KU NEWS SERVICE

LAWRENCE — Most people vastly overestimate the population of gun owners in the United States, and it potentially influences how groups approach gun policies, according to a study by two University of Kansas political scientists.

“Because gun owners are actually a minority, perceiving their group as larger and even as a majority could make them feel more empowered to advocate on gun issues,” said Don Haider-Markel, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science. “Likewise, non-gun owners that perceive a larger gun owner population now and in the future might be less likely to advocate for gun regulations.”

Mark Joslyn, professor of political science, and Haider-Markel are co-authors of the study, recently published in the journal Politics & Policy. They examined results from a 2016 nationally representative survey of 1,290 American adults who answered questions on a variety of policy, election-specific, psychological and political questions, including a number on gun ownership and regulation.

Specifically, the survey asked people to give their “best guess” on what percentage of Americans owned firearms. The actual percentage of U.S. individual gun owners is roughly 25 percent, and about 33-40 percent of U.S. households have at least one gun in the home, the researchers said.

However, the researchers found that more than 75 percent of respondents overestimated the number, and only a small minority, 2.3 percent, underestimated the number of gun owners.

The most common estimate was 50 percent, and nearly one-fifth of respondents estimated the gun owner population was 70 percent or higher.

“Generally speaking, less knowledgeable people tend to overestimate the size of groups, but so, too, do people who belong to the group, have contact with the group or have positive affinity towards the group,” Haider-Markel said. “In short, we inflate the size of groups we belong to or are close to.”

The overestimation of the population among both gun owners and non-gun owners could provide some explanation for the level of support surrounding pro-gun policies or the lack of support for federal gun control measures, even in wake of high-profile mass shootings, such as Newtown, Connecticut; Las Vegas; and Orlando and Parkland, Florida, though the professors said future research would likely examine potential trends after more recent advocacy efforts by gun violence victims.

“We see this as another in a line of politicized issues where facts are contested and factual beliefs might influence policy attitudes on the issue. As such, we wanted to explore basic knowledge about gun owners, perceptions of future gun ownership, and determine whether these perceptions influenced gun attitudes,” Haider-Markel said.

He added that past research in this area is built around the notion of a perceived threat of a group, but rarely is that threat actually assessed.

The researchers have conducted similar research on how people overestimate the gay population in the United States.

“As with the earlier study, people are not very good at estimating the size of groups, and this has implications for their policy preferences,” Haider-Markel said. “Here we can also show that people tend to think that the gun owner population will grow in the future even though all indications are that the gun owner population is getting smaller.”

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Some lawmakers are pushing legislation that could end a long-running economic borderwar between Missouri and Kansas that has prompted both states to spend millions of dollars in the last decade to lure businesses in the Kansas City metropolitan region across the state line.

Kansas spent $184 million in incentives since 2010 to entice businesses to move, while Missouri spent about $151 million in the same time period, according to the Hall Family Foundation. Those millions resulted in a net of about 1,200 jobs in Kansas.

“We’re using (economic development incentives) to divide the pie, not increase the pie,” said Bill Hall, president of the foundation and a Kansas City metro area civic leader.

Missouri passed a law in 2014 that prohibited the use of state incentives to poach businesses in Douglas, Johnson, Miami and Wyandotte counties. But the law required Kansas to pass a similar bill pledging not to go after businesses in Clay, Cass, Jackson and Platte counties in Missouri, The Kansas City Star reported.

Kansas lawmakers and then-Republican Gov. Sam Brownback rejected the plan. Brownback suggested a similar proposal two years later but it ultimately failed.

Missouri’s bill expired in 2016. Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Republican from Lee’s Summit, has filed a bill this session that would renew the legislation through 2021 to provide a chance for further discussion.

“I don’t understand why reasonable people can’t sit down and figure this out,” Cierpiot said. “It’s just bad policy.”

Critics of the tax incentives say companies get millions of dollars in tax breaks to move a few miles and often add only a few new jobs.

For example, Kansas spent $3 million in tax breaks to move about 60 jobs at HCA Midwest Health four miles from Kansas City, Missouri, to Overland Park, Kansas.

New Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement that everyone agrees the current situation doesn’t make sense “but the devil is in the details.”

“We will be looking at this issue and reviewing the legislation to determine if it is in the best interest of Kansas,” she said.

Some Kansas City metro area question the need for legislation, saying the economic realities are different than they were in 2014.

Blake Schreck, president of the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce, questioned how urgent the problem is now because the economy is healthy and both sides of the state line are flourishing.

