You can blame gun owners or blame the mentally ill...

[MotherPetrie]

13. Remember when the majority of adults smoked? I do.

Virtually every public place you walked into, except churches and movie theaters and elementary school classrooms, had smokers in it. I didn't smoke but I would come home from work at my office reeking of everyone else's smoke.

What happened?

Education, legislators standing up to big tobacco, lawsuits, and balls. And the desire to stop people dying ugly needless deaths from cigarette-related diseases. A surgeon general's warning label was finally imprinted on cigarette packaging. Was that much? Fuck no, but it was a start and once it started, it kept going. Cigarette ads banned on TV, a gradual awareness that smoking was deadly and anti-social.

At my work it started with smoking rooms at work. Ended with no smoking anywhere on the campus. As it became harder to smoke, more and more people quit.

Now non-smoking is the norm in public places in the U.S. A minority of people smoke and that number continues to drop.

Just imagine if people like you stood around wringing their hands 50 or so years ago, saying there is no use in doing anything because people will always smoke.

Guess what? They didn't and they don't.