Every time they call tell them "I'll donate blood when you respect my right to bear arms. Until then, you can fuck off and die."

See how often they call back.

You sure there's only one place? Around here we've got VA Blood Services too, and I think in NOVA the Inova hospital system has their own blood donation centers, so it's not like the Red Cross has a monopoly on blood everywhere.

Good for you; actions have consequences - and that applies to businesses as well.

I am sure you will be able to find another organization that will be willing to take your blood and not make a political stance.

Sure are.  They make a lot of money off the blood they get for free. And they use some of it to teach first aid to our enemies.

Misplaced blame is misplaced.

Uhhhhh....what about  vamps?

Could be worse.  I saw the title and thought perhaps you contracted some incurable disease.

Fuck that.  One reason I home school my kids is because I don't want her in a gun free zone.

I stopped donating when they no longer treated me like a donor and more like a criminal.

I call them "vampires". They called the day after I donated once.

I'm in this boat.  I used to give (I am B-) but when I got back from Desert Storm and some of the other countries Uncle Sam has sent me too I am now banned from the blood supply.

People do die from a lack of blood.

A good friend of mine's wife had a hemorrhage during pregnancy and was rushed to the hospital.  She was bleeding out so fast they used up the hospital's blood supply very quickly.  It just so happened that on the day she was rushed to the ER, they were having a blood drive at their church.  As the blood was getting taken it was being run to the hospital by ambulance, 15 miles away and going right into her body.  She used 7 people's worth of blood before they got the bleeding stopped.  I now work at that hospital and the staff that were there that day said it was the worst case of hemorrhaging they had ever seen and the only thing that kept her alive was the blood donations from her church.  Once the word went out the entire town showed up to give blood.  Both her and the baby survived.  This was 25 years ago.

Concealed is concealed.   I am not advocating illegal actions but silly signs are meaningless.  The only gun sign I have seen is on a county building that stated that OPEN CARRY was prohibited.   I concealed carry.

Go donate.   Take your gun concealed and continue the fight.

They do die, yup.

All the more reason you'd think the Red Cross would seek to eliminate barriers to donation rather than create them.

or,
go and make the blood donation as usual w/ your CCW
and 'accidentally' make sure they see it when you are in there.

then they will have to decide whether your Type A 'essence' is more important than whether you can conceal carry

I wouldn't mind making a personal donation to a few of them.

It's fun to mess with them. I've always done doubles to take longer between donations.  Makes it harder to get the pins though.

This is where my donation would go:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/24/pf/donations-charities/index.html

Maybe right on CEO pay but most info says 91% goes to services.....pretty good bt Charity Watch standards.

DAW...  The only reason to watch such nonsense.  

Just curious, who goes to the doctor's office CCW for their annual physical?

Are you seriously so butthurt by my comment that you call me out by name, when I was just trying to give the perspective of someone at the other end of the blood system?



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Good luck actually getting off the list.  My wife has tried for over a year.  She's a nurse and participates at her hospital

Mine bitched at me once for carrying plastic in leather.

At one point I read its CEO made 657K a year. Sounds like a business to me.

Having some knowledge of blood banking practices, I'm... startled to hear such a story.

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I carry at the doctor's office. Why wouldn't you carry at the doctor's office?

Be sure to write a few letters and inform people in the management levels of the issue. A lot of business owners arent really opposed to firearms, they just dont understand them and think by putting up the signs they are preventing crime and protecting people when its the opposite. if i choose to stop patronizing a business i always inform the manager, in hopes that maybe they will see the light and changes their ways.

I was thinking more along those lines myself.



 

There are other organizations that accept blood donations.  The Red Cross is a shitty group anyway.

Oh course she is into fucking her 'brother', but hey, when you look like this, who cares?

Well, then I apologize for hurting your feelings. It wasn't intended, and I had mistakenly assumed that you and others could take it in the tone it was intended. It was more personal, but arguably no less petty than ultimately penalizing downstream users who have no ability to contest nor even be aware of the RC's policies. It is disappointing that you would assume that I after so many years of congenial online discussions with you, would ever seriously suggest anything so ethically and medically wrong, and use it as anything other than a philosophical extension of your logical position.

I've already ranted about people who won't go to the trouble of donating any blood, let alone the large amounts you have. Thank you for your donation.

I made one personal observation to illustrate the example, which was well within the COC in pointing out the logical fallacy of someone accepting a product from the same company they no longer support. I'm terribly sorry it seemed so personal, but giving blood is personal to me.  Just as yours are to you, my beliefs on the risk/benefit of blood donation are also strong. I believe your escalating reaction is well out of proportion to the level of nonexistent personal injury caused by my comments. Had you bothered to read further, you would have seen that I also stated that we give blood to people without respect to their current or prior donation status. My priority is to keep a John Doe alive, whether a donor or not, presumed bad guy or not.

TL;DR. Sorry to hurt your feelings. It wasn't personally intended. You have your opinion, and I have mine. We differ, but that doesn't mean I am any less entitled to mine than yours.

Also, is this a nationwide policy, or just some local antigun RC office?

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I'm no fan of the RC.  At the local military hospital we have our own blood bank. But if we need additional units we can buy them locally from the RC.......  At $230 per unit!!!!!

