No, not all, but definitely some eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_and_Environmental_Zone
> The US kills many more people with guns, but it's so passé, old news, let them die. But a bomb, that gets people outraged, 'we have to do something'.
The United States has not, in the last century or so anyway -- maybe during Reconstruction -- actually experienced widespread targeted violence of the kind experienced in the UK and Ireland during the Troubles. More than 10,000 bombs exploded, many hundreds killed, many thousands injured. And that's just the bombs, not the shootings etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombings_during_the_Tr... Unlike American spree killers, most of these killings were highly targeted political acts. They weren't making a mountain of a molehill, in terms of the violence itself. It was a black mark for many decades for the two islands.
The people didn’t ask for it, they had a prepackaged idea sold to them leveraging the crisis of the moment (and even then it was controversial at the time.)
True of the Department of Homeland Security, true of many similar crisis responses.
Well, a problem of the moment needs a solution now. I hear many fellow leftists complaining about several "authoritarian", "fascist" laws, but I've never heard a proposal for a law that would be less "authoritarian", or "fascist", while at the same time solving the actual problem we had in the first place.
By the way, working "to fix the situation within the existing laws" fits the definition of "doing something", too. But complaining that a law is bad and the instead we should have done "something" does not look like a constructive criticism to me.