September 5, 2024 • 25 mins
Georgia high school shooting: Shooter & victims identified; shooter was previously spoken with. The crashing financial burden of aging at home. Party of One: Restaurants are catering to solo diners.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty and this is KFI bill Handle here. It
is a Thursday morning, September the fifth, going to be
very hot today. If you happen to be in the
San Fernano Valley, be prepared for something saying heat Woodland
Hills where my daughters live one hundred and fifteen degrees,
(00:24):
even the beaches are going to be ninety degrees. So
man is hitting big time. Amy, is today the hottest day?
Is this going to be it? Today? And tomorrow? Wow?
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
(00:48):
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
(01:12):
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
(01:37):
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
(01:58):
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,
(02:24):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:09):
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
(03:32):
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.
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:04):
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.
(05:27):
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,
(05:48):
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,
(06:10):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:54):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:30):
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.
(08:52):
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
(09:14):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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
(10:24):
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,
(10:45):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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
(12:13):
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,
(12:36):
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,
(13:00):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:11):
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.
(14:33):
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
(14:55):
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.
(15:16):
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.
(15:42):
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
(16:04):
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
(16:25):
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.
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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
(17:30):
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
(17:51):
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.
(18:13):
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
(18:38):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:31):
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
(20:53):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:21):
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.
(22:42):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:52):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:21):
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.
You're listening to bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty and this is KFI bill Handle here. It
is a Thursday morning, September the fifth, going to be
very hot today. If you happen to be in the
San Fernano Valley, be prepared for something saying heat Woodland
Hills where my daughters live one hundred and fifteen degrees,
(00:24):
even the beaches are going to be ninety degrees. So
man is hitting big time. Amy, is today the hottest day?
Is this going to be it? Today? And tomorrow? Wow?
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
(00:48):
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
(01:12):
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
(01:37):
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
(01:58):
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,
(02:24):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:09):
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
(03:32):
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.
(03:56):
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
(04:19):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:04):
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.
(05:27):
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,
(05:48):
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,
(06:10):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:54):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:30):
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.
(08:52):
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
(09:14):
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
(09:38):
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
(09:59):
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
(10:24):
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,
(10:45):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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
(12:13):
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,
(12:36):
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,
(13:00):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:11):
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.
(14:33):
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
(14:55):
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.
(15:16):
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.
(15:42):
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
(16:04):
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
(16:25):
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.
(16:46):
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
(17:07):
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
(17:30):
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
(17:51):
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.
(18:13):
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
(18:38):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:24):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:31):
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
(20:53):
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
(21:17):
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
(21:38):
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
(22:00):
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
(22:21):
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.
(22:42):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:31):
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
(23:52):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:39):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:21):
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.
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