GOP Rep: Smoking Ban Justifies Gun Ban

In what could only be described as one of our biggest I-told-you-so’s to date, GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) wants to use smoking bans to justify gun bans.

The smoking ban in question is the ban on smoking for 18-21 year olds. They’re old enough to vote, get drafted, die in war, determine which college to become perpetually indebted to, be in porn and heck, even do something really crazy like get married. But they’re not old enough to smoke because, according to Kinzinger, peoples’ brains apparently aren’t fully developed until the stroke of midnight on one’s 21st birthday.

“We raised without really so much of a blink, the age of purchasing cigarettes federally to 21,” Kinzinger says.

You sure did, Adam. And that’s the problem. Tyrants always get more tyrannical when nobody challenges them. Smokers have already been ostracized by government and academia, with a sheep-like public not far behind. There “wasn’t really much of a blink” because people have been trained not to blink.

Of course, I’d imagine smokers between 18-20 had feelings about it. But I bet almost none of them spoke up. It’s hard to feel like you’re in the right when you’ve been spoon-fed antismoking propaganda since birth – and when you know your peers have as well.

Changing the smoking age was, in part, an attempt to thrust 18-20 year olds into the arms of the pharmaceutical industry (pharmaceutical nicotine has become the only type that age group is now legally allowed to obtain). The age change was also the latest in a long series of actions separating smokers into smaller and smaller groups–divide and conquer is an age-old strategy which works, after all.

Tyranny, as we’ve said here many times, will always use previous bans to justify more bans. If you’re for gun ownership, you should be wholeheartedly against the Fed’s decision to raise the smoking age to 21. Your opinion on smoking is irrelevant here. Be against the 21 age limit for smoking because it’s a precedent they want to use against everyone else.

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