The Topline: More guns, more death

Bullets. Photo by Aristide Economopoulos/N.J. Monitor.

Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: Guns and death; Minnesota’s teacher pay penalty; peat management; and the latest estimates on income and poverty.

More guns, more death

In the wake of a horrific event like a mass shooting, we hear gun enthusiasts argue that mental health problems are the primary drivers of American gun violence, rather than the guns themselves.

Researchers recently decided to test this proposition empirically by comparing gun deaths in America with those in other countries with similar rates of mental illness. They found that gun deaths in the United States are a whopping 20 times higher than those in comparable countries.

While the country’s struggles with mental health are very real, it’s the easy access to guns that’s driving so much of the death and devastation that Americans have simply learned to live with.

Here in Minnesota, there were about 525 gun deaths last year, including 379 suicides and 128 homicides, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. Those figures have eased off slightly after peaking in 2021 .

As grim as our numbers are, they add up to the eighth-lowest gun death rate in the nation, considerably better than the U.S. average. Across much of the South, where gun laws are even less restrictive, death rates are two or three times higher than what they are here.

Minnesota has one of nation’s highest teacher pay penalties

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning D.C. think tank, released a report last week on teacher wage penalties across the U.S. On average, teachers get paid about 27% less than similar college graduates in other professions, the study found.

That penalty is growing as teacher pay stagnates. Back in 1993, for instance, teachers were paid just 5% less than their similarly educated peers.

Minnesota’s penalty is 31%, the sixth highest in the nation. That number provides some heft to union arguments that disproportionately low pay is one of the reasons Minnesota student achievement is lagging behind other states in recent years.

The report notes that “although teachers typically receive better benefits packages than other professionals do, this ‘benefits advantage’ is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers.”

Fixing the problem is relatively straightforward: pay teachers more.

Peat math doesn’t add up

The state of Minnesota and the federal government are spending millions of dollars to restore and preserve public peat lands — which act as wildlife refuges and powerful carbon sinks — in parts of the state, the Star Tribune reports .

At the same time, the state is also leasing out some of those same public lands to private sector companies that are harvesting the peat, effectively undoing the restoration work happening elsewhere.

All told the state is spending $3,000 an acre to preserve some plots of peatland, while letting industry destroy others for the bargain basement cost of just $12 an acre.

Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources is overseeing it all, and conservationists are scratching their heads, according to the story. Because it can take hundreds of years for harvested lands to regenerate their peat, the practice is not as renewable as other extractive industries, like logging.

Household incomes finally rebound

The U.S. Census Bureau released new data last week showing that in 2023 the median household income rose significantly for the first time since 2019. In inflation-adjusted terms, the 2023 household earnings of $80,610 are now roughly back to where they were prior to the pandemic , and above the level they were at in 2021, when former President Donald Trump left office.

The child poverty rate, meanwhile, ticked upward, continuing its steady ascent after Congress failed to extend the pandemic-era child tax credit that had slashed the poverty rate by about half.

The data also showed that about 8% of the population, or roughly 27 million people, lack health insurance, unchanged from the prior year.