How can supporters of sensible measures to prevent the proliferation of deadly firearms — a group that includes the majority of Americans — hope to defeat the gun lobby?
Professor West has said that banning the sale of e-cigarettes to under-18s is a sensible precaution to prevent adolescents starting with e-cigarettes and then going on to tobacco.
"I would urge farmers to remain extra-vigilant for signs of this disease and take all sensible precautions to prevent infection," said the National Farmers Unionn's (NFU) chief livestock adviser, Peter Garbutt.
Naturally, this is presented as humane and sensible means to prevent some of the 92 deaths that occurred "following police contact" in Britain between 2008 and 2009, but I cannot be the only one to worry about the idea of chemical sedation of suspects, given what goes on in custody suites.
Although both types of gain had separate allowances, this was seen as a sensible move to prevent tax payers from arranging their affairs so that they took their profits as capital gains rather than as income.
"Everybody's got to give a little bit in a sensible way" to prevent the economy from pitching over a recession-threatening fiscal cliff, he said.
But in addition to that goal, says Bernhard Hennig, a professor of nutrition and toxicology at the University of Kentucky who was not involved with the study, "nutritional interventions may offer a sensible way to prevent diseases associated with environmental insults".
He told the Today programme the rules were not about banning books but "sensible security precautions" to prevent items such as drugs being sent in.
And, though anti-government zealots won't want to hear it, it will take sensible, tough regulation to prevent abuses.
At an abstract level, such a system may seem sensible: far better to prevent terrorism before it happens than to investigate and prosecute after a tragedy.
