If Twenty Dead First Graders Won't Do It... And Six Dead Adults... What Will ???

[Recursion]

95. 80% support single payer as long as it isn't called that

You know the joke about Philadelphia fans? They love their teams, just not the actual players on them. Voters love Democratic policies until they are actually put into laws, which they then hate (while still loving the actual provisions in them). This is just a fact of life, and has been since the New Deal.

I have read that law did reduce gin violence over the long run, before it expired. Do you content that isn't true?

Violence of all kinds has been dropping pretty significantly since the mid-1990s. Nobody is entirely sure why. Gun laws have been changed a lot in that time (the 94 AWB was in place during the first half of that drop and gone during the second half, and state laws have been all over the map but no matter what a state did, it saw a drop -- DC literally completely banned guns until 2004, and then Heller forced DC to allow people to have guns in their homes, and violent crime just kept dropping during both periods). Some people credit getting rid of lead gasoline and paint (there were several threads on that), some credit Roe v. Wade (that's in Freakonomics), some credit better policing, some say it's because we've basically locked up all the young poor males. Even more oddly, nobody is really stepping forward to take credit for it because solving problems is actually bad for business in DC: you need a crisis mindset to get donations and people marching. When you say "violent crime is down 59% since 1995" then most people say, "Oh, great, I can go back to playing Angry Birds, then!"