>>>>>All good ideas but what is wrong with prohibiting their manufacture?
>>>
>>>The Russians, Chinese, Czechs etc might not accept the instruction? ;-)
>>
>>Don't worry - Hillary will strike up deals with them. :)
>>
>>I completely understand where Bill is coming from. 100% well-intentioned, but unfortunately just won't happen.
>>
>
>While it's often hard to imagine it, given enough time people do usually get things right.
>
>In 1960, the 4 cylinder Camry now I own and love would have seemed pitiful next to the 3.5 litre V8 Caddy Eldorado I was tooling around in.
>That Caddy was 2 feet longer than my Camry. It got about 7 miles to the gallon and took premium fuel.
>Looking back now, we were crazy to drive those things, but we loved them- till we finally saw the light.
>
>In 1960 people -including yours truly- were smoking in offices and classrooms, on airplanes- just about everywhere.
>Today I get annoyed when someone lights one up on the golf course- I can't stand even the slightest whiff.
>The power of the NRA is miniscule compared to the influence the tobacco industry had then.
>
>In both cases it was that oppressive government you like to demean that dragged us by our ears till we all finally came to our senses.
>
>With cigarettes, Michael Bloomberg deserves special mention for his courageous decision to bar smoking in NYC bars.
>Not only were his critics who predicted the demise of all NYC bars dead wrong- business went up instead of going down- but the rest of the US soon followed his example.
>
>It will happen with guns.

I think smoking is the best example here. One of our kids was, maybe, 10 when I spent most of a Phillies in the infirmary with him because someone smoking near us had triggered an asthma attack. It's now been more than a decade since smoking was permitted in the ballpark, and most of the time, we don't even think about it. We were in the Poconos last week and went to have lunch at a place that TripAdvisor recommended. Got there and found signs on the door saying that it allowed smoking (turned out to be a bar with food), so we went elsewhere.

I actually attitudes toward homosexuality are in the same rapid change category. Once enough people started coming out as gay that most people turned out to know someone, most people's views changed almost overnight. A few months' back, I read "Then Comes Marriage" about the Windsor case that overturned a key portion of the "Defense of Marriage" Act, written by the principal lawyer for Edie Windsor. The stories in the book about Windsor's life as a gay woman coming of age after the war, and the lawyer's as a gay woman in the 70's and 80's were fascinating. I'm so glad it's better for most gay Americans today.

Tamar