Sun-Journal from Lewiston, Maine • A5

175 years Jody Jalbert Publisher James R. Costello Publisher, 1952-2015 L.B. Costello 1898-1959 Russell H. Costello 1930-1993 Judith Meyer Executive Editor Mark Mogensen Managing SUN JOURNAL IS A DIVISION OF THE SUN MEDIA GROUPOpinion MONDAY, MAY 15, 2023 A5 Connecting you with your community By Paul Waldman THE WASHINGTON POST With mass shootings now hap- pening just about every day, Americans must ask this ques- tion: How many more guns will it take to make us safe? Gun advocates manufac- turers, activists in groups such as the National Rifle Associa- tion and Republicans who write their goals into law insist that the root cause of gun violence is not guns themselves. To achieve security, they say, the country needs more guns, not fewer.

They insist that more guns will bring less crime. And they claim that more guns in more hands are a key answer to mass shoot- ings, because only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a Okay then: If guns make us saf- er, how many will it take? Will 500 million guns do it? Six hun- dred million? Will a billion guns be enough? The advocates have certainly been getting what they want. In many states, gun laws have be- come dramatically looser, and the number of guns in the United States keeps increasing. While hard to know precisely how many are in circulation, esti- mates range from 352 million to 434 million. Gun sales have been rising steadily for two decades.

They rose especially fast during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and came down only slightly in 2022. The background check sys- tem, which misses most private sales, logged nearly 40 million gun purchases in 2020 alone. Gun deaths, both suicides and homicides, have also ris- en steadily. In 2021, there were about 21,000 gun homicides and more than 26,000 gun suicides. Good-guy-with-a-gun propo- nents imply that there exists a kind of Laffer curve of gun mur- ders that will be our liberation.

Recall the quack economic the- ory propagated by Arthur Laf- fer positing that raising tax rates slightly from a low starting point might bring in more reve- nue, but further increases would cause revenue to fall as people discouraged by taxation stopped working. Gun advocates seem to as- sume a similar arc for the re- lationship of guns to gun vio- lence: At some point, there will be so many guns that the trends will reverse, crime will be de- terred, and all arguments will be resolved peacefully. Once enough people perhaps all of us? are packing heat at all times and ready to kill, then we will finally be safe. In the meantime, we live in fear. There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the Unit- ed States already in 2023.

Along- side these spectacular events and the daily body count from argu- ments and grudges that escalate into armed combat, we have the new terror of gun owners so frightened by strang- ers knocking on their doors or turning around in their drive- ways that they open fire. Meanwhile, the FBI feels it nec- essary to produce public service announcements with tips on how to survive a mass shooting in your favorite restaurant. Schools ban backpacks, and Republicans suggest training third-graders to treat gunshot wounds. This cycle is fed by gun market- ing and NRA rhetoric, which tell people that they must acquire more guns because there are so many people out there with guns. Conservative politicians such as Texas Gov.

Greg Abbott (R) im- plore people to buy more guns. The same people insist that guns possibly be to blame for the endless carnage. It must be weaknesses in our mental health system, as though oth- er countries with far fewer gun deaths also have peo- ple who struggle with mental health issues. Or perhaps that we sufficiently de- vout, as some on the right ar- gue: If we spent more time ask- ing God to stop the shootings in our streets, our schools and our malls, He might do something about it. But guns themselves, they keep telling us, are a solution to the problem.

So when will we have enough that we will emerge into the bright future of safety been promised? Paul Waldman is an opin- ion writer for The Washing- ton Post. How many guns will it take to make us safe? By Chris Bryant BLOOMBERG OPINION Ever since Carsten Spohr became chief exec- utive officer of Deutsche Lufthansa nine years ago, been told the German first class was too big and it should cut back: Companies were no lon- ger willing to splurge on this employee perk when a flat bed in business class would suffice. Some car- riers scrapped their high- est-tier service entirely. Now, leisure passengers keen to live their best lives following the pandemic (and untroubled by their carbon footprints) are fill- ing up first-class cabins; they think nothing of drop- ping $10,000 on a one-way fare that comes with extras such as limousine service and a personal assistant at the airport. Lufthansa ex- ecutives have also changed their tune: year is the first year all my team tell me, Spohr, we need to grow first class, un- der-dimensioned.

