My friend Kevin Williamson, who cops to being “the resident Europhile” around here, has a rebuttal to my (first) piece on our friend David Harsanyi’s book Eurotrash and tosses an elbow in passing at my point that Europe’s higher life expectancy compared with the U.S. is in pertinent part explained by different methods for calculating live births and also by America’s higher rates of homicide and obesity. Kevin wisecracks, “On the related matters of culture and life expectancy, ‘Americans are fat and homicidal’ would not immediately leap to mind as my opening line in the case for American superiority.” I feel that this is a bit beneath Kevin because he knows what the point is and knows he is deliberately avoiding it for the purposes of making a little “LOL Americans suck” joke that is a boring cliché among our friends on the left.

Okay, we’re a fat and murderous country. But there is no policy change that is going to alter either of those things. Adopting Danish social-spending policies is not going to turn us into a nation of svelte, peaceful Scandinavians. I’m all ears if AOC or Bernie Sanders can come up with a cure for our obesity and violence. They can’t. Kevin has argued many times that the gun restrictions Democrats propose every time a mass shooting makes the news are merely cosmetic and would do zilch to decrease our murder rate. Remove the pistol grip or the flash suppressor from an AR-15 and you’ve still got an extremely lethal weapon with which you can kill as many people as you like. The Second Amendment, for good or ill, isn’t going anywhere, and as long as we have the right to bear arms, we are going to have much more gun violence than comparable countries. As for obesity, I haven’t even heard a fantasy proposal to deal with that. Forcing restaurants to publish calorie counts sure doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. I’m sure Kevin will join me in being skeptical that the high soda tax in Philadelphia is going to reduce obesity there.