In 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report on tobacco use and health. The report’s findings addressed cigarette smoking. It concluded:
- cigarette smokers had a seventy percent increase in mortality rate compared with non-smokers
- cigarette smoke was the primary cause of chronic bronchitis
- a correlation between smoking, emphysema, and heart disease.
- a direct link between smoking and a substantial increase in lung cancer
- a positive correlation between pregnant women who smoke and underweight newborns.
This was not the first study that came to these conclusions, just the first one in the US. In 1949, 60% of all doctors in the US smoked. By 1964, only 30% were smokers. In 2020, that figure had declined to 2%.
In the 50s and into the 60s, about half of the population smoked (58% men, 36% women). The report caused some federal legislation to become law, first the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965, and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, which enforced warning labels on cigarettes and banned cigarette advertising on radio and television. Unfortunately, even up into the 1980s smoking was permitted nearly everywhere – offices, bars, restaurants, trains, planes, etc. But public perception was gradually changing, and many states and local communities were passing regulations about where people could smoke. Smoking has declined to 11.5% in 2021.
I know a couple of smokers, and the addiction is not something they like to talk about. It has become somewhat a source of shame for them.
The Smoking Gun –what’s that title about? It is often used to mean evidence or proof of a crime or scientific theory, much like the 1964 Surgeon General’s report.
So this leads me to guns. According to the CDC, the leading cause of deaths for children and teens (from 1 to 19 years) was firearms. In 2020, that figure was 4357 lives lost. Firearms account for 20% of all child and teen deaths in the U.S., compared to an average of less than 2% of child and teen deaths in similarly large and wealthy nations.
Why did Alex Jones pick the nutty idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting was a false flag operation staged by the government? There are many wacky conspiracy theories he could have presented to his listeners, but this one had real appeal. For one, it fed into the right wing’s fear that they were going to lose their precious firearms.
It is hard to pin down exactly how many firearms are owned by the civilian population, for a couple of reasons: guns are a very durable item – if well maintained they can last hundreds of years. Secondly, there is no requirement for reporting gun sales on a nationwide basis. But the best estimates seem to hover around 390 to 430 million firearms in the US. We have a population of around 330 million. A UN report found 120 firearms per 100 people in the US.
(The figure of 120 guns per 100 people is somewhat misleading, because a much smaller percentage of the population owns an excess inventory of guns.)
This is much higher than any other country in the world. As an example, Japan, with a population of 126 million, has .3 firearms per 100 people. Are we any more free and safe than the people of Japan? The gun industry would have you believe that, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One of their favorite tropes is “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. Yeah, they are still using that. It seems to surface after every mass shooting, along with “thoughts and prayers”.
My belief is that although federal legislation is necessary- background checks, waiting periods, banning certain weapons, the real change has to come from state and local rules, and the average citizen insisting on a change in attitude about gun ownership. Like cigarette smoking, we need to make gun owners aware of their paranoid delusions. Handguns and AR-15s are not “sporting” weapons. They are designed to kill people. Recent events of “good guys” with guns shooting and killing people who knock on their door or pull into their driveway highlights the paranoia of gun owners. Shouldn’t they be ashamed of their addiction?
What do my fellow Daily Kosers think?
