People watch TV shows and think that law enforcement have all of these great tools that solve all crimes in about an hour – WRONG!

The tools actually used by police departments can take days, weeks, or even months to provide answers.

On All Things Considered Melissa Block did a report on The Low-Tech Way Guns Get Traced.

This is a result of the NRA getting Congress to put restrictions on law enforcement to make existing laws ineffective, and burdening gun dealers, wholesalers, and manufacturers with a lot of unnecessary record keeping. If you are involved in the gun trade and you go out of business, you have ship all of your records to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. How many records do you think MalWart has? Cabela? If BATF is doing a search, you have to search your records to find what they want, even if it means going to an offsite storage site to find a record that is a decade old. This costs money, as does storing the records forever.

This is a cost to business of paranoia.

Dr Masters started the day with a recap of Sunday’s tornadoes: Tornadoes Slam 5-State Area, Killing Two; Outbreak Continues Today. Among those tornadoes was an EF-5 that touched down in Shawnee, Oklahoma. EF-5 tornadoes have winds in excess of 200 mph.

The National Weather Service warned that conditions were ripe for another outbreak of tornadoes today, and they were right.

This evening’s post: Violent tornado devastates Moore, Oklahoma

…There have been only six billion-dollar (2011 dollars) tornadoes in history:

1) Joplin, Missouri, May 22, 2011, $2.8 billion
2) Topeka, Kansas, June 8, 1966, $1.7 billion
3) Lubbock, Texas, May 11, 19780, $1.5 billion
4) Bridge Creek-Moore, Oklahoma, May 3, 1999, $1.4 billion
5) Xenia, Ohio, April 3, 1974, $1.1 billion
6) Omaha, Nebraska, May 6, 1975, $1 billion

The May 3, 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore tornado killed 36 people and injured 583. It damaged or destroyed 8132 homes, 1041 apartments, 260 businesses, 11 public buildings and seven churches. According to rough estimates of the size of the damaged area made by helicopters operated by news9.com and kfor.com, the damage footprint from the May 20, 2013 tornado is easily twice as large. I expect that after the damage tally from the May 20 tornado is added up, Moore will hold two of the top five spots on the list of most damaging tornadoes in history, and the May 20 tornado may approach the Joplin tornado as the costliest twister of all-time.

What’s it going to take before people start taking the weather shifts seriously? How much damage? How many deaths?

If you are in Britain this week. you should make a point of going to the Chelsea Flower Show. I’ve been there a couple of times, and even if your interest in flowers isn’t in the avid gardener class, it is a great experience.

Chelsea isn’t quite as old as the Rochester Lilac Festival, but the 600 varieties of lilacs are no match for the diversity of the Chelsea Show.

[Note: I lived a block and a half from the lilacs in Rochester, and when they were in bloom it was a great way to get rid of the odor of a house that had been closed up all winter.]