One of my regular themes is that Americans are disorderly and disobedient people — gloriously so and dangerously so. People who understand that roll their eyes when, e.g., one of our progressive friends points out how much more frequently Americans kill each other with firearms than do most Europeans or Japanese. Democrats think that means we need more gun control. (And they generally press for the dumbest possible model of gun control: new restrictions on licensed firearms dealers and the people wo do business with them, the most law-abiding demographic in the country.)

People who have a better handle on the facts of American life know that, yes, we shoot each other a lot more often than the Swiss, but we also stab each other a lot more often, beat each other to death with our bare hands or blunt objects more often, etc. We also have more automobile accidents and dangerous and deadly accidents of other kinds — our traffic-fatality rate is 50 percent higher than that of Western Europe or Canada. The same disobedient spirit that helped us to establish liberty here also makes us uncooperative, obstreperous, and, sometimes, dangerous. It’s a package deal.