“We’re all growing and doing fine, so it hasn’t been a huge issue,” he said.

But he said getting a bi-state agreement to award incentives only for net new jobs would help both sides.

“I would anticipate we’ll take a crack at it sometime this year,” he said.

Bill Hall, who has spent years advocating for a cease-fire in the incentives border war, said now is a good time to get an agreement because of the strong economy.

“The economy is not always going to stay good,” Hall said. “This is the perfect time to deal with it because emotions aren’t as high and more reason can be brought to it, because people aren’t fighting for every last job.”

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A 37-year-old Springfield woman was sentenced to eight years in prison for the death of another woman in a drunken driving crash.

Melissa Mahan was sentenced Friday in the December 2016 death of 54-year-old Leslee Owrey, of Fair Play.

She pleaded guilty in November to involuntary manslaughter.

Investigators said Mahan was speeding when she hit the rear of Owrey’s vehicle just outside of Springfield. Owrey was thrown from her vehicle and died at a hospital.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol says Mahan’s blood alcohol content was .295 percent, far above the legal limit of .08 percent.

She also refused to perform sobriety tests at the scene.

BARRY COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 2:30a.m. Sunday in Barry County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee driven by Jason M. Cendroski, 38, Monett, was southbound on Farm Road 1090 just south of Monett.

The vehicle traveled off the road, struck a mailbox and an embankment.
Cendroski was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was not wearing a seat belt, according to the MSHP.

By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN

Most Kansas students graduate high school nowadays. Yet many still struggle with the skills of reading and writing.

Now a task force of educators, parents and lawmakers hopes to help close that gap.

Over the past half year, the Dyslexia Task Force put together recommendations and this month handed them off to the Kansas State Board of Education.

The group’s work is well worth paying attention to. It could change reading instruction for every public school student in the state.

The goal? Catching a wide range of struggling readers and spellers earlier on.

Signs of dyslexia according to research at Yale University
It extends far beyond dyslexia — though even that, some researchers say, is far more common than parents and teachers realized in the past.

Ugh, English is hard.

Though, bough, cough, tough.

You’ve probably reflected on the woes of English spelling before. Usually we just throw up our hands. Or shrug. Or jokingly congratulate ourselves on having the strangest writing system in the world, then move on.

That’s not acceptable to teachers who specialize in instruction for children with dyslexia.

Unbeknownst to many of us, much of the “weirdness” does follow patterns. (English professor Anne Curzan has this enjoyable column to that point.)

Angie Schreiber began learning these nitty-gritty guidelines after finding out her son had dyslexia. Now she runs an Emporia private school that teaches students like him.

“English is 80 to 85 percent regular,” she argues. “If we teach to the regularity and not use the irregularities as an excuse, we can teach our kids to read, write and spell.”

A couple examples:

Check out the “ie” words in the photo below. Shield, tie, brief, die, and so on.

This is a photo of a teacher’s laptop while her eighth-grade student with dyslexia practiced reading them aloud. It helped him to recall that “ie” often sounds like an “i” at the end of a word, but like an “e” if it’s in the middle.

And what about spelling “back”? What’s that “c” doing before the “k”? Schreiber explains that English usually uses “ck” at the end of a one-syllable word after a short vowel. Hence “back” and “truck” get a “ck” that “bank” and “think” don’t.

Solution to the big ole reading gap?

Teaching such guidelines are one part of “structured literacy,” an approach to reading instruction that may soon be required of every elementary school in Kansas.

Some people swear by it. Others roll their eyes.

The disagreement is part of “the reading wars” — a decades-long and nationwide rift in the sphere of literacy education.

How can there be so much to debate about teaching kids to read? Well, because so many people worry we still haven’t figured it out.

Even the optimism around No Child Left Behind waxed and waned. Nearly two decades later, Americans continue to enter adulthood without mastering this vital skill.

Though almost 90 percent of Kansas students graduate high school, a third of the state’s high-schoolers score below grade level on English tests. More than two-thirds test below the higher proficiency bar that Kansas uses for federal accountability.

Structured literacy teachers argue they know how to resolve a big chunk of that reading gap.

They’re not saying all those children have dyslexia — they’re saying research shows structured literacy improves reading and spelling across the board.

Did you miss the Kansas News Service’s feature on dyslexia?
Plenty of literacy specialists disagree (hence the “reading wars”). Sometimes, experts on either side even cite the same research as showing totally different things.

Rethinking classrooms and college

So, back to the dyslexia task force’s decision this month.

