My heart broke again this afternoon when I read that a three-year old in SC died after mistaking a pink, loaded handgun for a toy (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/toddler-dies-playing-pink-gun-mistaken-toy-article-1.1256597).
I made the mistake and read some of the comments. The same old, same old. The parents are to blame. They were "irresponsible" gun owners. Any responsible gun owner would NEVER keep a gun where a child could get it. They should be prosecuted, blah, blah, blah. But assuming that the gun was purchased legally, the parents were being responsible, by the NRA's standards, for keeping a gun in their home to protect them from the bogey man and jack-booted government thugs.
Sometimes it seems as if the NRA has such a strangle hold on our public policy and collective psyche that we will never make any headway on this issue. But then I think of the big tobacco battles of the 1990s. Those seemed impossible. I was an idealistic, newly minted, public health advocate back then. I worked with the folks on the front lines of the tobacco wars. It seemed like we would never break the tobacco industry's grip on our nation's health - no matter how many studies were conducted, no matter how many law suits were filed, the tobacco lobby was too strong.
But inch by inch, the American public has begun to reclaim it's health from an industry bent on destroying it. We have regulated the hell out of cigarettes. You can't smoke in most restaurants and clubs anymore. Try lighting up in an airplane. You'll get quite a reception when you land. Smoking cessation counseling is a routine part of primary health care. School health programs preach about the dangers of smoking to kids. We tax and tax cigarettes.
The result? Smoking rates in the U.S. have been dropping consistently from year to year. States such as California have achieved record lows in the rates of adult smoking. They've also see drops in rates of heart disease, lung cancer, and other smoking-related illnesses. http://www.cdph.ca.gov/Pages/NR11-031.aspx
And guess what - we have not BANNED cigarettes!!!! You can't smoke anywhere or anytime you want. It may be uncomfortable or inconvenient for you to suck on that cancer stick, but you can still smoke your life away if you want. But you're not going to be endangering my health or the health of my children any more.
Maybe it's time to revisit the tobacco wars and see what strategies we can adapt to the gun wars. Maybe we start by teaching young children what bullets do to human flesh (who remembers seeing the diseased lung in science class?). Maybe state Attorneys General start prosecuting manufacturers for marketing guns to children (pink guns, really? It's like the fruit-flavored cigarettes they tried to sell in the 90s). Maybe we put more money into public health research into the prevention of gun violence. Maybe a public education campaign like The Truth Campaign (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448237/) to fight the bogus claims of gun safety promoted by the NRA (which is the gun manufacturers' version of the Tobacco Research Institute).
Maybe, just maybe we can save some lives and you'll be able to keep your guns too.
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