Guest Blog: It was done on Tobacco. It can be done on guns.

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By Dennis Henigan

I spenttwenty-three proud years of my life as a lawyer and advocate for the guncontrol cause.  Countless times, afteregregious acts of mass violence with guns were followed by cowardly excuses forinaction by our political leaders, I would wonder:  What will it take?  What kind of horror must our nationexperience before the politicians finally defy the gun lobby and startprotecting the American people?

After SandyHook, I think we may know the answer.  Asour citizens confront the inconceivable reality of 20 first graders (and six caringadults) shot to death in their school, there is a palpable shared feeling thatwe can tolerate the slaughter no longer. Deep inside our collective consciousness, we know that, if our leadersdo nothing, we will suffer the horror again and again and again.  And we can’t stand the thought of it.    Yes, SandyHook is different.  The attack on anelementary school classroom taps into our most elemental instinct as adults andparents -- to protect the children before all else.  I now work in the tobacco control movementand one parallel to guns is striking.  Akey turning point on the tobacco issue was the revelation that the tobaccocompanies were deliberately acting to addict our children to a lethal product.   When the welfare of our kids is at risk, weinsist that something be done. 
Everything Iknow about the gun issue tells me we are entering a period of unprecedentednational self-examination about what gun violence is doing to our nation.  And we will not be satisfied with aconversation.  We must have action.
The Americanpeople can overcome the gun lobby, but only if we confront, and expose, threemyths that have long dominated the gun debate and given the politicians a readyexcuse for inaction. 

• First, wemust not let the opponents of reform get away with the empty bromide that “gunsdon’t kill people, people kill people.”  Doesany rational person really believe that the Sandy Hook killer could havemurdered 26 people in minutes with a knife or a baseball bat?   Guns enable people to kill, more effectivelyand efficiently than any other widely available weapon. 
• Second, wemust challenge the idea that no law can prevent violent people from gettingguns.   This canard is refuted by theexperience of every other western industrialized nation.  Their violent crime rates are comparable toours.  But their homicide rates areexponentially lower because their strong gun laws make it harder for violentindividuals to get guns. 
• Third, wemust not accept the notion that our Constitution condemns us to the continuedslaughter of our children.  It is truethat the Supreme Court has expanded gun rights in recent years; it is equally truethat the Court has insisted that the right allows for reasonablerestrictions.  In his opinion in the Heller gun rights case, Justice Scalialisted restrictions on “dangerous and unusual weapons” among the kinds of gunlaws that are still “presumptively lawful”. Assault weapons that fire scores of rounds without reloading surely are“dangerous and unusual”.

The tobaccocontrol movement overcame some equally powerful mythology to fundamentallyalter American attitudes toward tobacco products.   The tobacco industry’s effort to sowconfusion and uncertainty about the link between smoking and disease eventuallywas exposed as a fraud.  The entrenchedview that smoking was simply a bad habit that individuals can choose to breakwas destroyed by evidence that the tobacco companies knew that nicotine waspowerfully addictive and engineered their cigarettes to ensure that people gothooked and stayed hooked.   Theassumption that smoking harms only the smoker was contradicted by theoverwhelming evidence of the danger of second-hand smoke.  
Once thesemyths were exposed, attitudes changed, policies changed and we started savingcountless lives.  Since youth smokingpeaked in the mid-1990s, smoking rates have fallen by about three-fourths among 8^thgraders, two-thirds among 10^th graders and half among 12^thgraders.  A sea change has occurred onthe tobacco issue.
Similarlyfundamental change can come to the gun issue as well.  The myths about gun control, however, stillhave a hold on too many of our political leaders and their constituents.  We will hear them repeated again and again inthe coming weeks of intense debate. Every time we hear them, we must respond and we must persuade.
There is toomuch at stake to be silent.   
Dennis Henigan is Director of Policy Analysisand Research at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and a former Vice Presidentof the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.  He is the author ofLethal Logic:  Exploding the Mythsthat Paralyze American Gun Policy (Potomac Books 2009)