Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together, together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.

And never, we think you know everything.

Don't be complacent.

A quick lesson in gun safety.

So I would basically expect a status quo election for all the congressional races this year.

Midterm elections coming up.

What Louisiana needs to know.

Every time I do it, it looks different.

I come to the place.

I try to seek out unique materials and talk to the people who live there.

This art is not what it seems.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Care Saints here.

Andre is off tonight.

Monkeypox is now a public health emergency.

Yesterday, the Biden administration made the declaration after cases in the US reach up to 6600.

The majority of them emerged in New York and California.

But numbers are on the rise in Louisiana as well.

The Department of Health recorded 11 new cases as of this morning, bringing us to 69 total infections.

The state is expecting about 7000 vaccine doses in the coming weeks.

It's a two dose shot similar to COVID.

It becomes effective two weeks after the initial injection.

And now some other headlines across the state.

WCC Energy Group LLC spilled an estimated 4000 gallons of oil.

Your Bayou Sorrel in Abbeville Parish on Sunday.

The Coast Guard, who was monitoring the spill's cleanup, has not yet received any reports on the extent of harm done to the area's wildlife.

The rapper Mystikal was accused of raping and choking a woman at his home outside of Baton Rouge due to his past history of sexual battery.

State District Judge Steven Turano ruled on Tuesday that he will be held without bail.

Louisiana native Pat Carroll, an Emmy winning comedic actress who you may know as the voice of Ursula in The Little Mermaid has died at the age of 95.

Her daughter, Tara, wrote that they want everyone to honor her by having a raucous laugh at absolutely anything.

A new law is going into effect on Monday.

It would prevent police from using the smell of marijuana for a warrantless search of homes.

This is just one of a few new regulations go into effect this month.

Another new law changes the chief regulator of medical marijuana from the Department of Agriculture and Forestry to the Department of Health.

Also, some bad news for music festival lovers.

Boku fest will not return in 2023.

Producers for the project say that multiple reasons have led to this decision.

So far, no word on when the festival will return.

Organizers released a statement assuring fans that they will be back, saying, quote, This isn't goodbye.

This is all down the road.

And the past few months, we've heard a lot about guns.

We've heard arguments for stricter gun laws and arguments for looser ones.

But rarely do we hear how to properly handle them.

I went to a gun range in Krotz Springs to meet up with a certified gun trainer to learn about best practices for gun safety.

Guns are a widespread part of American culture.

You see them in our movies.

Don't think I don't know how to use these alone.

You hear them in our music.

I'm a pistol packin papa.

And now you're hearing about them in politics a whole lot.

Why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job or putting yourself in a position of authority?

If your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing.

What are we doing?

In May, following the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, the country was outraged.

There was public outcry, some asking for stricter gun laws and others asking for lax ones.

Gun control was drafted, but somewhere in all the controversy, Chelsea, Texas perspective was lost.

She's a certified gun trainer who's lived everywhere from Fort Lauderdale to south Louisiana to her gun usage as a right.

We all need to have.

But learning to use these weapons safely is paramount.

I met with Chelsea at a gun range to learn exactly how to wield this weapon properly.

I'm going to start you with the full size.

Okay.

And then we'll go to Subcompact and then I'll let you do the 380, which is like the smallest one.

So I would have shot.

Four different times by the end of the day.

Yeah, this is a newer gun.

It's actually, like made for female hands or people with smaller hands.

Okay, so same components.

As far as grip goes.

GRIP is one of the first things Chelsea taught me.

You have to hold the gun at the grip, which is the long piece at the base.

In movies, you see characters seek up their guns, but that's actually one of the worst ways to hold it.

This is one of the reasons Chelsea says training is crucial.

First and foremost is is knowing that you have to train to operate it properly.

You can't just go buy a gun and leave it at home and think that it's this magical tool that's going to solve all your issues.

You still need to practice working with it, but what.

Are the most important things to know whenever you want to own a gun?

The biggest three safety rules are keeping it pointed in a safe direction, so never pointing it at someone or something that you don't want to bury or keeping your mindset that the guns are always loaded.

So even if I hand you this and say, Hey, it's unloaded like you're still going to physically and visually check it yourself and keeping your finger off the trigger until you're ready to shoot.

These tips seem like no brainers, but accidental shootings are common.

On average, 492 people die from accidental gunshots each year.

Pew Research recorded 535 unintentional gun deaths in 2020.

Most of the shooters and victims are young people under the age of 25.

Manhandle your gun.

That's it.

We like to say the industry.

Don't touch the trigger.

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Our sites ready?

First, we want that target on the left side.

I took Chelsea safety rules and tried them myself.

Securely hold your grip.

Point your gun away from people.

And lastly, keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot.

Did I get it?

