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Comment by traderj0e | Hacker News Reader

Practically it's hard to ban something new across the entire country without overwhelming support like that. There are enough people who strongly think kids shouldn't be able to buy alcohol or cigarettes that it ended up getting banned in every form, in all US states (even before federal law). Wouldn't be possible with a slight majority opinion, even if an individual proposition only needs 50% of votes.

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> without overwhelming support like that.

this is 1,000,000% not accurate. there are things that vast majority of people support that are never going to happen (e.g. universal background check for gun purchases) and there are things that ruling party easily gets through that are wildly unpopular.

I said it's hard to ban something without support, not that it's easy to ban with support. Not to mention, gun background checks are more controversial than you're making them out to be, in fact this is an example I would use. Even if more than 50% like the idea of a background check, not so many will trust the implementation, and not everyone will vote.

Just for completeness sake and just for fun about 40 or so states allow private sales of firearms without a background check. Of course it is on the seller to know they are not selling to a felon and they may be on the hook if the buyer does something bad though I am straying a bit off topic from age/ID verification and tracking.

you should look this up, the percentage of support is closer to 100% than 50% (84-90%) - about as great of a support as it is humanly possible and yet………

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