The inconvenient fact is that criminologists have found that U.S. citizens use firearms for self-defense 2.5 million times annually, and for every life that is lost to firearms violence 65 are saved in self-defense. Coupled with the hundreds of thousands times firearms are used for recreational and competitive shooting, shooting is an NCAA and Olympic sport as well as in the Boy Scouts, 4H, ROTC/JROTC, etc. as well as hunting and collecting, it is clear that the firearms are used legally and safely far more often than their illegal and unsafe use.

http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/KleckAndGertz1.htm

Suter E. “Guns in the Medical Literature – A Failure of Peer
Review.” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia. March 1994; 83: 133-48.

Of course, citizen disarmament zealots, their organizations, their media allies, and their naïve followers ignore these inconvenient facts because they debunk their propaganda and deception.

So what is it that they’re trying to distract us from noticing? Because this all seems like a tempest in a teapot…

Personally I sort of enjoy watching the Tea Party/John Birch Society (I think they’re about the same thing) screw things up for the Republicans. I’m glad that their comedic value has been extended.

It’s you rightwingers who are hilarious. The rightwing halfwits who live around me are constantly bitching about federal spending. But, as I have posted repeatedly, and you have apparently ignored, this area receives billions, yes billions, each year in federal spending. Hanford alone rakes in over $2 billion each year. And most of these bitching halfwits have worked at Hanford’s good paying jobs and are, or soon will, collect handsome pensions for doing so. Most of them have decent homes, big freakin’ trucks and SUVs, motorcycles, RVs, and any toy the desire. And how do they say thanks, by bitching about federal spending. Correction: bitching about someone else’s federal spending. Just like that Coburn guy.

Wanna guess what this area would be without all that federal sugar? It would be just thousands of square miles of sagebrush and tumbleweeds, AKA scrubland. That’s all.

You did notice that this was under “opinion”, right? And you know what they say about opinions and asses, right? And you know the FAA got most of its weather information from the NWS for your flight, right? And most of the radio and TV stations get their information from NWS radar, right? And while lots of TV stations have their “weather cameras” very few have any long range weather radar, right? And they don’t have weather satellites either, right?

Where the differences are is interpretation of the weather data. And that is “local” weather data. Few stations can handle national weather patterns, the source of which is almost always NWS.