An interesting letter in the Australian Shooter Magazine this week, which I quote:

"If you consider that there has been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the past 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington,DC is 80.6 per 100,000 for the same period.

That means you are about 25 percent more likely to be shot and killed in the U.S. capital, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the U.S., than you are in Iraq."

Conclusion: The U.S.should pull out of Washington.

(Borrowed from http://hollys-hystrionics.blogspot.com/)

You Just Can't Fix Stupid

So the other night we were trying to drive to town. We left our place and went down the road about 1 mile and the road was closed. There were lots of "blue light specials" and they had their surveying instrument out. We figured it was a fatal accident. So we had to turn around and go up past our house to take another route. The other route was blocked off as well. So we had to take another route to get to town. Good thing there are several routes.

So today I did a little investigating to see what the heck was going on in our quiet neck of the country.

http://www.flashalert.net/news.html?id=1276

Motorcycle Crash on E Bell Road Results in Fatal Injuries - 07/14/09

Serious Crash Closes Historic East Columbia River Highway - 07/14/09

If the observant reader looks at the incident times, the second accident listed had occurred and they had closed the HCRH. So traffic was taking Bell Rd to get around it when the second accident occurred on the detour road, resulting in a fatality.

So if the LE folks hadn't shut down the road to play surveyor and investigate the injury accident, maybe they wouldn't have caused the fatality...