effectively a TSA checkpoint. That's it. You
Speaker 1: come in well and works. It's so far. They open
Speaker 1: up all the backpacks. There are stadiums that you can
Speaker 1: only have clear plastic bags so the security can see
Speaker 1: whatever you have. You're not allowed purses, and so you
Speaker 1: go through a metal detector. If people have some kind
Speaker 1: of metal, boom, the wand comes out. And every single
Speaker 1: school has to be secure. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: every single shopping center, every market would have to be secure,
Speaker 1: which of course is impossible. Schools, I think you can do.
Speaker 1: I think taxpayers would vote in the kind of security
Speaker 1: that is needed. It has come to a just craziness.
Speaker 1: And this has been going on for a while. I
Speaker 1: went back to the high school that I graduated from,
Speaker 1: and I was invited by a teacher that I had
Speaker 1: who was just about to retire. And we're walking down
Speaker 1: the hallway and I see a door with LAPD seal
Speaker 1: on the door, and I asked him, I go, what
Speaker 1: the hell is this about? And he goes, oh, we
Speaker 1: have a substation with two cops assigned to the school.
Speaker 1: This was not resource officers, this was LAPD. And he said,
Speaker 1: it's a different world. It is a totally different world.
Speaker 1: When I went to high school. I mean open gates,
Speaker 1: you know, you could go in and out. Nothing was
Speaker 1: locked down. And now we look at what's going on.
Speaker 1: And by the way, and I want to say something,
Speaker 1: and you know, I have advocated control my entire broadcast career,
Speaker 1: my entire adult life. The point is it's over. Critical
Speaker 1: mass has already happened. It's like climate change. You can
Speaker 1: slow it down, but you're done right. We're past the
Speaker 1: point of no return, and we certainly are passed the
Speaker 1: point of no return with weapons. There was a time
Speaker 1: during George W. Bush's presidency where there was a federal
Speaker 1: law that you couldn't buy an assault weapel, you couldn't
Speaker 1: own an assault weapon. If you had grandfathered in you could.
Speaker 1: But that sunset it after ten years, and since then,
Speaker 1: I think twenty or thirty million assault type weapons. And
Speaker 1: I know there's an argument saying assault weapons are no
Speaker 1: more dangerous than a, for example, a semi automatic pistol.
Speaker 1: But the bullets from what I understand, an assault weapon
Speaker 1: does far far more damage by just its design and
Speaker 1: the kind of bullets that it has, so be prepared. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's calendar this one and this is the fifth, and
Speaker 1: we're going to have a football pool. I'm telling you
Speaker 1: right now, guys on the morning team, We're gonna have
Speaker 1: a football pool. And we're simply going to guess when
Speaker 1: the next one is and whoever wins the next one
Speaker 1: in terms of the closest to the date, you get
Speaker 1: a prize. All right, I want to switch gears for
Speaker 1: a moment and talk about something that came out of
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal. And this is going on, and
Speaker 1: this is a growing issue, and that is let's start
Speaker 1: with baby boomers. Eleven thousand people in the US are
Speaker 1: turning sixty five every day. That is a huge number.
Speaker 1: Baby boomers are an enormous part of the population, and
Speaker 1: we are retiring. I'm a boomer. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that baby baby boomers want to do, and that
Speaker 1: is grow old in their own homes. That's just something
Speaker 1: we want to do. The problem is we're growing old
Speaker 1: because of medical advancements, We're living longer, and most people
Speaker 1: have a two story home, and how do you stay
Speaker 1: home when you're old and decrepit and you have a
Speaker 1: two story home. I will probably the next segment talk
Speaker 1: about what I did and it made a lot of sense,
Speaker 1: and both with my mom and what I did in
Speaker 1: my house. All right, So a couple of examples. Nebraska.
Speaker 1: This is Nebraska, Okay. Christine Saalhany was interviewed. She spends
Speaker 1: about two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year for
Speaker 1: twenty four hour in home care for her husband, who
Speaker 1: has Alzheimer's. That is a problem because you have soaring
Speaker 1: costs to be in homecare. It's gone just astronomical, so
Speaker 1: medical advances, baby boomers, more of them. So you've got spouses,
Speaker 1: adult children, siblings, Well, they're putting their lives on hold.
Speaker 1: It's as simple to care for relatives, sleep deprivation, constant worry.
