That's really poor policy analysis because we have to assume that Canada and the USA are the same except for the policy for the conclusion to be valid. A better way to judge the effectiveness of gun control legislation is to do time-series analysis, focusing on a single location that has passed or repealed, or had struck down, gun restrictions. Basically, someplace where you have 'before' and 'after' data on gun-related violence. Places that have had the same gun control laws for a long time, strict or lax, are pretty useless for this. It's observing the change that gives us some insight into the effect of the legislation.

My challenge to gun control activists is to find that data - show me the city or state that instituted gun control legislation and then had a significant drop in gun-related crime that can't be explained away by other factors. I've yet to see that. In fact, what I have seen is the data from Chicago in the last few years, where they had close to a 10% drop in gun-related violence after a hand gun ban was struck down as unconstitutional. Now, again, this tells us close to nothing: it might capture unique characteristics about Chicago that we can't generalize, the policy enforcement mechanisms might have been poor or corrupted or simply unique, the weather could've been significantly cooler one summer than the other, etc. The best case scenario (here meaning strongest conclusion) is still just about handguns. But that's the way to go about trying to discern the effectiveness of legislation. We never get to really know for sure. The tools we have to give us some idea of what to do don't provide a ringing endorsement of gun restrictions.

My hunch about America's weird attraction to guns: it's culture, not policy. That's a bit of a cop-out since I can't tell you anything about how or why that culture is the way it is. But legislating at it is an exercise in futility I think.

I think we'd just skip him and let him pick whenever he does come into the thread rather than make a selection for him, if it comes to that.

None of the members of Nickelback have gone yet?

The White House wasn't thrilled with the Supreme Court ruling because they really want that penalty to be a penalty, not a tax. This isn't a perfect distinction, but in general a tax is something that's meant to raise revenue and a penalty is something that's meant to coerce action. By the Court finding ACA constitutional as a tax specifically, it legitimizes people forgoing insurance and paying the tax. The administration wanted a stronger finding on that mechanism because it's really important to the bill's functioning.

The penalty is significantly less than the cost of insurance, at least in the first several years. So you'll have the same problem we have now - a lot of young, relatively healthy people will forego insurance and pay the penalty if they have to. Fewer people will end up paying into the system than expected, leading to higher premiums, which lead to more people choosing the penalty over insurance, which leads to higher premiums, and so on.

To raise the penalty enough to coerce people into buying into the program will require Congressional support. The Republicans can't repeal the bill, but they can sink its chances of working by holding firm there.

With the first pick of the second round, I'm pleased to select Duane Allman as lead guitarist.

Rhiannon and Skydog - how could we go wrong?