ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING

Hate to on this Sunday feature killings, but the USA had another mass shooting yesterday, in Birmingham, Alabama.

Four were killed and more than 20 injured.

Authorities are not sure who or how many were responsible.
No suspects yet.
You can be pardoned for not even knowing this happened, for something similar occurs all the time.
There have been more than 400 mass shootings in the U.S. this year.
The FBI defines mass shooting as an event in which one or more individuals are actively engaged in killing or attempting kill people in a populated area. Implicit is the use of firearm. Usually needs to have at last three deaths.

ONE THIRD of all the world's public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 occurred in the U.S. Size of circle indicates relative number of shootings.
Not sure why that period ended more than twelve years ago, but that was from Wikipedia, and until 2012 there have been 4,011 mass shootings in the U.S.
Highest rate in Washington, DC, followed by Louisiana.
Perpetrator demographics vary by type of mass shooting, though in almost all cases they are male. Contributing factors include easy access to guns, perpetrator suicidality and early childhood trauma, as well as various sociocultural factors including online media reporting of mass shootings. In one study, 44% of mass shooters had leaked their plans prior to committing the act.
There was a period when mass shooting deaths remained lower, from 1994 to 2004 during the period of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

Do we need better gun control?

Who are to blame? National Rifle Association, Republican Party, second amendment to the Constitution,...the list goes on and on.
Should this be a presidential campaign issue of importance? Only in tenth place at a 4% concern level.

Here are the facts and trends.

One-third of U.S. adults say they personally own a gun. Including Kamala Harris. But the breakdown is 45% Republicans and 20% Democrats.
Donald Trump owns two hand guns, but now as a convicted criminal, might have them taken away.
I was expert with an M1 rifle (that was a long time ago), .45 caliber pistol and machine gun when was in the U.S. Army, but have never owned one.
The U.S. surgeon general has declared gun violence to be a public health crisis.
Of those who do, 72% own one for personal protection.
58% of adults favor stricter gun laws.

Another Taylor Swift sighting.

Yesterday I featured From Russia with Lev. MSNBC again replays this 1 hour 32 minute documentary tonight at 9PM EDT. Don't confuse this with the 1963 James Bond From Russia With Love, which got 97/84 scores from Rotten Tomatoes, which you can stream. Title song was sung by Matt Monro.

Yesterday, I also said that my Apple 16 Pro iPhone arrived in the mail. My first photo, which is a view of downtown Honolulu and the Pacific Ocean from my seat at my iMac.

It is a beautiful day.

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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