There was a time when cigarettes were everywhere. Remember? They were in vending machines, in newspaper and magazine ads. Movie stars portrayed them as sexy. Remember the photo of Hayley Mills’ dad in the original The Parent Trap? The one where Brian Keith is posed in a moody black and white, holding a smoking cigarette?

Then it finally sank in that cigarettes were killing us. Remember? Remember the cancer statistics that finally got our attention, not just because they were big numbers but because those big numbers swallowed our loved ones? Remember the emphysema?

When nonsmoking areas popped up in restaurants, they were laughable. Remember? Remember how you could sit in a booth in the nonsmoking section, but the booth on the other side of a thin partition was in the smoking section? Remember how, if you chose not to smoke, or if you had a condition that made second-hand smoke a health risk you were considered a pussy?

Remember how, as more people chose not to smoke and were vocal about it, people who chose to smoke defended it by saying they were entitled to their personal choice? And, then, maybe you remember, many of those people developed health problems associated with smoking until, finally, they realized that the cost of their freedom of choice was their life?

Remember?

You probably remember that we finally got it when the public discussion about cigarettes included the term addiction. Smokers were addicted. It was hard to stop. Doctors said, if you don’t stop you will become seriously ill. Smokers said, but I can’t stop because I’m addicted. Then a whole therapeutic industry sprang up to concentrate on addiction. Remember? Remember how smokers desperate to quit would sit in hotel ballrooms to listen to people tell them how to quit? Remember the hypnosis?

By then, the national advertising of cigarettes had been all but halted. Those sexy images in magazines? Gone. The U.S. Surgeon General’s warning overshadowed all that sexiness. Remember? And tobacco companies, who had known for a very long time that prolonged smoking was harmful to the smoker’s health, finally had to admit that it was peddling a product that was killing us.

Guns are like that.

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal.