Glad you liked it as well. We may pick up the soundtrack, if only for the Gavroche variants, although I'm going to wait until I can get the complete set, highlights don't really cut it.

I didn't get the impression in the book that there was any loosening of U.S. export control regulations on North Korea. As you can imagine, they're quite strict and anyone selling goods into that market from the U.S. would be facing jail time, let alone loss of security clearance and the like. Not that people don't do that sort of thing on occasion, but even if the DPRK was opening itself up to more trade and actually becoming less of an economic basket case, they'd still have a long way to go to becoming a large weapons purchaser. For one thing, presumably the PRC would expect that their aid would go to buying their systems. In fairness, North Korea does punch well above its weight in terms of percent of GDP going to the military, but they still don't have oil money to burn or the like. I could buy the plotline if you substitute say Burma/Myanmar or Vietnam for North Korea. Country with improving relationship with the U.S. that's authoritarian and what not.

That makes sense. Not that much time is passing so it's not unreasonable to see Quentin slowly making progress towards his childhood goal. Not that he didn't walk down a few primrose paths or the like, but his big successes were often storybook enough that even if he wanted to focus on getting to his magical kingdom once he was out of school he didn't really have a clear path forward. Also, he did put in a lot of hard work at the school, so some level of post-Japanese-high-school-style burnout is not unreasonable. But yeah, more Julia is enough to get me to read Magician Kings, although sadly it doesn't seem easily available via the Howard County library system.

Correction: The military regulations that was banned by a NRA support provision involves commanders talking with troops about private gun ownership and registering their private weapons. I'd read about the taking gun homes matter in the Switzerland/Israel post and confused the articles.

Thanks for commenting. I'd definitely agree that there are a range of potential factors. However, in this case, I think the casual mechanism is quite straightforward and is supported by the other charts on Ezra Klein's post. The casual mechanism I'm thinking of is that, that violence, committed with guns, substantially raises the possibility of fatalities. I think this becomes clear when looking at the suicide rate and household gun ownership. Now obviously there's a selection bias with such ownership, but "they controlled for measures of poverty, urbanization, unemployment, drug and alcohol dependence and abuse, and mental illness." Military commanders picked up on this connections and tried to implement restrictions on taking home weapons, only to run into vehement opposition by the NRA. I think the dicey question isn't so much the relationship of guns and violence but what is the most effective means to reduce the level of violence. Not all gun control is created equal by any means both in terms of effectiveness and intrusiveness. But I don't think we can have that conversation until we admit that we have a problem and that it is vanishingly unlikely that the solution to our problem is more guns.