Day 119 of the Lower Puna Eruption, and all is quiet, with activity at the lowest level in more than a decade. Getty photo to the left when there was activity at Halemaumau. The Hawaii Civil Defense Service said:
It is common for eruptions to go through periods of diminished output, or to pause completely, only to reactivate days, weeks, or even months later.
Re-activation could occur at any time, with little to no warning.
The death toll remains at zero.
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Similarly, Hurricane Lane left a lot of rainwater, but no one was killed. Puerto Rico, which for the longest time reported only 64 dying from Hurricane Maria, is now up to about 3000 deaths.
Speaking of mortality, JAMA, which stands for the Journal of the American Medical Association, just released a report dealing with gun deaths, which had so many assorted statistics that I got lost in the details:- 195 countries and territories were studied.
- Gun deaths increased from 209,000 in 1990 to 251,00 in 2016.
- If I read this correctly, the rate of deaths decreased about 1% during this interval. That is, the population increased more than gun deaths.
- Further, in 2016, gun homicides accounted for 64%, with 27% from suicides. I would guess that actual war deaths were not counted.
- In this quarter century period:
- Firearm suicides decreased by 1.6% per year.
- But in 124 of those 195 countries, the suicide rate either stayed constant or experienced significant increases.
- Someone, anyone, explain to me what this means? Click on that article and read it.
- To repeat:
Conclusions and Relevance This study estimated between 195,000 and 276,000 firearm injury deaths globally in 2016, the majority of which were firearm homicides. Despite an overall decrease in rates of firearm injury death since 1990, there was variation among countries and across demographic subgroups.
Not sure why they used the term "firearm injury death."
Additional information about guns:
- U.S. manufacturers have produced 150 million guns since 1986, or 4.7 million/year. In 2016? 11 million guns, of which 4 million were rifles. The National Rifle Association estimates that 25% of those were AR-15s or some other type of semiautomatic. Did you know that AR-15s were illegal from 1994 to 2004, but that Congress, with perhaps some input from the NRA, let the ban expire? These are the weapons used during mass shootings: Sandy Hook Elementary School, Parkland, Las Vegas concert and so on. Firearm sales dropped last year because gun advocates felt assured that President Donald Trump and Republicans would fend off any attempt by Democrats to control sales. Every time there is a major shooting, sales zoom up for a while for fear of losing the Second Amendment.
- With 2% the world population, Americans own 40% of all the guns in the world. MORE THAN THE NEXT 25 COUNTRIES COMBINED. Including the military, there are more than one billion firearms in the world, and American citizens (not including the Department of Defense) have 393 million of them. That is 1.2 guns/person. Yemen, a country at war, is next at 0.53. Canadians are #5 with 0.35. But they do a lot of hunting. Japan and Indonesia are at the 0.01 level. Why do we own so many guns? The best answer is because we can, although most will say it is for personal protection. Here, with minimal check, we can walk into a gun store and buy one.
- The most popular gun is the Ruger lightweight compact pistol, a semi-automatic handgun. You can find one for $260. Ruger is short for Sturm, Ruger & Company, with headquarters in Connecticut, which happens to be where Sandy Hook Elementary is located.
- You can't go to Amazon.com and buy one, for they don't sell firearms, liquor, eyeglasses, tobacco, lottery tickets, fuel, cars, pets and second-hand clothing.
- You can click on Budsgunshop.com and get a Ruger LCP 6+1 380ACP 2.75" for $186. It weighs 9.6 ounces, but there is no manual safety. Safety check? Read this. Confused?
I tried to find some data comparing Mother Nature versus guns in the USA, and the best I could find was a 2012 study by Fareed Zakaria of CNN reporting that She caused 1/10th (3168 in 2008) that of guns or traffic, where there were a few more vehicular (34,485) deaths than by firearm (31,347):
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Ocean storms:
Jebi just attained typhoon status, and seems likely to become a super typhoon (150 MPH). If you're going to Japan, or happen to live there, there is a chance Jebi could make landfall about a week from now...or not:
In the Pacific, Hurricane Miriam will reach Category 4 strength, but move north before getting close to Hawaii. Maybe some rain in five days.
However, Norman just became a hurricane, and here are those dreaded spaghetti models:
Over the next ten days, anything can happen, but the consensus seems to be a path just north of Hawaii.
The Atlantic is at this time calm, but conditions are ripe for something to happen:
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