LOL, good one.
There's also 3rd hand smoke that can be a bit of a problem. The residue passes through skin pretty easily if you're in an area where there's been a lot left on the furniture.

Someone pulled up those stats a few pages ago. Go take a look.

I don't smoke anymore. Instead I track someone at work and take a break when they do. Been doing this since I was in the military to illustrate what special treatment smokers would get to feed their habit. I got called on it and told not to do it because I have no legit reason to take a break. I told them it was a masturbation break and I needed to feed my habit. After completely explaining my position they let me continue, and actually put regulations on the smoking breaks within our division. That is what I consider a win.

I did. You were wrong. No one was talking about the psychological toll of gun violence yet. No one was talking about the number of people affected, just the number of people killed. Also, while we're doing the apple and oranges thing, I'd love to have a comparison of the number of children who find a parent who sent a bullet through his/her brain vs. the number of children who find a parent that purposefully overdosed on tobacco.


*sigh*

My boss has pretty expressly asked us to not use our mobile phones during work, but allows smoking breaks. 10 minutes of texting a day seems much more of a problem to him than half an hour to an hour daily smoking. I mean, I neither text nor smoke, but those extra breaks man. Those extra breaks! Would love to have your chuzpa.

Dude, that's awesome!!!

You must have served quite a while ago. When I joined, we were forbidden smoking altogether. Quite a few people used those 13 weeks of bootcamp to quit for good. Some, of course, resumed as soon as they left it.

To be honest, I'm not certain if it's possible to purposefully overdose on tobacco. I'm quite certain, however, that it's entirely possible to kill oneself without using a gun. I know of two suicides. One was a guy who, years ago, was in my class. He hung himself. The other was an ex boyfriend of a girl I used to know. He walked off a building. Though, now that I think of it, my evil side kind of wants to see what would happen if we were to outlaw ropes and tall buildings.

Want some statistics on which mode of suicide attempt is wildly more successful than the others? :|

cause europeans can buy and carry around assault guns, assault guns are smoking hot

I would venture a guess that violent means are more successful than others. Shooting oneself in the head or stepping off a tall building are both fairly definitive it seems. Still, just because something is a good tool for killing oneself doesn't mean that it should be forbidden to all. I own several firearms and have never endangered a single person in my entire life. Nor am I suicidal, much to the displeasure of a number of people on this forum :D

To solve the mystery here, the most effective way of killing yourself is a shotgun to the head. Other methods involving guns may not be as effective, but still rank fairly low on the agony and time to death scale. Four methods involving guns feature in the top 8. Your suggested method, jumping from great height, ranks 7th with a mere 93.4% lethality. Yet it also ranks higher in the pain scale than most gun suicides - and at almost 5 mean minutes for death to occur after impact, I find it to be quite a shit way to kill yourself, honestly (not that killing yourself isn't shit anyway).

(I'm not making fun of suicide, by the way. One of my former classmates did kill himself by jumping from a skyscraper, while on vacation. Definitely a mental illness related suicide, we're thinking some form of impostor syndrome, but we'll never know)

That is correct. If the tool is manufactured with the sole purpose to kill as many human beings in as little time as possible however, then it should be forbidden to all.

Something tells me we are fairly unlikely to come to an agreement. Oh well, at least we agree on smoking.

Huh, that is even the topic of this thread. Well, was. For a short time, after a few people have done their darndest to ignore the multiple provocations in the original post, and before someone was insane enough to draw comparisons to gun violence. ;)

Still thinking about the "measures appropriate to the number of deaths" argument. If we're introducing laws to protect the people from smoking (480,000 deaths annually), but not laws to protect from gun violence (a meagre 33,000 deaths anually), it should be considered a massively, massively overblown reaction to introduce far reaching "secret" laws that give authorities total surveillance and detention rights when far less than 4,000 people have died in the US from the respective threat during the last 20 years, right?

Correct. If you are talking about terrorism, then yes, it really is a non-issue and cannot possibly justify this bout of insanity. Hysteria, though... Terrorism looks great on TV, sells like hot cakes and can be used to liven up any conversations. Unlike boring deaths by blunt instrument (hammers, baseball bats) or lung cancer, terrorism creates quite a spectacle. It is, therefore, spectacular. And, yea, hysteria... =(