There is a very straightforward explanation for that. Strong rent control laws can bring residential building to a screeching halt. Once politicians have milked the political advantages of passing rent control laws, they have to avoid a backlash if all building of apartments stops.

That leads to an escape hatch in the rent control law. Luxury apartments with rents above a certain level are exempted. That leads to the shifting of resources away from building affordable housing to building housing that is unaffordable.

It is even more painfully obvious that "gun control" laws do not control guns. The District of Columbia's very strong laws against gun ownership have done nothing to stop the high murder rate in Washington.

New York had very strong gun control laws decades before London did. But the murder rate in New York has been some multiple of that in London for more than two centuries, regardless of which city had the stronger gun control laws at a given time.

Back in 1954, when there were no restrictions on owning shotguns in England and there were far more owners of pistols then than there were decades later, there were only 12 cases of armed robbery in London.

By the 1990s, after stringent gun controls laws were imposed, there were well over a thousand armed robberies a year in London. In the late 1990s, after an almost total ban on handguns in England, gun crimes went up another ten percent.

The reason-- too obvious to be accepted by the intelligentsia -- is that law-abiding people became more defenseless against criminals who ignored the law and kept their guns.

The same thing applies internationally. We might keep that in mind as the Obama administration pursues the will o' the wisp of banning nuclear weapons. If that Utopian dream ever came true, those nations naive enough to get rid of their nuclear weapons would be at the mercy of those rogue states who kept theirs.