I've never shot a gun before in my life.

The guy just shot wood.

The jolt from the rifle was hard enough to manage, let alone aim.

It was Ms.. After Ms.. After Ms.. Oh, wait.

Did I get it?

I think I got it.

This is a very difficult weapon to wield.

Which begs the question why does anyone want to carry something so dangerous?

I'm going to be honest.

Whenever I found out about you, you're.

Not at all what I expected.

You know, most people think of gun owners as these men that go out hunting and wearing the camouflage.

But you're.

Completely different.

Yeah, I didn't actually shoot until I was, like, 17.

And just some personal experiences that I've had, my family has had.

I'm big on just woman empowerment and women being safe and being their own first responder and the Second Amendment right is the best thing I feel for for women to protect themselves.

Of course, it's a case by case scenario.

Like maybe pepper sprays best for one woman, but for me personally, like, I know a firearm is my choice.

What's it been like?

You know, watching all the shootings and you've all the things that happened in Buffalo and how people have responded to it.

What's it been like as a gun owner watching that?

Definitely a mental health crisis going on.

I think it would be great to have some program is going into schools and just not only talking about gun safety but just like the purpose of life.

I think there's been an overall maybe disconnect spiritually and just, you know, no actual appreciation for another person's life.

Like I think those are kind of what we need to be focusing on more than like more restrictions by the government.

There's one last thing Chelsea wanted me to know about safety, and that's how to store a weapon.

They suggest keeping it inside room temperature away from outside elements because it could corrode arrest blocks are known for being really durable, though.

Even shooting after being in water.

So it does depend on the gun that you buy.

But definitely taking care of it.

Taking care of it properly, cleaning it.

You want to make sure ammo is clean and dry as well.

If not, your chances of hurting yourself or others increases.

And that's important to the one that you shot as a 43 X.

Back at the range, Chelsea said Guns don't have to be dangerous as long as you take the time to practice the necessary.

Skills.

Never think you know everything.

Don't be complacent, low and to the right.

Just to recap, if you plan on buying a gun, make sure you meet with a trainer like Chelsea before taking it home.

They can help you understand exactly how to carry, shoot and store your weapon and election season is coming up soon in Louisiana.

In the past few months, we've had several changes affect our laws and the way we vote.

Roe versus Wade was overturned and after several injunctions and court dates, abortion clinics are closed.

Before that, the Supreme Court delayed its decision on Louisiana's congressional map, which only had one majority black voting district.

Shawn Colvin, a political analyst and pollster, can help us see where Louisiana stands for the midterms.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me on tonight.

So let's get started.

So there seems to be an increase in anxiety surrounding election integrity.

Is there something to that?

I think the misunderstanding, unfortunately, stems from the fact that now you basically have three different voting streams, as it were.

You, of course, have your traditional Election Day voting.

You have your in-person early voting and was becoming increasingly popular in Louisiana and in other states as mail in voting, because you have different political preferences for each of those three voting streams and that data is not being released at the same time.

That's what created the controversy, in my opinion, that you saw from the presidential election, because you had the illusion of Donald Trump leading in several states because the more Democratic leaning mail in vote, rather, had not yet been released.

So that unfortunately, I think, led to a lot of misunderstandings regarding election integrity.

Do you anticipate any security issues going forward?

Not security issues per se.

But I think the big issue to me is if you have a state with a close election that has a lot of mail in ballots that are not being released at the same time as the Election Day vote and the early vote, that has the potential for there to be suspicion for security itself.

There's always the ever present issue of whether there are going to be attempted cyber attacks.

That's just something I think is a reality going forward in any election.

Do you think there are going to be any changes in the way Louisianians cast their votes?

So Louisiana, we do not really have competitive races this year.

This not the Senate race nor the six congressional races, because basically what happened was the congressional map that was upheld by the Supreme Court is basically a least changes map.

And because it was adopted so late, that to me kind of created a late start to the political season.

So you don't really have any substantially contested races this fall.

And so, in fact, one of the incumbents, Mike Johnson, up in Shreveport, was unopposed.

So I'm not really anticipating there being very much because really it's at the point now where there's not any more seats for Republicans to pick up because, of course, the seat in New Orleans that Troy Carter holds is heavily Democratic.

So I would basically expect a status quo election for all the congressional races this year.

So is that what you mean?

Whenever you say a least changes map.

Leaves, changes, map, meaning basically the overall political complexions existed from 2010 to 2020 is basically going to be the same for the next decade because you had a parish or two shifted here and there.

But the overarching concern of the congressional map was to make sure that the population stagnant districts up in north Louisiana were expanded east and south to meet the equal population requirements.

So suppose the map would have actually had those two black voting districts on it.

Would that have made any change this year for this election?

Well, the interesting question when you're talking about the black majority districts is how do you find a black majority?

