“Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em,” They told my dad when he was training in Arizona for WWII.

In January of 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States announced in print that tobacco smoke was dangerous to health. Cigarette caused lung cancer. The announcement was a political risk to the SG, and a blow to a valuable American industry, which had known of the danger for decades and kept that to itself. The warning was timed for a Saturday so that the stock market would have a couple of days before shivering, and to allow for Sunday newspapers to cover the story in detail. People read newspapers then.

The NIH explains through The National Libraries of Medicine: “The report estimated that average smokers had a nine- to ten-fold risk of developing lung cancer compared to non-smokers: heavy smokers had at least a twenty-fold risk.”

I was eleven when the report came out. For a Health and PE class, I had to interview adults, and ask questions: Do you smoke? How much? When did you start? Have you ever tried to stop? And what happened? Did I interview my dad about his Camels habit? I honestly don’t recall, though even in adolescence I think I would have understood my father’s embarrassment about an addition to cigarettes. Perhaps that was when he told me about his 6-week addiction to morphine when recovering from a war wound in a European hospital? What I do remember is how one of my favorite teachers answered that survey: yes, he’d tried to quit, and he’d gained 20 pounds. He chose to smoke. Eventually researchers would reveal the deliberate manipulation of the chemistry in cigarettes to make them more addictive.

In the following decades my father-in-law would die of lung cancer and so would my dad, and in the 1980s, five neighbors here on the coast would die as a result of smoking.

My husband and I have never smoked. Neither do our sons.

I credit my mother for my very early decision not to smoke. She told me about living in San Francisco with her sister, a Marine, during the war. Men were always handing her cigarettes, so she tried. “But it made me cough. And the soldier told me, ‘You’ll get used to it,’ and I thought, ‘Why would I want to get used to this?'” She told me that story years before research provided a better reason not to smoke.

After decades of research, we know that exposure to secondhand smoke markedly increases a non-smoker’s chance of heart disease, cancer, and premature death. But to date we have known little about what it means to be exposed to ‘secondhand’ gun ownership. In other words, what risks or benefits do people who don’t own guns experience when they live with someone who does? That research was outlawed.

Killing yourself with cigarettes is a long process. There are quicker ways.

A study funded by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research found that people who live with a handgun owner (but don’t themselves own a gun) are nearly twice as likely to die by homicide than those living in gun-free homes. Women—who make up two-thirds of those who live with handgun owners—faced especially high chances of being fatally shot at home by their spouse or intimate partner.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health warns: “Although the majority of suicide attempts do not result in death, attempts using a firearm are almost always lethal—nine out of 10 firearm suicide attempts result in death.” The majority of gun deaths in our nation (60%) are suicides. Those keeping a gun in the house are far more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder, and about once a day in the US, a toddler shoots themself or someone else. This is not new information.

In 1993, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study by Arthur Kellermann and others that found that guns in the home were associated with an increased risk of homicide in the home. It was not merely that guns were used as opposed to say, strangulation. There was more violence if guns were around. The now-infamous National Rifle Association immediately set about concealing the truth. The NRA successfully lobbied Arkansas Republican Representative Jay Dickey to stop research about the dangers of guns. In 1997, the Dickey Amendment was first inserted as a rider into the omnibus spending bill of the United States federal government that mandated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control” and simultaneously demanding that funds previously earmarked to study firearms be used to study something else. Without explicitly banning it, the result was the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized.

There is a move to outlaw all hunting and fishing in my state, which I find [forgive me] overkill. I had students who hunted and filled the family freezer. One got her elk when it walked onto her family’s rural property and she was already dressed to go to Prom! And I was fully aware of the hard work involved in processing a dead elk. Even though I am a vegetarian, I respect the rights of responsible hunters. I cannot say the same for the city guy who walked into a local farmer’s barn to shoot the elk wearing the big red bow around his neck. Private property, inside a barn, and even Bullwinkle’s bow wasn’t enough of a hint?

My father served in WWII and took responsible gun ownership seriously. We had guns in my home when I was growing up—at least two pistols and a rifle that I recall. These were always kept unloaded, partially disassembled, and locked away. I was shown how to determine if a gun was loaded. I was taught to always assume a gun was loaded and to never point even a toy gun at anyone.

I knew two young men who were accidentally shot through the spine while at parties in rural Washington. Different parties and maybe a couple years apart in time. Someone found the gun and handled it carelessly. One of those guns was hidden between studs in an upper story and shot someone having a beer downstairs. It was loaded after all. Both those boys lost the use of their legs. One was the first boy I ever dated and the other was the boyfriend of my first roommate in college. They were a few years apart in age but didn’t know one another. So far as I know, their only point of connection was me.

I’ve always felt terrible for the two boys, but I also felt a little sorry for whoever found those guns “where no one will ever find it” and didn’t know enough not to play with it.

A third person I knew, a woman, was drunk at a camping site in California, waved around a handgun and was also shot through the spine. It was a park ranger who shot her and put her into a wheelchair. (I felt particularly bad for the ranger.)

You might say that I struggle with defenders of the rights of handgun owners. I struggle to understand why weapons designed only to kill people are so common in my country. Why do we have more guns than citizens? Do those gun-owners belong to a well-regulated militia? Do they believe the propaganda about owning a gun to defend myself against federal overreach? Seriously? It’s only been recently that I felt that particular fear, and I suspect however well-armed, I wouldn’t do well against a well-regulated military.

And cigarettes. Despite my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher, I’m pretty sure that smoking doesn’t keep anyone thin. What I know is that I hate the smell. Hate it! When I see someone younger than me smoking, I think every time: “Your whole life you’ve known cigarettes are likely to kill you, and they cost money you can’t afford.” I will also say, from personal experience, that yes, we are all going to die, but there are better ways to leave this world than dying of cancer.