I served as a page in the House of Representatives at age 15. This job allowed me to wander around the hallways of our nation's Capitol for an entire month while delivering messages, posting mail for U.S. Rep. Oren Harris and performing the general flunky duties of a page. It was a great experience.
One day, while perusing various documents published by the Congressional Record in some basement office, I came across the now-famous 1962 Surgeon General's report that connected cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other perfidious lung diseases.
There were stacks and stacks of the report. No one seemed to be paying it much mind.
I used the congressman's franking privileges to mail a copy of the report to my dad, who was a two-pack-a-day smoker. I had some naïve illusion that it might prompt him to quit. He finally did, but it was about 30 years later. That was too late to save him from an untimely heart failure due to COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).
We now know that tobacco smoke is deadly and nicotine is addictive. We should have known it in the 1960s, but the tobacco industry waged a successful war against public awareness by carefully targeting ads, changing its products to be more palatable, touting filters, lying to us, and colluding with each other to protect cigarette sales.
Gradually, over a period of decades, public opinion changed. So did the smoking landscape--drastically.
Numerous private organizations promoted anti-smoking campaigns. Local ordinances against smoking in public restaurants became commonplace. State legislatures passed laws forbidding smoking in government offices, school campuses, and other places supported by government financing. Private corporations began to declare their workplaces smoke-free. Congress made it illegal to purchase advertising on TV that marketed cigarettes or tobacco products. Even Hollywood stopped filming scenes with actors who smoked.
States increased the taxes on tobacco purchases so that it is now ridiculously expensive. By the mid-'90s, a class-action lawsuit brought by multiple state attorneys general brought the tobacco industry to its knees with a huge multibillion-dollar settlement.
We now live in a country that is virtually smoke-free in nearly every public place. Parents who smoke are so aware of its negative effects that they often take smoke breaks outside their homes. Nonsmokers greatly outnumber smokers, and there is a lot of peer pressure to stop smoking. The vast majority of restaurants and even bars no longer have smoking areas.
The culture that made cigarette smoking "cool" has been reversed. Yet we still have millions of Americans who smoke or use tobacco products.
Some learnings we may glean from this:
• Changing the culture of millions of people is very hard, but possible.
• Cultural change on such a vast scale usually requires a long time.
• People initially ignore science-based data that conflicts with ingrained personal habits and recreational pleasure.
• Significant cultural change on a national level only occurs when a tipping point of public opinion begins to demand it.
• Multiple strategies involving national, state and local governments, public leaders, private business, and nonprofit organizations are required to achieve long-term cultural change.
We love guns in America. They are part of our heritage and ingrained in our culture. Most of my generation grew up playing at being soldiers and cowboys and carrying toy firearms proudly through the neighborhood while pretending to shoot invisible enemies and sometimes each other.
Guns are part of our frontier image and reinforced by countless Hollywood productions. The majority of Americans probably own at least one firearm or have at some point in their lifetimes. Many who don't have no objection to neighbors, family or friends that do.
If we are going to have a serious discussion about regulating firearms in this country, there must be a cultural change in our self-perception. The arguments about Second Amendment rights are transparently shallow rationalizations that enable us to collect and enjoy the recreational use of whatever kind of gun we like.
I am a gun owner and collector, so I believe I have a pretty good understanding of what motivates people, even nonhunters, to own firearms.
We may never be able to prevent firearms from being used to harm other people, just like we have not been able to eliminate tobacco usage. However, if a multi-strategy approach to prevent mass shootings occurs, similar to what happened with cigarette smoking, we have a realistic chance of minimizing mass shootings, suicides by gun, and accidental shootings.
This all begins with a series of small steps from the top down and the bottom up. Cultural change on this scale ain't easy, folks.
It took decades to reach a tipping point with tobacco usage. How long before we reach our tipping point on guns? And how many more mass shootings?
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Boyd Ward of Mayflower, the retired executive director of ARORA, is an author and blogger.
Editorial on 08/23/2019