Speaker 1: Families draining their savings. I'm not talking about the old people.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about their kids, siblings, draining their savings, their
Speaker 1: life savings, their retirement to take care of mom. Now
Speaker 1: what happens when they get old? Does that continue on? Well,
Speaker 1: you reach a point where sometimes someone in your family
Speaker 1: goes you know, I'm sort of done you know, enjoy yourself.
Speaker 1: Seventy seven percent of Americans age fifty and older want
Speaker 1: to live as long as possible in their home. Three
Speaker 1: quarters don't want to move. They want to grow old.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately that means someone has to take care of them,
Speaker 1: and that means in home care or a combination of
Speaker 1: in home care and relatives taking care of mom or dad.
Speaker 1: Typically it's the children taking care of mom or dad. Now,
Speaker 1: the problem is if it costs that much money for
Speaker 1: twenty four hour care in the case of Christine Salahany
Speaker 1: and by the way, this is not unusual two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty thousand dollars a year. Well, how many people
Speaker 1: have two hundred and forty thousand dollars a year after taxes?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think there's some deductions, but nothing like this.
Speaker 1: So the bottom line for a lot of people is
Speaker 1: they have to augment the in home care. Instead of
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, it's twelve hours or even eight hours.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell you about my mom and
Speaker 1: she had let's just say a big issue because I
Speaker 1: had to take care of her, and I'll share that
Speaker 1: experience with you in a moment. The statistic is when
Speaker 1: a loved one needs round the clock care. And when
Speaker 1: someone is really old, decrepit Alzheimer's, it is twenty four
Speaker 1: hour care. Family members provide about half the care about
Speaker 1: twelve hours. And if you're a child, you are well,
Speaker 1: your life is put on hold. How about your kids?
Speaker 1: How about their college education? Because that you can put
Speaker 1: on hold. Kids can always borrow money, all right, Kids
Speaker 1: can always go for pel grants, They can do all
Speaker 1: manner of things to go to school. Well, when you're
Speaker 1: a white first of all, school is too expensive for
Speaker 1: anybody today, so that's crazy. But you can put that off.
Speaker 1: You can't put off helping mom or dad who is
Speaker 1: sitting there with Alzheimer's in the home because they don't
Speaker 1: want to move out. And I can see that, I can,
Speaker 1: actually I can see that now. When I built the
Speaker 1: Persian Palace, and this was the year two thousand, I
Speaker 1: put an elevator in the house for exactly this reason.
Speaker 1: And this is before I decided, okay, kids are gone,
Speaker 1: and frankly I changed my mind. But I put an
Speaker 1: elevator in the house. And why because I thought I
Speaker 1: was going to grow old in that house. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, my kids made me grow old in
Speaker 1: my house. By the time it was in my forties,
Speaker 1: I was very old with my children. And now you
Speaker 1: can only put the kind of elevator I had when
Speaker 1: you build a house, and not too many people were
Speaker 1: doing that. But there were two reasons. One in case
Speaker 1: of a medical issue. Remember it was a two story house,
Speaker 1: and most of us do have two story houses because
Speaker 1: one story houses take up too much of the footprint,
Speaker 1: take up too much of a lot. So what do
Speaker 1: you do. You simply put a story on top of
Speaker 1: the other one and you deal with half the square
Speaker 1: footage on the ground, so you can you have more
Speaker 1: house for less acreage if you will, for less ground space.
Speaker 1: And so I did it for two reasons. One was
Speaker 1: going to grow old in the house, and frankly, when
Speaker 1: you're old, going upstairs is a real drag that reaches
Speaker 1: the point where you just can't do it or it's
Speaker 1: too difficult. So do you move everything downstairs? Or in
Speaker 1: my case, I put in an elevator because I anticipated
Speaker 1: growing old, and for medical reasons, And that one turned
Speaker 1: out to be a good call. Why because Marjorie broke
Speaker 1: her femur. She took a spill and had to have
Speaker 1: surgery on her hip and her leg and all that,
Speaker 1: and the surgeon said, you can't go home. You've got
Speaker 1: to be several weeks in a rehab at least. And
Speaker 1: she said, I have an elevator at home. And he said, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: you're fine. Congratulations, you don't need a rehab. Those are
Speaker 1: the two reasons I did it. And growing old in
Speaker 1: our home and we're being longer means we need more care.
Speaker 1: And that is a reality. And the cost of and
Speaker 1: when you're really a mess and you want to live
Speaker 1: in your home and you need twenty four hour care.
