There is no question that cigarette smoke is deadly and is one of the main causes of lung cancer. Which leads to one of my key arguments against gun control laws. If people really want to do something to save the lives of people, they would strive to outlaw most, if not all, tobacco products because they kill many times more people than guns do.

For decades, there have been many efforts and programs to get people to stop smoking.

I started smoking occasionally at the age of 12 and by the time I graduated high school, I was smoking close to a pack of cigarettes every 2 days. At the age of 19, I was hunting with my dad and was shocked that after climbing a large hill, I was wheezing and out of breath. The next day, I went out into the desert, built a fire and threw all of my tobacco into the fire. I haven’t smoked since then.

However, like many ex-smokers, I have become overly sensitive to cigarette smoke from others. I find that secondhand smoke to be obnoxious, offensive and more.

Over the years, a number of studies have shown the damaging effects of secondhand cigarette smoke. Some studies have indicated that children raised in homes with smokers have far more health problems, especially respiratory problems, than the smokers themselves.

Even if one does not smoke or isn’t plagued with breathing secondhand smoke, just breathing big city air is just as bad, as reported:

Want to know just how badly polluted the air we’re breathing is getting? It can be as harmful for your lungs as a pack of cigarettes a day, new research has revealed. The new data might explain why more non-smokers are getting lung problems traditionally associated with smoking.

This latest study looked specifically at emphysema, a condition which destroys the air sacs in the lungs; it can cause wheezing, coughing and shortness of breath, as well as increasing the risk of death.

Researchers found that higher levels of pollutants in city air – ozone in particular – could cause emphysema to progress as quickly as would be expected from smoking an entire pack of cigarettes every day…

This was an extensive study too, covering 7,071 participants between 2000 and 2018 in six metropolitan regions in the US: Chicago, Winston-Salem in North Carolina, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Saint Paul in Minnesota, and New York City. Data was pulled from air and lung analysis in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA).

Having an ambient ozone level just 3 parts per billion (ppb) higher than another area, over 10 years, is comparable in terms of emphysema progression to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for 29 years, the study found. On average, the levels of ozone in the six study areas covered the 10-25 ppb range…

Living in a big city is getting more and more dangerous every day. After all, there are far more muggings, robberies, beatings, sexual assaults, murders, gang violence, mass shootings and terrorist violence occuring in big cities and now, you stand a greater risk of developing a severe lung disease by just breathing the air in many big cities. So why live there?