We could learn a lot about gun control from the war on smoking - Toronto Star

Funny that you don't see bumper stickers proclaiming: "Cigarettes don't kill people. People who smoke cigarettes kill people."

Nor do you see firearms plastered with warning labels and lurid pictures of gun-violence victims.

But now that there is new momentum behind tougher gun control in the United States — a legacy of the Sandy Hook school tragedy in Connecticut — perhaps there is something to learn by making a connection between guns and smoking.

Or, if you like, put it in the form of a dare: could governments chip away at the cherished American gun rights in the same, systematic way they have taken on smoking and the tobacco business?

It's not really a huge stretch to compare gun owners and smokers.

Sure there are big differences, but both are consumers of potentially lethal products, with the capacity to harm innocent people around them.

Since the 1960s in the United States, firearms and tobacco, as well as alcohol and explosives, have been lumped together in one crime-fighting and taxation bureau.

And hard as it may be to believe nowadays, it wasn't that long ago when smokers actually believed they had rights to indulge their addiction, free of public reproach.

The fact that we scoff today at "smokers' rights" is proof that governments and politicians are capable of radically shifting the culture around dangerous goods in our society.

The war on tobacco really began in earnest in North America in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, when smoking started to be banned on airlines, select buildings and restaurant sections.

There was some pushback from smokers, even in polite, law-abiding Canada. We may have forgotten it by now, but an abrupt, all-out ban on smoking in Toronto bars and restaurants was met with massive defiance in 1997 and lasted only five weeks before it was repealed.

"It's like the wild west out there, " Ontario Restaurant Association president Paul Oliver told the Star at the time. "People are smoking anywhere."

Keep in mind, this was only 15 years ago — a time when the air was filled not just with blue smoke but with talk of smokers' rights as well.

These days, Toronto is marching toward a ban on patio smoking too, just as cities across North America have done. Smokers have now realized that resistance is futile.

(I should note, not proudly, that I continue to dabble in that lamentable smoking habit too — and I have been on the grumpy, receiving end of the limits to my freedom. I mention this only to underline my appreciation for just how hard it has been to take away rights from citizens. This hasn't been a walk in the park — where, incidentally, smoking is also now banned too in my hometown of Ottawa.)

The bans, moreover, are just one front in this long-running war. Tobacco advertising has also been prohibited since the 1990s and cigarette manufacturers have been forced to package their products with dark warnings and ugly photographs. This is an outright assault on the rights to free expression and commerce, but governments have weighed that as the price for a greater, smoke-free good.

Smokers also are subject to a form public shame that we wouldn't tolerate with other minorities. It's called "denormalizing" — officially defined as "the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool."

Imagine if all these tools were applied to the quest for tougher gun control.

The war on smoking has taught us that governments can use their powers to curtail habits or forces that they want to discourage — and that citizens, though disgruntled, can endure some limits on their rights.

Now, it should be noted that the constitutional right to bear arms (which doesn't exist in Canada, by the way) has a deeper, more emotional resonance than the right to pursue a risky lifestyle habit. Gun ownership, especially in the States, is tied up with the ideas of individual strength, independence and defence of home and family.

It's also true that cigarettes kill more people than guns do in the United States — an estimated 443,000 deaths each year from smoking, compared to about 11,000 deaths annually by firearms in that country, from 2007 through 2009.

But if American politicians are serious about tackling that plague of gun violence, they might want to consider how they have dealt with the buyers and sellers of tobacco. Through a combination of bans, stigma and yes, chipping away at rights, tobacco is still a legal product but it's been "denormalized" — removed from the mainstream of daily life, with smokers made to feel intensely responsible for the ills they inflict on society.

That wouldn't be a bad outcome of a sustained campaign against guns either, especially that responsibility part.

Who knows? With the right mix of political will and anti-gun measures, Americans might dream of a day when neither cigarettes nor firearms are brandished in public.

Susan Delacourt is a member of the Star's Ottawa bureau.