Speaker 1: Just to give you an example, the average, okay, the
Speaker 1: median cost of round the clock in home care is
Speaker 1: two hundred and ninety thousand dollars per year. Boy, that's impressive,
Speaker 1: isn't it. And about a third of retirees don't even
Speaker 1: have the resources to afford even one year of minimal care.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is absolutely crazy. No one could afford it.
Speaker 1: So what do you do? Well, family members make up
Speaker 1: a lot of that. When mom, dad, brothers, sister need
Speaker 1: twenty four hour care on the average, even people who
Speaker 1: can afford it, I really care. Can you imagine three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars, so they'll come up with one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty one hundred and twenty thousand, and then the
Speaker 1: family takes over the rest of the time and it
Speaker 1: wipes out savings. I mean, it destroys families got to
Speaker 1: take care of mom. You got siblings, they split up
Speaker 1: the time. I mean, it is completely crazy, it really is.
Speaker 1: And so what do you do. I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you about my mom's story. All right, My mom died
Speaker 1: at ninety eight. She had a house that we basically
Speaker 1: forced the stale of because she was an assisted living
Speaker 1: which costs less than and we put her up assisted
Speaker 1: living and then bored and care at the end of
Speaker 1: her life. She ran out of money at ninety three,
Speaker 1: and that's with selling the house. If she didn't have
Speaker 1: a house, it would have immediately been impossible. And so
Speaker 1: she had a pension, she had Social Security, and she
Speaker 1: ran out of money at ninety three, so then I
Speaker 1: had to pick up the bill. After that, she lasted
Speaker 1: another five years just to screw with me for no
Speaker 1: other reason, and it cost me one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year until she died five years. And that's with
Speaker 1: Social Security, and that's with her pension, and it still
Speaker 1: cost me that much money. I could not go visit
Speaker 1: her in the last five years of her life. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't well, I couldn't go visit her alone. I would
Speaker 1: not walk into her room alone because I knew I
Speaker 1: I was gonna grab a pillow. It was that simple.
Speaker 1: And so she ended up dying at ninety eight. When
Speaker 1: we went to the funeral, nobody was there except family.
Speaker 1: Because when you're ninety eight and you die, everybody you
Speaker 1: know is dead already. So there's just immediate family. And
Speaker 1: so people are going completely broke. Why because they want
Speaker 1: to stay in their homes longer, and you know the
Speaker 1: average And here's the problem that the workers themselves. And
Speaker 1: by the way we ended up, I ended up having
Speaker 1: to pay for twenty four hour care towards the last
Speaker 1: of her life. Now, what happens if you don't have
Speaker 1: any money, Well, I mean, the county comes in and
Speaker 1: Medicare will pay for part of it. And the county
Speaker 1: is not going to park people in a Walmart parking lot,
Speaker 1: so they will put you in some kind of a facility.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine a county facility? And thank goodness, two things. One,
Speaker 1: I had the financial ability. By the way, one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year, you have to make a whole
Speaker 1: lot of money, where one hundred thousand dollars a year
Speaker 1: does not hurt. That is a big hit. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't care for you're insanely wealthy one hundred grand
Speaker 1: a year. So I had to pay one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year for my mother for five years. She
Speaker 1: didn't know who I was, She zoned out, she was
Speaker 1: basically a vegetable. And I hated her on top of that.
Speaker 1: So what a combination that is? You hate your mom,
Speaker 1: You're paying a fortune. You know what kind of car
Speaker 1: I could have gotten for five hundred thousand dollars over
Speaker 1: those years. You know I'd be driving a Lamborghini or
Speaker 1: a Maserati or a McLaren. So when I see a
Speaker 1: one of these sports cars at worth half a million
Speaker 1: dollars driving down the street, it was I literally look
Speaker 1: at that, and it's my mother that doesn't let me
Speaker 1: have that. Okay, I'm done. I'm a dutiful son, aren't I.
Speaker 1: I still did it, all right, guys, that's enough of
Speaker 1: that now. Am I particularly a bastard today? Or more
Speaker 1: so than I? Usually am, and have I reached new
Speaker 1: levels of complete a holiness? Pretty much? You're going to
Speaker 1: be haunted by your mother? Yeah, thank god. I don't
Speaker 1: believe in ghosts, although I took care of her. I mean,
Speaker 1: I you know I did. I came to the table,
Speaker 1: so I mean, what do you say? KF I am
Speaker 1: six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been
Speaker 1: listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my Show Monday
Speaker 1: through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on
Speaker 1: demand on the iHeartRadio app.