I nev- er thought that I will ever hear he told inves- tors last week. A shortage of first-class seats is the definition of a first-world problem. Airlines are betting this a temporary phenom- enon but rather a struc- tural shift in how the rich spend their cash. a lot riding on that call be- ing right. The renaissance of the first-class cabin is part of a broader boom in high- end leisure travel, which is boosting yields (average fares) and helping trav- el companies repair their balance sheets following a devastating pandemic.

Lufthansa is forecasting its best-ever summer in terms of flight revenue and says premium seats are Last week, Brit- ish Airways owner Inter- national Consolidated Air- lines raised full-year profit guidance, after saying in February the premium lei- sure segment was perform- ing Premium leisure de- mand at Air France has and the com- La Premiere first- class cabins have in the past three or four months enjoyed their highest-ever occupancy rates, manage- ment said last week. Over- all, premium seat occupan- cy at the Air France-KLM group was four percentage points higher in the first quarter compared with the same period in 2019, while fares were high- er. leisure, es- pecially into Paris, is very the Franco-Dutch management add- ed. For every business class ticket Dubai-based Emirates Airlines sold out of London, were four or five people try- ing to get at one point and hence prices have in- creased, its president Tim Clark told Bloomberg Tele- vision. premium book- ings have rebounded fast- er than total passenger traffic, especially in North America and Europe.

Re- markably, this is hap- pening even as business travel has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels; per- haps it now that Zoom will suffice for less important corporate meet- ings, but the airlines mind as much if the pre- mium leisure boom con- tinues. The skies are crowd- ed with private jets, busi- ness-class plane cabins and lounges are overflow- ing with tourists, and less affluent passengers are treating themselves to a more comfortable seat in premium economy (which is particularly lucrative for airlines). And not just aviation profiting from the boom: Norwegian Cruise Line revealed last week that reservations for its latest 154-night Regent lux- ury world voyage were al- most ahead of pre-pan- demic levels at an average price of over $230,000 per suite. Airlines are trying to capitalize on high-end de- mand by unveiling new premium cabin designs, rejigging the ratio of econ- omy to premium seating and reactivating moth- balled large aircraft like the A380 and A340 which offer lots of premium space. Before the pandem- ic, Air France used to re- duce the number of busi- ness-class seats ahead of the summer tourist sea- son, but this year to ensure it can meet high de- mand.

A five percentage-point increase in the premium cabin seating mix at Qa- ntas Airways, compared with pre-pandemic lev- els, helped boost interna- tional operating margins to a record in the six months to December 2022; it said leisure accounted for of premium cab- in bookings on long-haul routes. Gone are the days when premium cabin leisure travelers are just using up points or have scored a free upgrade. Now they are paying the full amount themselves and more of them are booking directly via airline websites rath- er than through travel agents, providing the air- line with profitable oppor- tunities to upsell. One obvious conclusion is that the rich simply ar- feeling the cost-of-liv- ing crisis the way rest of us are, and travel has moved up their list of priorities. only see it avia- Spohr said week.

see it in high-end cars, you see it in high-end watches, you see it in high-end luxury products. Look at LVMH in France, look at the Ger- man car manufacturers. There is a general trend towards luxury, towards premium for those people who can afford it. Travel is surely part of The wealthy also now have more time on their hands. Flexible working makes it possible to toil from a second home in Florida on a Friday before hitting beaches or sailing the yacht on the weekend.

