At the time I worried that this legislative panic attack would leave us no safer, and considerably less free.
That’s probably for the best, given that the massacre encouraged a flurry of policy proposals whose “prospects for reducing the risks of mass murder are limited.” But a year later, Newtown’s legislative legacy is far less dramatic than it might have been. At the state level, nearly two-thirds of post-Newtown firearms laws actually loosened restrictions on gun owners. On the federal level, nothing much has happened.
