Gun control in the US and UK

It seems to happen with depressing regularity, a lunatic in America takes a gun and shoots a collection of innocent strangers. The event is a tragedy, days of news coverage are devoted to it, talking about how the killer was disturbed or a "loner" and coverage in the UK nearly always involves being told (yet again) about how the American relationship with guns is just different to the rest of the world.

It's "part of their culture", part of being an American and outsiders just don't understand.

This idea of all Americans as crazy, gun-toting cowboys is obviously a colossal exaggeration but I think a huge part of it comes from our disbelief when, even in the wake of something like Newtown, the US still doesn't pass any sort of restriction on who can own extremely dangerous weapons and this is down to the US constitution as much as cowboy culture.

This is kind of a long post so there's a jump:

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What the 1975 Public Affairs Act tells us about opinion polling

To recap: to demonstrate the tendency of people to answer survey questions even when they have no idea about the answer, there's an experiment about the "1975 Public Affairs Act" where survey respondents are asked if they think it should be repealed or not.

When the experiment was first run by George Bishop, between 20 and 40 percent of Americans were willing to offer an opinion on this Act, saying that they supported or opposed repealing it.

The problem is that the 1975 Public Affairs Act is fictional so obviously the correct answer is "the 1975 Public Affairs Act is fictional, so stop wasting my time and move onto which celebrity I'd like to have tea with!"

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My two cents on Thatcher

There's obviously been so many things written about the now late Margaret Thatcher and her legacy (both good and bad) that there's little I could add but I link to some of the ones I found interesting below.

I'm one of those rare, weird people who is fairly ambivalent about her. I can understand why so many feel so strongly about her but I never really have because my experience of her has been largely second or third hand. I studied the Thatcher era at school and was always an avid history reader but it shows what an insular middle class upbringing I had that I didn't really experience the visceral hatred that so many people north of Birmingham have for her until I went to university.

I think the closest thing I've seen to what I think about the Thatcher legacy is by John Rentoul who calls her a necessary prime minister whose changes were necessary but were made in the most damaging way possible.

Anyway, other good things I spotted were:

A worthy takedown by Glenn Greenwald of pathetic attempts by some newspapers/commentators to imply that criticism of a public figure is somehow not allowed after their death.

Paul Krugman has a nice quick article looking at the effects of her economic policy.

As usual one of the best written statements of the Tory position is by Daniel Hannan.

And Janan Ganesh is always worth reading.