Here in purple/blue Colorado, I see somebody open carrying 3-5 times a year.
Ha! My favorite, data-driven LA blogger Kevin Drum had a great - and I thought pretty balanced - post on this today:
His outlook was pretty balanced and goes through every metric you can think of. Weather, housing, crime, taxes, income, health care, etc.
Read it.
See now, I don’t get why people are so freaked out by earthquakes because they mostly ain’t no thang. Especially if you live in the Central Valley in California, atop something like 95 miles deep soft alluvial soil. Earthquake waves hit that and they sloooooow down and it’s just a gentle rocking. I was up in Yosemite camping on a big granite batholith and a 6-high something quake went off couple hundred miles south and now THAT was a shaker, everything was jitterbugging around for a bit. But then it’s over and usually nothing bad happens. Due to having lived in Japan it takes well over a 6.0 to even wake me up! Even Loma Prieta was only a big deal because the Nimitz Freeway was such a shitty built mess in the first place and the Marina district had gas lines buried all over in soft soil that was subject to liquefaction if you stomped your foot too hard. In a properly built and maintained building an earthquake isn’t a problem unless it’s such an enormous one that everything goes to hell in a handbasket and those are so seldom it’s literally centuries in between.
I guess it would be mean to point out to your wife that Texas has been the site of a couple good shakers too, a 6.5 magnitude one in 1931 and a 5.7 in 1995. Thing is though, that on the Pacific we know it’s an issue so we build to handle earthquakes but y’all who don’t get them as often don’t bother to take them into account so when they happen there it makes a bigger mess than it does here. Tsunamis now, as a result of earthquakes, those are a genuine problem, such that all along the coast there are signs telling people which roads to head out on to get away if one’s coming. We get warning of those suckers though, and few people are all that concerned about them. Earthquakes big enough to cause damage are only a few in a lifetime, but hurricanes and tornadoes are every damned year–I went through typhoons in Japan and that much weather is more than I’m comfortable with on the regular.
Stupid yet quotidian argument results in gun death in Lubbock (disturbing video warning - two clicks required).
In Texas, the DA won’t file charges, so cooler heads are not encouraged.
Hehehe, nah, it wouldn’t be mean, but in her defense, that would be a pretty paltry set of statistics to get her to live on the ring of fire. Also in her defense, in a lifetime I’ve been in the actual path of a tornado once. I cowered in the strongest area of the building, and it only damaged roofs across the street from where I was working. Even that’s rare, I don’t think any of my close family have been as close as I have to a tornado. Their paths are narrow.
Plus, it’s not like we’re in Oklahoma, they don’t happen every other day. Yeah, I’m probably going live long enough to regret that statement, eventually. It is Texas, after all.
Guess what? Texas has more tornadoes than anywhere else in the US! Uh oh! 
Hehehe, we do get plenty, but it’s relative. Scroll down to the map regarding per 10,000 sq miles. Oklahoma is pretty much all dark red. DFW is in the southern corridor of that blob. And again, their paths are pretty tiny, geographically speaking. We could get 20 tornadoes in DFW next year, and none may be within 20 miles of my house.
ETA: And as I said, I ask anyone who thinks of moving here “So, how do you think about the sky opening up and trying to kill you?” Because it’s a valid psychological question, if you’re not comfy with it, you shouldn’t move here. I learned to at a young age, but I was born here. They used to print (yes, often incorrect) instructions on how to deal with tornadoes on grocery bags when I was a kid. You just learn how to expect that to happen and how to try to protect yourself if it does. You live here.
FWIW, West Texas is likely the most desolate part of the state. East Texas is pretty much pine woods and/or farmland. Central Texas is mostly farmland, with the Hill Country being somewhat rugged.
Zoning laws are a local responsibility- it totally depends on where you live. Houston is notorious (infamous?) for having had zero zoning laws until sometime in the mid 1990s. Other cities like Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio have had much stronger zoning laws for a long time.
I don’t feel like Texas is losing any real natural disaster competition versus other big states like California- wildfires, mudslides and super-severe drought are on the same scale as occasional tornadoes and a couple of hurricanes a year, most of which are non-issues, like Hurricane Nicholas earlier this autumn.
Tornadoes just give me the whirling fantods, it’s about as close as I get to an irrational fear. So yeah, not sanguine about the sky tryna kill me in the slightest!
Heheh, you’re just the opposite of my sweetie. I’m generally fine with either, but if there’s a spot with a regular combination of the two, even I would have my moments of doubt about moving there.
Fire is my other big bugaboo and I saw footage of a fire tornado once and damned near crapped me pants. Thing is that climate change is going to increase the number and severity of every type of weather phenomena so drier droughts, mega fires, hurricanes more frequent and severe and those hurricanes spawning more and fiercer tornadoes. Ironically, I can’t see any evidence that earthquakes or volcanoes (we have those too in Oregon!) are affected by climate change so might could be we’ll end up safer overall out here.
Yeah, but Texas is a huge area geographically. It’s going to get more of everything unless you take that into account as well.
Yeah my Wife is very afraid of tornados. I’ve always thought you could always just get in your car and drive away.
But once in I think eastern Colorado we where driving on I70 and got hit by the biggest freaking dust devil I’ve ever seen. Came out of nowhere, drove right through the thing in the blind. Really, I think it could have be classified as a small tornado. I guess dust devils are. But this one was huge.
My uncle lives just north of Dallas in a suburb. I really love the area. It isn’t as hot/humid as, say, Houston, and it has a lot of transplants, so it isn’t diehard redneck country. I wouldn’t move to Texas, however, because of the “Texas Taliban” that now runs the state. They are legislating women back into male dominated servitude.
Once I visited Plano, TX. My lasting impression was that the name is very apt.
I will say this about TX: There is a lot of affordable land that’s relatively close to some major urban areas. Given the current nationwide scarcity of affordable real estate, cheap land is going to be a big draw for many people and businesses.
Yeah, but so are California, Oregon and Washington combined and yet people think earthquakes are a valid fear. So, your point?
Earthquakes are something only people who don’t live in California are afraid of. If you’ve lived through a few you realize that as long as you don’t have an unreinforced masonry chimney and you’ve anchor-bolted your house to your poured perimeter foundation like the code says, you just have to pick up some broken dishes. No big.
I personally find most natural disasters exhilarating. Except fire. Wildfire scares the shit out of me.
It’s pretty much that way with tornadoes too. Here in the midwest, they’re pretty common and are more or less a thing of curiosity than something to be fearful of.
Interesting. A tornado did some very major damage in the tiny New England town I moved to, the year before I got there. Acres of forest flattened, a historic barn destroyed, the 19th century church irreparably damaged, the sides of several homes sheared away.
I’m not real exhilarated by the thought of tornadoes, have to say. Although CA has more than a full complement of common natural disasters, tornadoes aren’t one of them.
https://patch.com/california/san-diego/most-destructive-tornado-california-history
According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there have been 461 tornadoes in California from 1950 through 2020 — the 20th fewest among states. These tornadoes directly resulted in no deaths and 90 injuries.
Granted, not many but not non-existent.