Editorial voices from elsewhere
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:
West Virginia is still among the states with higher rates of teen pregnancy, but West Virginia Bureau for Public Health officials gave some good news recently when they announced that, slowly but surely, that rate is declining in the Mountain State.
In fact, Dr. Rahul Gupta, the state health officer, said the rate has declined 15 percent in the past two years. The reasons for the change are encouraging, if a little surprising. First, Gupta believes young women are being taught more about the importance of staying in school, pursuing a college degree and even contemplating careers previous generations might have thought were out of reach.
The teen pregnancy rate in West Virginia is still unacceptably high – 38.3 per 1,000 girls, compared with the national average of 25. But the trend is changing, and it sounds like parents and families should receive a large portion of the credit for making that happen.
Hillary Clinton took a beating in West Virginia, losing the state to Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary held there May 10.
Her chances to win that coal-producing and economically depressed state were compromised after a parsed quote about coal’s future in the United States was circulated by the media. At an Ohio town hall in March, Clinton said the country would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business …”
That quote created quite a stir in the coal-producing regions of the country, but, as is common these days, Clinton’s statement was taken out of context. The complete statement: “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”
All of the sound and fury leveled at Clinton over her remarks obscures one true fact: The coal industry is already gutted.
It is sad, we do not deny it, and the financial burdens of losing a job have crushed many families, but well-paying jobs have come and gone. Eventually the devastation to the environment wreaked by fossil fuels and their extraction will be more of a concern than the jobs that were lost. That’s just a cold, hard fact. It’s about time we faced up to it and admitted these communities, and the world, have more to fear from global climate change than from lost jobs.
Recent reports of toddlers involved in accidental shootings have prompted a renewed focus on gun-safety laws. In one of the more dramatic cases, a Milwaukee toddler fatally shot his mother last month, apparently after finding a loaded gun in the back seat of the car she was driving.
Unfortunately, such incidents happen far more often than many Americans suppose. Last year, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, at least 265 children under the age of 18 accidentally shot either themselves or someone else. A Washington Post analysis found toddlers were behind accidental shootings at a rate of about one per week. The Huffington Post noted these children were involved in more shootings and shooting deaths in the United States last year than terrorists.
Sadly, many of these accidents are preventable. Everytown found that as many as 70 percent of shooting deaths of children could have been avoided through proper gun storage.
Collecting unbiased and accurate data on these shootings is an obvious step toward improving prevention. Congress should face down the gun lobby, and end its restrictions on gun-related research.