12
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, April 27, 1995
7B
Gun-regulation power changes hands
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court yesterday struck down a federal law banning possession within 1,000 feet of schools, saying the states — not Congress — have the authority to enact such criminal laws.
The 5-4 decision thrown out the 1990 Gun-Free School Zones Act stood in sharp contrast to a long-standing court trend of deference to congressional power to regulate interstate commerce.
Congress stole power reserved to the states when it enacted the law, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote as the court refused to reinstate a former Texas high-school student's conviction for taking a gun to school.
The school gun law "is a criminal statute that by its terms has nothing to do with 'commerce' or any sort of economic enterprise, however broadly one might define those terms." Rehmann wrote.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted in a concurring opinion that most states already outlaw gun possession on or near school grounds.
But Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in dissent that the ruling cre-
attained a legal uncertainty that would "restrict Congress' ability to enact criminal laws aimed at criminal behavior that ... seriously threatens the economic, as well as social, well-being of Americans."
"The problem of guns in and around schools is widespread and extremely serious." Brever said.
Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., who sponsored the school gun law, said, "I'm astonished that the Supreme Court has said that Congress cannot protect our children from guns." He said the ruling ignored children's safety for the sake of legal nitpicking.
Sixty-five students and six school employees were shot and killed at U.S. schools during the five years before the law was enacted, according to the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.
The court rejected the Clinton administration's argument that gun possession near schools may result in violent crime, which in turn can harm the national economy.
Under that reasoning, Rehnquist wrote, "Congress could regulate any activity that it found was related to the economic productivity of individual citizens: family law ... for example."
If Congress could regulate activities that harm the educational environment, it also could directly regulate schools — perhaps even by mandating a federal school curriculum, the chief justice added.
The government had asked the court to reinstate Alfonzo Lopez Jr's conviction for taking a handgun and five bullets to school in San Antonio in 1922. He said he had been given the gun to deliver to someone else for $40 for use in what he described as a "gang war."
In ruling that Lopez's conviction could not stand, the high court said that he "was a local student at a local school; there is no indication that he had recently moved in inter-state commerce."
Congress can enact laws under its power to regulate interstate commerce only to police activity that substantially affects such commerce, Rehnquist said. The ruling seeks to preserve a distinction between what is national and what is local." he said.
Bernard James, a lawyer for the National School Safety Center, called the ruling a wake-up call reminding Congress that there was a constitutional limit on its power to regulate commerce.
Richard Samp of the conservative Washington Law Foundation said the decision could spark challenges to other federal criminal laws and environmental laws that regulate individual conduct, such as a private citizen polluting a wetland.
Joining Rehnquist's opinion along with Kennedy were Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting along with Breyer were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Barden Ginsburg.
In other action yesterday, the court:
Ruled unanimously in a New York case that states can regulate hospital costs by charging different rates based on a patient's healthcare coverage.
Heard arguments on whether Ohio could deny a Ku Klux Klan request to put a cross alongside a menorah and Christmas tree on the Statehouse square in Columbus.
Heard arguments on whether a former federal prison inmate who said he had once sold marijuana to Dan Quayle was wrongly disciplined when he tried to publicize his claim shortly before the 1988 presidential election.
Report says food handouts don't solve world hunger
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Some 750 million people around the world go hungry every day, but they need economic help more than they need food handouts, the World Bank said in a strategy statement yesterday.
"If we want to reduce hunger effectively, we have to reduce poverty," bank President Lewis T. Preston said in a foreword to "The World Bank's Strategy for Reducing Poverty and Hunger."
Except for those who grow their own food, the strategy statement said, avoiding hunger depends primarily on getting money. The poor spend up to 85 percent of incomes on food, it said.
Reducing poverty, the World Bank's basic task, requires helping governments make their economies grow and provide jobs for the poor while avoiding practices that undercut local farmers, he said.
"They are not wasting their money," said the bank, the world's biggest source of aid loans to poor countries."People will meet their nutrition needs more cost effectively if they receive the money equivalent of the commodities supplied from food aid."
"A staggering 750 million men, women and children go hungry every day. That need not happen," said the statement, prepared by Hans P. Binswanger, a senior farm adviser at the bank, and Pierre Landell-Mills, its representative in Bangladesh.
Third World governments sell to their citizens most of the food given them as aid except in emergency situations. Sales prices are often lower than available in markets, and that discourages local farmers, the bank statement said.
Governments use proceeds from sales for general spending, but the bank suggested they would do better to spend the money on programs directed against hunger.
Critics say governments providing food aid often buy grain and other items to help their own farmers and business people, which means the needs of poor countries come second. The U.S. government, the biggest donor, has run out of food surpluses it acquired to keep up market prices and also is reducing amounts it will spend in the market to buy food for aid.
Last month, the Clinton administration told other donor governments that it was cutting its food pledge through mid-1998 by 45 percent, to an annual 2.5 million metric tons of grain. As recently as last December, the United States was pledged to its traditional 4.47 million tons a year.
Study says mother's age is key to healthy birth
The Associated Press
BOSTON — Alarge new study suggests that biology, not just poverty, is to blame when teen-age births turn out badly.
About 13 percent of all children in the United States are born to teenagers. Statistics have long shown their babies are especially likely to be premature and undersized.
The reasons for this have never been clear. But because these young mothers are often poor, ill-educated and from racial minorities, many experts assumed their living conditions, not their age, explained their pregnancy problems.
The new work challenges this belief. It found that even middle-class teen-agers are almost twice as likely as older women to deliver premature babies.
"In general, all teen-agers should be encouraged not to get pregnant," even those who are married, said Richard Ward, the study's senior author.
Just how the mother's age contributes to prematurity is unclear. The researchers speculated that teen-agers' bodies are still growing and therefore may be competing with their fetuses for nutrients.
Understanding prematurity is important because it is the leading cause of newborn deaths. Babies born too soon simply cannot survive outside the womb, no matter what doctors do.
The new study attempted to sort out the causes by focusing solely on white, middle-class females in Utah. Two-thirds of the teen-agers in the group under age 18 were married, and 95 percent were still in school.
The study concluded that even when poverty is not a factor, the risk of prematurity remains high, especially for the youngest teen-agers.
"If you could have every pregnant teen-ager be married, not poor and get good prenatal care, you will still have bad outcomes," said Ward. "Being young is enough to cause this."
The study, conducted at the University of Utah, was published in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was based on a review of 134,088 white girls and women ages 13 to 24 who delivered their first babies between 1970 and 1990.
The youngest girls, those ages 13 to 17, were 90 percent more likely than the women in their early 20s to deliver prematurely. The risk was still elevated, but less so, for the older teen-agers.
Seven percent of the younger teenagers' babies were born unusually small, compared with 4 percent of the older mothers' babies.
Charlotte Catz, chief of pregnancy and perinatology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, called the research "a very important breakthrough."
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