In other words, what you have right now?

Troy Carter's district is approximately 60% in terms of black voter registration and or voter strength.

The maps that I saw being proposed lowered that number down to 50%, which in my opinion does create the risk of a black candidate not being elected.

Because, of course, you have turnout differentials between white voters and black voters.

So everything seems like it will stay pretty much the same this.

Year with the maps that have passed.

Correct.

So is there anything Louisianians really need to know going into this midterm election.

In terms of need to know?

I think it's a case of you also have local races.

For instance, here in East Baton Rouge Parish, we have school board races and we have an appeals court judges race.

But in terms of what they need to do, I think it is a case of you're going to have polarization that is going to impact the election results in terms of in the Senate race.

Choose one example.

You know, John Kennedy has the advantage not only being the incumbent, but basically being a Republican incumbent in a state that substantially supported Donald Trump.

The Democratic candidates who are running are really the main two, which will be Lupe Mixon and Gary Chambers.

They're both going to be dividing the Democratic vote down the middle, much like what happened in 2020 and the Bill Cassidy race.

So that to me is going to be the overarching theme is can either those two Democratic candidates expand beyond their existing base?

All right.

Well, is there anything else that you found interesting, anything leading into this midterm election?

You know, the thing that I found interesting so I have been looking at the elections from a holistic standpoint.

And my favorite metric I like to use, as it were, is partizan turnout.

In other words, what was the breakdown of those who voted in Democratic primaries versus Republican primaries?

And I've been looking at this data going all the way back to 2006.

What I'm seeing this year is in nearly every state I have studied, Republican turnout is up markedly from 2018, while Democratic turnout is flat or declining.

And the reason that matters is that in congressional midterm elections, you typically have lower turnout than you do a presidential election, meaning those who show up have kind of a added level of importance.

So when you're talking about number one and elevated Republican enthusiasm, number two, independent voters in every poll I have seen are strongly anti Biden and are more favorable to Republicans this year.

Those that's the kind of atmosphere, as it were, that I'm seeing that Democratic incumbents have to face, not here in Louisiana, but in other more swingy states.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

The congressional primary election starts on November 8th and the congressional general elections start on December 10th.

Thank you again, John, for joining us.

Seven homeowner insurance companies have collapsed in Louisiana.

At least a dozen more have begun submitting withdrawal notices, which is one step that's required before leaving the state insurance commissioner Jim Donlin spoke Monday on a crisis that's left tens of thousands of homeowners in a bind.

Let's take a look at some highlights from a speech.

Just is happening in this ongoing crisis that we are truly in the midst of in the insurance area.

The crisis is in affordability of insurance.

And when 50,000 folks lost their coverage with these failed companies, they had to resort to the market of last resort.

And it is the most expensive by law insurer in the state, designed to be so that it doesn't become a market of choice.

Let me run quickly through what I consider to be a very, very successful legislative session.

And it was successful primarily because, as they tell the freshman incoming medical students, the first lesson to learn in medical school is do no harm.

And I do believe the legislature accomplished that.

And that's not always that easy to do.

The best of intentions can go awry.

I'll mention I'll go into a little more detail about one of the bills that I'm pleased we were pet we were able to pass in did so of course with the best of intentions.

But I'll I'll touch on how it is having negative consequences to our ongoing crisis in a few minutes.

When I get to it, the first bill that I testified, in my opinion, the most important of the session was by Senator Bully of New Orleans, now Act 69 to require a higher level of capital and surplus for companies being seeking or holding licenses to sell residential insurance, property insurance in our state.

And frankly, that bill was copied from our friends in Florida who did a similar piece of legislation here about four or five years ago, up until now.

And that bill has not yet been passed, signed into law, I don't believe.

But it's any day now, if it has not already been signed up until that bill passed and then got signed in, get signed into law, the requirement was that you had to have $3 million of cash available, frankly, without authority.

We have for years been requiring $6 million by virtue of what is known in the regulatory world as a desk rule.

And the companies rail against desk rules for good reason in the nationwide 51 jurisdictions that regulate insurance at the state level because of the uncertainty that comes with that.

But this one was widely accepted and the practice was was in place for actually before my taking office some 16 years ago, our requirement went from 3 million to 10 million for new companies applying to do business in our state.

And for those here five years to get to five, in ten years to get to ten, all of our companies are at the five.

Actually, our desk will required 6 million of a new company when they came to our state.

When you think of our you probably don't think of science, but the administration at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine decided to change that.

The school became the first vet school in the entire country to have an artist in residence.

Her pictures were displayed inside the school's library for everyone to admire.

She gave me a special tour of that exhibit.

Healing, Teaching, Discovering and Protecting the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine operates by those words.

Every time an animal is a need, they respond quickly.

