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Friday, December 21, 2012

First Amazon review for AoM

It's always nice to see reader reviews showing up on Amazon.com and elsewhere, but they've been slow in coming aof An Age of Madness. Happily, the first one showed up a couple of days ago, and it's brief but very nice. So thanks, Elizabeth Dickie, though we have never met. (Really.)

And hey! Anyone out there who has read the book and has happy thoughts about it should feel free to posty something. For bettre or for worse, we are organisms who are easily influenced by ithers of our kind, and a handful of people saying "Yo! This book is all right!" is likely to lead to mroe people reading it, and saying in turn "Yo! This book is all right!" which will lead to more people saying etc.

Sorry I have to shill like this but hey, it's the times and all.

In other news, Australia banned semi-automatic assault weapons following a public shooting in 1996, and guess what? There's hasn't been a shooting since. Damn Australians! Knuckling under to tyranny like that, throwing away their freedoms, offering an example of another way forward, and so on.

From the Wahington Post's Wonkblog:

' Back in 1996, Australia imposed a much stricter version of the assault weapons ban [than the US ban that expired in 2004] after a mass shooting. The Australian version avoided many of the loopholes in the U.S. law: Not only did the country ban all types of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, but it also spent $500 million buying up nearly 600,000 existing guns from private owners.

As Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff pointed out, Australia’s law appears to have curbed gun violence. Researchers in the British Medical Journal write that the ban was “followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides.” '

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