I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in a loving household with wonderful working class parents—who smoked in the house and the car with me and my sister breathing daily their second-hand smoke. My parents would have done anything for us, including risking their own lives for our safety.
Yet they smoked right there beside us, filled our living room and our cars with their tobacco smoke.
It seems nearly impossible now for us to comprehend how it took the U.S. public so long to come to grips with the slow and insidious harm tobacco products have incurred on both users and innocent bystanders, including children.
It seems nearly impossible now for us to comprehend that we were somehow shocked to discover that Big Tobacco systematically lied to the U.S. public—at the expense of adults and children alike—all in the name of profits off tobacco products.
In 2012, most of the U.S. has found a compromise: Tobacco use has not been banned, but tobacco use has been regulated so that the least harm possible occurs, and that harm lies primarily with the adults who appear to choose it.
Tobacco purchases are regulated by age. Public smoking, especially in restaurants and other indoor areas, has been banned in many places. But the individual rights of an adult to choose to smoke remains intact, as preposterous as that choice clearly is in the light of the evidence.
Lung cancer and emphysema are not nearly as dramatic as mass shootings. 24-hour news stations do not set aside all programing for days to cover the costs of tobacco use.
In ten or twenty years, will we look back with the same sort of bafflement regarding how we are being used daily by the NRA and the gun industry?
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