Good News Monday

First, you got your local good news from Saratoga.

Saratoga Springs on Tuesday became the seventh municipality in New York to enact a law that requires gun owners to secure their weapons or risk criminal charges.

The Saratoga Springs City Council unanimously passed the law, which was named in honor of Nicholas Naumkin, a 12-year-old who died in 2010 when a schoolmate who was playing with a handgun accidentally shot him in the friend's Wilton home. The gun and ammunition had been left in an unlocked dresser.

The law requires that owners keep firearms locked in either a secure cabinet or with a trigger lock when not in their possession, and the use of an unsecured gun in a shooting could result in a criminal charge for the owner. The cities of Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, New York City, Buffalo and Westchester County have all passed similar laws.

Sorry, that should have read great news. The bad news is that the state senate in New York are assholes. 

Bills introduced in the state Legislature to enact a similar law statewide have passed the Assembly but not the Senate. New Yorkers Against Gun Violence said it will pursue laws in other municipalities if the Senate does not pass a statewide bill.

Hope springs eternal, though. 

Voters on Long island will soon pick a replacement for a convicted former top lawmaker in a contest that could help give Democrats complete control over New York state government.

Democrat Todd Kaminsky faces Republican Chris McGrath in the April 19 Senate election for the seat long held by ex-Senate Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican convicted last year of using his position to obtain payments and jobs for his son.

In good news from the rest of God's creation:

Worldwide, in fact, inequality is actually going down.

Humanity, it seems, is not leaving its poorest behind.

This conclusion comes from the work of an eminent expert on inequality, Branko Milanovic. He spent decades studying data at the World Bank and now works at City University in New York. In a new book, “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization,” he makes a case that the rapid growth of poorer countries since 1988 has brought the first decline in inequality since the Industrial Revolution.

Not so much in the US, but we takes what we can gets.

Milanovic’s findings are reinforced by new research from Tomáš Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They find global inequality fell between 2003 and 2013. And they project the number of people in poverty will fall from 12.3 percent of the total population to 3.6 percent by 2035.