It's almost.

An art.

I really like my work to connect very deeply with the place that I'm creating within, and so every time I do it, it looks different.

I come to the place.

I try to seek out unique materials and talk to the people who live there and get a sense for what goes into sort of being there in terms of atmosphere.

And then I try to connect that to the work.

This is Shelby Prineville.

She's an artist who loves to connect wildlife with her artwork.

So when the LSU vet school asked her to be their first artist in residency, she jumped at the chance to combine science and art.

So these are some of your pieces right now.

And I mean, just at a glance, it looks like this is just paper and it looks like this is just some sort of I don't know, it looks like wood to me almost.

But what is unique about these pieces?

Sure.

So with the mosquito piece specifically, I met with some researchers from the epidemiology lab where they study infectious diseases, viruses carried by mosquitoes.

So they do research with these creatures.

And this paper is actually a mosquito of a positioning paper, meaning they smear mosquito eggs on the paper and hatched the mosquitoes for research purposes.

So I've taken that paper that they use every day in a scientific way and have used it as a substrate for art.

I've gone ahead and painted on top of it, and what I've painted are two different female mosquitoes fresh after a bovine blood meal.

Well, down here in Louisiana, we definitely have a not so nice relationship with mosquitoes, so it's nice to see them in a totally different light.

Yeah.

And then with this piece, it is just on a wood panel.

So that's a very traditional art material.

But this is a painting of a wild Mississippi kite from the Zoo Med Wildlife Hospital.

Each of Brenda Bill's pictures took materials from the vet school to create an image of animals.

The staff actually treat.

The painting of the two pigs is on a pig board instead of a canvas.

And this portrait of a mississippi kite is made from medicines veterinarians use.

So it's a gorgeous bird and it sort of fluffed up in a defensive posture in this piece and then the background and a little bit of the eyes around the beak and then the whole of the feet are actually done using veterinary medicines exclusively.

So it uses Betadine, which is a type of antiseptic that I'm sure you're familiar with, a little bit of cornstarch just to create some darker coloration and then a smokeless moxa roll from integrative medicine, which they use to warm up acupuncture sites.

So those are the the veterinary chemicals.

And then on top, the bird itself is painted with acrylic paint.

I mean, I don't know much about paints or art or any of that.

So how did you figure out that those chemicals will work in a picture?

Oh, I don't always know that they will.

I've been working with a bunch of novel usages of these chemicals, and I don't actually know always how long term archival they're going to be.

In this case, I did research and I found that there are a number of carpenters who are using iodine as a wood stain.

So that gave me some faith that that would probably be fairly archival.

Print of Hill's work was displayed in the Vet Schools library, where students and faculty could admire the creativity.

Mark Mitchell, the zoologist and epidemiologist at the school, says Print of Hill's work brought a much needed change to the atmosphere.

A lot of time sometimes we want to separate science and the arts and I think for human beings everything combined is really what makes life exciting.

And so for us and the wildlife side of things, what's really special is the fact that our artist in residence was really excited about the wildlife cases.

And so we got to spend a lot of time watching her and see this magnificent work that's behind me.

The idea for the project came from Oliver Garden, the vet school's dean.

To him, this project was a way to let light and creativity mix with the science.

Exceeded what I thought was possible and her productivity was was breathtaking.

She essentially, in seven short weeks produced enough artwork, visual predominantly to make an exhibition.

And that's a pretty outstanding accomplishment.

So what's next for the vet school?

More artist Garden says they're open to all the possibilities.

And we recognize the value of all forms of art, whether they're visual or otherwise.

And indeed, we're in the early talks with a musician, and we hope that that will come to fruition and and give a different flavor to the program in which the culmination would be rather than an exhibition.

It would actually be a concert.

How cool would that be?

A concert at the vet school that would have an open invitation to anyone who wants to come.

So yeah, we definitely will be continuing and it's probably going to be a different form of art and the visual form, the interdisciplinary visual artist that Shelby is.

Artwork created through this residency will now join Shelby's larger body of work and be exhibited in other parts of the country.

She has upcoming solo exhibitions at Omaha's Botanical Center in Nebraska in August and then at the Long View Gallery in town and country Missouri later this year.

Switching gears, the Louisiana Harvest of the Month is a digital series celebrating foods grown right here in the Bayou State.

You'll get fun facts and tips from gardeners as we take you along to different farms and even some backyards.

The latest episode was on the eggplant.

You can find it on our website.

That's LPD Dawgs program slash harvest.

And that's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything, LPD, anytime, wherever you are with our LPD KPBS app, you can catch LPD News and Public Affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

For everyone at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, I'm crossing here.

Until next time.

That's the state we're in.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together, together, together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth B Zeigler Foundation and the Zeigler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.