A common refrain in avi- ation is once sam- pled the delights of the premium cabin, hard to contemplate returning to the indignities of cattle class. But are wonderful travel memories really so priceless? A banking cri- sis, deep recession or stock market meltdown would surely make leisure passengers more price con- scious. Private jet demand has already begun to fade, albeit from very high lev- els, while U.S. demand for luxury goods is slowing. Furthermore, Wall Street CEOs are busy cull- ing work-from-home priv- ileges, potentially mak- ing opportunistic leisure trips harder to arrange.

For now, though, airlines so much worried about whether wealthy customers will continue to splurge on first class, as they are about whether enough room left at the front of the plane to ac- commodate them. Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion col- umnist covering indus- trial companies in Eu- rope. Previously, he was a reporter for the Finan- cial Times. Good luck finding first-class plane tickets By mark GonGloff BLOOMBERG OPINION Ditching fossil fuels to minimize climate disrup- tion be cheap or easy. But with every billion-dol- lar disaster, remind- ed that failing to do so will be increasingly expensive, and deadly.

Already this year the U.S. has suffered seven natural disasters costing $1 billion or more in damage, the Na- tional Oceanic and Atmo- spheric Administration reported last week. These include flooding in Califor- nia, spring storms in the Midwest and Southeast and a winter storm in the North- east. As recently as the ear- ly 2000s, seven billion-dol- lar disasters would have been considered a typical year. Now a typical ear- ly-May tally and still months away from the peak of wildfire and hurri- cane seasons.

The pace of such catastro- phes has risen exponential- ly in the past few years, al- most in lockstep with the rise in atmospheric concen- tration of carbon dioxide and global temperatures, according to a study pub- lished last month in the Journal of Climate Change and Health. As the governments plan to zero out their emissions for decades, we can expect carbon con- centrations to keep rising, making the planet hotter and natural disasters more frequent and intense. In the 1980s, the U.S. aver- aged just three billion-dol- lar disasters per year, ac- cording to the study. In the past five years, that average has risen to nearly 18.

Those numbers tru- ly convey the growing scope of these catastrophes. Last year may have been an av- erage year in the new nor- mal, but its 18 major events cost a total of $175.2 billion, according to the NOAA, making it the third-costli- est year on record. Three of the five costliest years have occurred since 2017, with a total tab of $710 billion swamping the $369 billion in federal climate spending approved in last In- flation Reduction Act. And these figures merely reflect rebuilding expens- es. They ignore the cost in lives, which is also increas- ing, and lost economic op- portunities.

In the 1980s, about 300 people a year died, on average, in billion-dollar disasters. That average rose to 523 in the 2010s. But even as the number of expensive calamities soars, Americans keep moving in- to the teeth of them. Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states at increasing risk of deadly weather have been the fastest-grow- ing states in recent years. That has helped push the cost of home insurance to the point that many home- owners are skipping extra coverage for floods and other such events, the New York Times reported last week.

Nationwide Insurance has said two-thirds of U.S. homes have enough insurance. Of course this is exactly the kind of thing Nationwide Insurance would say, but easy to see homeowners balking as premiums rise. The re- sult could be that they bear more of the expenses when tragedy strikes. Climate-proofing is cer- tainly becoming a central issue for Corporate Ameri- ca, with rating agencies, as- set managers and activist investors pushing compa- nies to account and prepare for climate risks, no matter the cost.

Poll after poll shows two- thirds of Americans want action on climate change, but the fossil fuel industry and its allies have tried to slow down real action, argu- ing energy transition costs will be too much to bear. nothing compared with the price of delay. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion ed- itor and columnist cov- ering climate change. A former managing editor of Fortune.com, he ran the business and technology cover- age and was a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. Natural disasters are the new normal BLOOMBERG PHOTO BY ALEX KRAUS Banners for Deutsche Lufthansa AG banner fly outside the first class passenger terminal at Frankfurt Airport in Frankfurt, Germany, on Monday, Feb.

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