Wouldn't banning smoking save more lifes than banning guns?

[dmallind]

131. Well of course it would - but there are differences as well as similarities.

Some differences posited upthread are spurious however. People ARE legally protected from second hard exposure to the harmful effects of guns - far more than they are from cigarettes even after much recent improvement there. It's a far more serious crime to spray bullets around a public place than smoke, and of course it should be so.

Some legitimate differences exist. Guns kill far more decisively and with far less variation than ETS. Plenty of people survive gunshots of course - but most people subjected to decades of workplace ETS are not killed by it. Most people getting shot as part of their daily routine would not be so lucky. The death count IS higher yes - but only because far more people smoke in public than carry guns in public, let alone actually shoot them in public (after all carrying a pack of unlit cigs is equally as harmless as the most responsible CCWer imaginable, and it must be said less likely to incur negligent discharges).

There are likwise cases where smoking is far worse than RKBA. Guns if used legally and responsibly without homicidal/suicidal intent kill nobody. Smoking kills when every possible safeguard and restriction short of outright bans are in place. But the obverse is also true. Accidentally lighting up a cigarette without checking your surroundings is at worst going to trigger a stern rebuke and an unpleasant few seconds for a nearby asthmatic. Doing that with a gun kills the kid in the next apartment way too often.

In pure body count you have a fine point the more overwrought shrieking side of the antis will wilfully ignore. You likewise have a point in that whatever positive use of guns you want to imagine, it is not zero. Lives have been saved aplenty by guns. If not none at all by smoking, certainly far fewer by orders of magnitude. The hypocrisy regarding body count is indeed strong. Guns are evil if they kill 30000. Tobacco less so if it kills 15 times that. Noted. Even said so myself. BUT there is also a grave difference in the risks of negligence, in the finality and immediacy of harm, and in the specificity of results.

To be honest the antis would be well-served by following smoking as a model. In a few decades smoking went from a nigh universal image of coolness to a shrinking minority of pariahs, and all because of public perception of negative impact and the resulting media image shift. Doing the same for gun ownership would take as long, and would be protected from a final ban by 2A, but is certainly possible.