In terms of the actual effect on your health, smoking probably isn’t quite as bad as obesity. Both are terrible for you, and both will inevitably kill you, but obesity is a bit more efficient about it. I see plenty of elderly people (read: over 60) people who smoke, but I hardly see any obese people of the same age. The reason? The obese people are dead before they hit 60.

Not only that, but there are a lot more obese people than there are smokers (though there is naturally some overlap), which means that more people total wind up dying from obesity-related causes than do smoking. Problem is, if you tell a fat person they shouldn’t be fat, you’re “discriminating against them and their life choice”. But if you tell a smoker they shouldn’t smoke, well that’s just sound health advice.

Wait, why am I writing this in a gun thread? Ban ’em. Completely. There’s no reason for anyone to be carrying lethal weaponry in a civilized country. Rifles, handguns, shotguns, the whole lot. Get rid of them all. And criminalise the sale of ammunition as well. The only people with guns should be the military. Sure, there’ll be a time where the criminals are armed and the rest of the population isn’t, but eventually they’ll run out of ammunition and be left with nothing more than a fancy and rather ineffective club.

Kendo_Bunny: Um… I’m pretty sure rape is already illegal. Aside from the inanity of claiming a gun is the only viable means of protection when physically out-classed, you go around arming all the women, it just increases the odds that the rapist will have a gun too. And since he knows with absolute certainty his victim will be armed, he’ll probably be more diligent about making sure he can use his gun.

Regardless, my starry-eyed Utopian dream of completely removing firearms from the civilian populace is about as likely, as someone else mentioned, as winning the war on drugs. So if we have to live with guns, I just say get rid of the handguns. Give everyone big fuck-off rifles and make it perfectly legal, nay, illegal *not* to, carry your rifle wherever you go.

That way there’s no question of, “I wanna rob that guy, I wonder if he’s armed or not.” You know damned well he armed. Let’s see how many people still risk it when they know for an absolute certainty that their “victim” is armed. And hell, let’s be honest. We’re never going to get rid of handguns either. There’s too many of them, and the gun industry lobby would never let it happen, so let’s throw in a requirement to carry one of them too. Hell, carry two. And a derringer in your boot. Or shoe.

If we can’t get rid of guns, then we might as well just make damn sure that every single one of us is armed to the teeth. Some may say, “But AgZed, that sounds like the Wild West, which was terribly violent and a man’s life was worth less than his boots.” But I say, these are different times! Our guns are bigger now, dammit!