One party — the Republican Party — is blocking sensible gun laws.
Why, for that matter, block sensible efforts to encourage fuel-efficient cars and cleaner energy sources?
His death left a power vacuum at the Federal Reserve and allowed leaders with less sensible views to block effective intervention.
For decades, those big cigarette companies undermined scientific research into the damage their products were causing and blocked sensible regulations.
Leadership of Congress has shifted to the Democrats, but the National Rifle Association's power to block sensible steps to curb gun violence endures.
Mr. Bloomberg directed half his anger at the right target: the forces who have blocked sensible gun laws as out-of-state guns make their way to New York, which has strong gun controls.
He is blocking sensible moves by the EU's transport commissioner, Neil Kinnock, to introduce a legal market for airport slots.On the Boeing merger, Mr Van Miert's logic is much more suspect.
And all this is made vastly easier by a gun lobby that has blocked sensible safety measures at every turn, and by members of Congress who seem to pledge greater allegiance to the firearms industry than to their own constituencies.
He was, in fact, edging toward the view that critics accused him of holding: that racial and social problems were hopeless -- at least so long as the left blocked sensible discussion and action.
The New York politicians who have commented on the N.R.A. invasion don't like the idea, in part because they resent the N.R.A.'s efforts to block sensible gun control legislation whose main purpose is to keep guns away from the wrong people, including children.
