Don't want to get shot and die? Move to New York
Animals know how to hide, and show off
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Go to the National Center for Health Statistics site and take a look at the map of firearm mortality by state and you’ll see a cluster of five states in the upper right-hand corner that are pale yellow.
Pale yellow means safe — much safer than places like Arkansas and Idaho, Mississippi and South Dakota, which have almost none of the more than 40 laws, regulating gun sales, possession and use, found in New York and the other safe states.
The safety zone, comprising New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey, has the nation’s lowest rate of firearm deaths. If you live there — in New York, say, where the 2022 rate of firearm deaths per 100,000 people was 5.3 — you’re about five times less likely to die from getting shot than if you live in Mississippi, where the rate is 29.6, or Alabama, where it’s 25.5.
New York has what the Everytown gun safety group calls the five “foundational” laws of gun regulation: background checks, a concealed carry permit system, an extreme risk law that allows police and family members to petition the court to block access to guns for someone in crisis, the absence of a shoot-first or “stand your ground” law and requirements that guns be secured out of the reach of children.
New York has many other sensible laws for minimizing the widespread harm to innocent people inflicted every year by guns. People with violent criminal convictions are barred from carrying guns. Guns may not be carried into bars or K-12 schools. Stalkers and domestic abusers can’t have guns.
Some states allow all of those things. Those are the states the map shows as red, where the rate of gunshot deaths is over 20 per 100,000.
Understanding that more gun regulation means fewer gunshot deaths, I support, as a Warren County taxpayer, the hiring of a pistol permit clerk to help process state paperwork for permit applications.
County officials like Stony Creek Supervisor Frank Thomas are bellyaching about it.
“This is just the result of the state of New York, the state that we live in, and the infringement on our Second Amendment constitutional rights,” he told a reporter from the Post-Star.
He’s wrong — the Supreme Court has affirmed that the right to bear arms, like other rights, is subject to reasonable regulation.
Common sense restrictions like speed limits are a reasonable regulation of the right to interstate travel. Common sense restrictions on gun sales, possession and use that also reduce bloodshed are reasonable.
If the cost of being more than five times safer here than in Mississippi is a clerk’s $45,000 salary plus benefits — out of a $190 million-plus budget — I’m happy to help bear it.
My wife and I have never had guns. Bringing them into your household in Glens Falls is a symbolic exercise that accomplishes the opposite of its purpose. You may buy a gun for “protection,” but having one in your house increases the risk of someone in your family getting shot.
Children can find guns, and bullets, and they have in this area, with fatal consequences. Adults can make mistakes and kill someone they love — that, too, has happened here. And having the easiest means for suicide close at hand makes death by suicide far more likely.
There is more to owning a gun than the mistaken notion it makes your family safer. I’m sure there are people in the Glens Falls area who don’t lock their doors but have a gun for “protection.”
Guns are fetishized in our culture, and owning one has become a rite of passage, a misguided way of asserting maturity and independence.
People buy guns to point them outward, toward an ill-defined and, in this area, mostly nonexistent danger. But the real danger comes from inside families — parents who abuse children and husbands and boyfriends who assault their partners. Fortunately for us, convicted domestic abusers are banned from having guns in New York.
Warren County brings in revenue from pistol permit fees — $32,000 in 2022 and $25,000 in 2023, according to a recent story in the Post-Star — and the revenue would rise with a full-time clerk on the job.
But, regardless, pistol permit paperwork is a cost worth bearing. We are lucky to be removed from the chaos created by easy access to and easy use of guns. Thank God New York isn’t one of the states sacrificing citizens’ lives on the altar of the Second Amendment.
Camouflage
I continue to be amazed at the way animals blend in with their surroundings through color and also by staying still. Cole’s Woods was full of small, papery butterflies on a recent hot, sunny day, many of them white and gray, some black, and this one, identified by my phone as a Coenonympha california, which matches all the colors around it — the orange-brown of the pine cone, the ashy gray of the branch and even the patchy pale green of the fungus on the branch.
Then there was a toad, barely visible among the plants — one more splotch of green on the floor of the woods.
A damselfy flitting around Halfway Brook was also hard to spot once it settled on a leaf.
Finally, I spotted this swallowtail butterfly on our rhododendron bush. It wasn’t trying to hide, I think, but showing off its colors.
Excellent commentary on firearms.
It continues to amaze me how some people advocate for the right to be irresponsible with weapons. One measure NYS must take with regard to reckless and malicious use of firearms is the institution of liability insurance requirements for gun owners and the institution of stronger civil lawsuit laws. If we're going to own dangerous weapons, we need to take full responsibility for their misuse, including financial responsibility.
I'd take our gun laws one step further....they should be required to be insured.
I'm all for making it harder for someone to have a permit.