Pending approval from the Kansas State Board of Education, the group wants to make structured literacy part of the college coursework required to teach in this state. To get their licenses, many teachers would need to pass a test that shows they understand and can teach in depth things like “phonemic awareness” — which involves recognizing and breaking down individual sounds in words.

Schools would need to offer training for teachers already in the field and incorporate structured literacy into general reading instruction for all students.

Read a draft of the task force’s recommendations.
Reports from state-appointed panels don’t always lead anywhere. Some end up looking more like political theater than anything else. Don’t expect that fate for this one.

“This, obviously, is not going to be one of those reports that sits on a shelf someplace,” said retired superintendent Jim Porter. “It’s going to get the attention it deserves.”

Porter chaired the task force and, until recently, the state board.

Adopting structured literacy would add Kansas to a national wave of states passing laws and policies meant to better serve children with dyslexia.

Even among those states, though, a radio documentary by APM Reports suggests implementation has proven tricky.

The state board of education may vote on the task force’s recommendations in the coming weeks or months. Rolling out new standards in thousands of schools and training a critical mass of teachers will take longer.

“I’m worried that it’s going to be a 10-year process,” says Christina Middleton, a Lenexa mother whose son wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia till the summer before fifth grade.

That’s when she took him to Children’s Mercy Hospital for tests, got a diagnosis and signed him up for private instruction in structured literacy.

Half a dozen reading programs had failed him before that point, she says. Now in high school, he reads at grade level.

Teaching schools wanted a seat at the table

Colleges of education may well ask the state board to rein in some of the recommendations. They worry Kansas is on the brink of sweeping changes that bypassed them.

The sole professor on the dyslexia task force was psychologist David Hurford, who founded a center focused on researching dyslexia and teaching children who struggle with reading.

The dyslexia task force membership
“There is a voice missing,” Ken Weaver, dean of the Emporia State Teachers College, wrote in an email this week. “That is the literacy faculty from all the Regents universities.”

Those professors likely would have expressed concern that task force members were misunderstanding the thrust of decades of research on reading education. Or underestimating the extent of phonics and related instruction already taking place in Kansas schools.

But from the point of view of parents who say schools failed their children year after year, the status quo just hasn’t been working.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @Celia_LJ.

JOHNSON COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 4:30p.m. Saturday in Johnson County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 1997 Chrysler driven by Amanda R. Sanders, 26, Kansas City, Mo., was eastbound at a high rate of speed on Missouri 58 one mile west of County Road SW 200.

The Chrysler traveled off the road, rolled and the driver was ejected.

Sanders was pronounced dead at the scene. A passenger Danial E. Vanartsdalen, 36, Kansas City, Mo., was flown to Research Medical Center. They were not wearing seat belts, according to the MSHP.

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri woman who was raped in front of her 2-year-old daughter several months before prosecutors say her two assailants abducted and sexually assaulted a Kansas sheriff’s deputy says police seemed to doubt her when she sought their help.

During a hearing Thursday in which one of the men, 41-year-old William Luth, pleaded guilty to raping her, the Independence, Missouri, woman told the court that the officers who investigated the February 2016 attack in her home “made it abundantly clear that they were pretty sure I was just being dramatic,” The Kansas City Star reported.

No suspects were identified in that attack until Luth and Brady Newman-Caddell were arrested for the October 2016 sexual assault of the Johnson County, Kansas, sheriff’s deputy and authorities say DNA evidence linked them to the earlier attack.

The Missouri woman said from the outset, the Independence police seemed to doubt her story that she was raped in the same bed as her toddler. She said they asked her about her past sexual partners and pored over her social media history and phone contacts.

“They made me feel insane,” she told the court.

She also said it made her sick when she found out that Luth had raped another woman. “I owed this woman so much gratitude for being strong enough to endure what they had done, and to have the courage to seek justice,” she said. “Without her, I wouldn’t be here facing William Luth today.”

She said her case was solved because she underwent a rape examination and “forensic scientists did their job,” and that she hasn’t received an apology or acknowledgement from the police department even though her account was proven true. She said at least with Luth, she gets an admission of guilt, which she described as proof that “I was telling the truth.”

Officer John Syme, an Independence police spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press phone message Friday seeking comment.

Both Luth and Newman-Caddell pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping the deputy, with Luth getting sentenced to 41 years in prison in that case and 30 years for the Missouri attack, to be served at the same time.

Newman-Caddell was scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday in attack on the deputy, but the hearing was called off when he told the judge he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea. The charges against him in the Missouri attack are still pending.

The Star and the AP don’t generally identify victims of sex crimes.