Aug 12, 2016 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:

Texas is No. 1 in the nation on a tragic list. Our state had the most unintentional child shootings in 2016, according to Moms Demand Action, a grassroots advocacy group.

Even the youngest children are at risk. Toddlers have shot at least 23 people nationwide as of May, according to The Washington Post, some fatally. Many factors contribute to these grim statistics. The reckless behavior of adults, such as leaving a loaded gun laying around in a house with children, should be prosecuted.

Another contributing factor needs attention: the overconfidence of parents or guardians. Parents and caregivers who believe young children don’t know where their guns are hidden or how to access them are too often wrong. A Harvard study supports the commonsense notion that kids may know more about their parents’ guns than their parents think they do. More than 70 percent of children surveyed under age 10 knew where their parents stored their guns – even when they were hidden.

Kids around unsecured and loaded guns are a tragedy waiting to happen. Prosecution of irresponsible gun owners are one deterrent. But ultimately, heightened vigilance and action will be the only way to end these senseless deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory that pregnant women should stay out of a section of Miami is not the most disturbing news about the Zika virus this week.

CDC officials’ warning was bad enough, to be sure. The agency said an outbreak of 14 cases of Zika in Miami’s Wynwood district was the reason for its advisory. Zika can cause birth defects.

Perhaps even more unsettling was the CDC’s tally showing more than 1,650 cases of Zika have been reported in the United States. Only in Florida has the disease been transmitted by mosquitoes. Other U.S. cases involve people who have traveled to Zika-ridden areas of the world or have contracted the disease by having sex with others infected.

But there is a catch to all that: Zika can be picked up by certain mosquitoes who bite people already infected. Then, the bugs can spread it to new victims.

That could mean that, at least in some areas, the growth of Zika could be exponential. And that means federal officials should make finding a vaccine and a cure for Zika a priority.

A petition filed recently with the state Board of Oil and Gas Conservation draws attention to a serious anomaly in our environmental regulations. The petition – filed by a coalition of landowners, environmentalists and public health workers – seeks to force oil producers to reveal the full list of chemicals they are using to “frack” oil and gas from deep in the ground.

Because of a bizarre mix of state and federal regulations, the companies don’t have to reveal the chemicals they are pumping into the ground. This is because, the oil companies argue, they are trade secrets, and if they are revealed, the company could lose its competitive edge. This despite the fact that many of the chemicals they use are hazardous to the environment and human health.

Think about this: Would we even allow natural resource extraction companies to dump hazardous chemicals into our lakes or rivers? Or would we allow them to spew toxic pollution into the air without any restrictions.

And yet somehow it’s just fine to allow them to pump these pollutants deep into the earth and we’re not even allowed to know what they are?

And making the situation worse is the fact that Montana law long ago separated surface rights and mineral rights in land ownership, and landowners often do not own the oil and gas under their land. So the oil and gas firms can legally come on to someone’s land and pump millions of gallons of fracking chemicals into the ground and the landowner doesn’t even have the right to know what those chemicals are.

On its face, this is absurd.

Members of the Oil and Gas Conservation Board should certainly grant this petition to the full extent they are authorized. And where they are not authorized, the Montana Legislature and Congress need to step in to amend the laws so that these chemicals must be fully revealed to landowners and the public.