#63: Gun policy

💎 Word gems

Why Canada Races on Gun Policy When America Crawls (New York Times / Max Fisher)

Whenever I see another mass shooting in the US, I always see the comparison with Australia; after the Port Arthur massacre, Australia effectively banned guns and prevented repeat events. It's always puzzled me how any gun reform policy simply grinds to a halt in the US, compared to what happened back home. The Australian system functions similarly to Canada and this comparison between the US and Canadian systems is enlightening.

Canada is similar to what the United States would be if it had only a House of Representatives, whose speaker also oversaw federal agencies and foreign policy.

What America has instead is a system whose structure simultaneously requires cooperation across competing parties and discourages them from working together.

The result is an American system that not only moves slower and passes fewer laws than those of parliamentary models like Canada’s, research has found, but stalls for years even on measures that enjoy widespread support among voters in both parties, such as universal background checks for gun purchases.

Walk Away Like a Boss (N+1 Mag / Sarah Resnick)

A wonderful, albeit long, read into the world of crypto - where everything can be commoditized and “all our economic ills are refracted”.

When I did start thinking about crypto, in late summer 2021, I came to the discourse with a set of preconceptions about what I would find. The lofty vision of a transparent and fair financial system had mostly given way to the public worship of the appetites; talk about crypto’s “radical potential,” whatever the politics, had been replaced by a caricature of Silicon Valley hype men and gym rats who liked to pose in front of Italian luxury sports cars and post close-ups of their Rolexes. The conversations artists were having about the blockchain operated at a far remove from the world of traders and investors who were speculating on asset prices, riding the market cycles, and reaping the gargantuan returns. (A good day in crypto can equal a year’s worth of returns on the stock market.) Most of what I’d gleaned about this part of the cryptosphere I’d absorbed ambiently from the internet or the news.

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