Cocksuckers will let a person die rather than do the right thing.

The RC doesn't want my blood anyway.

Never been a Red Cross fan. For the amount of money they take it.. precious little actually makes it to helping people.

I stopped giving a fuck about the Red Cross when they took in a metric shitton of money immediately after 9/11 and then did fuck-all good with it.

I am also afraid of needles.  I have donated 3 times though!  It takes me a very long time to get psyched up enough to go in and do it.  Like, weeks.  Seriously.  I'll get to the point where I am in the parking lot and almost faint thinking about it, and have to go home and 'start over'.  But, occasionally the stars align and I get over it, march in and donate!  I feel pretty damn awesome every time I pull it off!


A shame though about the no guns.  I'll have to check my place and see if that is a new policy, or just something that each place decides.

And, like others have said, the blood is very important, might have to be a Concealed means Concealed, or speak with the management deal.

I suspect we have some people on this site who do healthcare finance. I honestly don't know this information, and perhaps some of our membership can give insight:

1: What is the actual cost involved in processing a unit of whole blood into packed red cells? Ideally, I'd like to see the cost breakdown including collection, testing, incorporated cost for units that fail testing, storage, and transportation to the hospital. If possible, minus costs assignable to plasma and platelets.

2: How is that cost covered between financial donation and costs passed along to hospitals?

3: What additional hospital charges are baked into the eventual charge to be patient?

ETA:
4: Who should pay the costs, and in what proportions? It's not an easy answer, particularly in the weeds of needing transfusion as a result of another person's actions.

5: What level of compensation may be appropriate to entice people to give blood, and at what point is it a donation vs a sale (not necessarily unethical)?

6: How does this affect our view of organ donation & sale, and what degree of free market should be allowed? Is it morally and ethically required to afford an opportunity for blood and organ recipients to receive these items outside their raw economic ability to buy them?

I did some literature review. $230 is $30 above actual average acquisition cost of a unit of blood.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17377098/
http://ispub.com/IJEICM/9/2/4759

(Can't hotlink from mobile)


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I do, but since I OC 95% of the time my pistol is OC and not CC.I do it with his blessing.

Kudos, sir.

Kudos.

I usually donate in one of their buses, no sign on those.  Other than that they are usually at a hospital which is a no CC zone here in Texas by state law.  


And for those that don't like needles you get used to it, shit I had surgery last week and the doc had to drain some fluid off my chest today.  18g needle in the pec and pulled about 40-50 mL with a syringe.  I held the needle in while he unscrewed and reattached  the 10mL syringe to the needle each time.  That was fun.  

This.  If you want a peek into the people profiting off of brokering donated blood, start reading:

http://www.bloodbook.com/part-1.html

I used to donate, but they asked me to stop and just be available for Blood emergencies.  Mine is the second rarest blood type, B-, 1.5% of the peeps have it, but I think next time they call asking, I might mention the policy.  But, I am going to have to go down to the local office and see if they have a sign.

The only dramatic differences I see between a nonprofit organization and a for-profit are the label given to extra money in the bank account at the end of the year and the amount of bloat on the organizational heirarchy.

There's a huge artificial bottleneck in the various middlemen that disconnects supply and demand. That's how one really controls a commodity. Not by controlling supply or demand, but by controlling the flow. Those at both ends of the chain end up serving the middle.

It's a broken system that is not well protected against abuse and politicising, as TBK1's experience has shown. It should be apolitical, but they are leveraging their position to make a statement and maintain a monopoly. What they do is not all bad, nor entirely pure in motive.

And lest my comments be misconstrued, nothing is meant to denigrate the generosity of TBK1's donations nor anyone else's. I'm at the other end of the crack the whip game, and have simultaneous great appreciation for people such as him that have donated and disgust for the political and allocation games of the middleman. I disagree with the mode of expressing protest because it has relatively little effect on the RC, but I respect the desire to not support an organization with wrongheaded policies.

If it were a free market, a consumer boycott would be effective. In this case, it is a supplier boycott of an organization that already controls flow. They can pass any potential problems of a supplier shortage on to the consumer with their allocation and charges. They don't suffer. It's the person bleeding that ends up holding the empty bag.

Use up most of a metro area's blood supply in resuscitating a few car accident victims and one or two shoot out participants. The Red Cross says, "sorry, that's all we have allocated for the area." A young mother hemorrhage a during labor, yet all the blood for miles around has already been used up. "Sorry, no more yet," says the Red Cross.

Young mother dies because there isn't any more blood. The surgeons and I have to see her family and tell them. Then we go home and look at our own families and realize that it could have been our wife or kids who bled to death. People upstream aren't harmed. People downstream are harmed. The middle man continues to control supply but now has a great news story to use in their next as campaign.

So yes, it is a little personal to me. Because I am one of the people who deals with the fallout of real or manufactured blood shortages. And sometimes it wears on me. I've seen an awful lot of people bleed to death, and I've seen quite a few saved. I've also spent many hours lying awake in bed staring at the ceiling playing the dangerous "what if there were just one more trauma" game. I again publicly apologize if I unintentionally slighted TBK1 or any other donors in my inarticulate attempt to point out the ability of an organization to sidestep and transfer any impact from a donation boycott.

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