Up in smoke Options

[fingercuffs]

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2008/0...mon.tobacco.cnn

We already have a smoking ban in public places. We also have legislation in the works that would ban smoking in private residences that adjoin other buildings (practically every home in San Francisco). Now corner stores might soon be banned from just selling cigarettes. Behold what happens when you give up your right to choose to Big Brother -- a little here, a little there, and before you know it, there's no freedom left.

[Epic]

Your analogy is off by a mile

A better analogy would making it illegal to drive on streets (even though it's legal to own and drive a car). It effectively limits and eliminates 90% of where you can drive....which is what this law is trying to do - eliminate 90% of where you're allowed to smoke in SF

What bullshit

Or that making it illegal for you to drive on streets when it has been shown that your driving habits endanger the lives and health of others, but only streets where the population is dense enough to make your driving habits a high-impact situation.

Now doesn't that make sense? If something that YOU do has been found to negatively impact the health of OTHER people, don't you think they can control how and where you do it? Oh wait, if you drive recklessly and endanger others, they take your license away. Time to get buttsore over that.

[Oasis]

Or that making it illegal for you to drive on streets when it has been shown that your driving habits endanger the lives and health of others, but only streets where the population is dense enough to make your driving habits a high-impact situation.

Now doesn't that make sense? If something that YOU do has been found to negatively impact the health of OTHER people, don't you think they can control how and where you do it? Oh wait, if you drive recklessly and endanger others, they take your license away. Time to get buttsore over that.

I don't particularly like the smoking ban. I think it should be up to individual bar/restaurant owners to decide whether to allow smoking in their private establishments. That way, people who want to be around smoke have the option of doing so, and people who don't want to be around smoke have the option of going to a nonsmoking establishment. No one gets hurt with choice. And don't give me the idiotic "It limits where I can go!" argument. Big deal. Find another bar that caters to your lifestyle. I personally don't go to bars that play rap music because I fucking hate rap, but I don't cry foul because the owner made a choice to cater to a specific group in his club...I go somewhere else. And goddammit, I'm not implying rap music is bad for your health (although it might as well be). I'm making a broad comparison and saying you can avoid things you dislike being around

It's impossible, as a decent driver, to avoid dangerous dipshits on the road. License revocation is rare. I know people who have gotten 20+ tickets and still have their license. People who get in multiple at fault wrecks will lose their insurance before they lose their license. If you get a DWI, you lose your license, but you can easily get it back if you pay a $1k/yr Administrative License Revocation fee. The government, quite honestly, doesn't give a dick about taking away bad drivers' licenses. They care about the revenue generated from fees and tickets that bad drivers get. Shitty drivers keep the government in business.

Unlike smoking, where I have a choice as to whether or not I want to be around it, I can't avoid dangerous drivers. It's not like there are two sets of roads, one for dangerous drivers and one for good drivers. So no, your analogy is flawed as well.

On second thought, you're right about one thing. Road safety is very comparable to the smoking ban in one aspect. It's illegal to smoke in bars, but the punishment if you're caught is placed on the offender, not the establishment. If I'm caught smoking in a non smoking bar, I get fined. The bar doesn't. I won't be banned from the bar (by the government, at least) so I'm free to go back in there, break the law again, put other peoples' health at risk again, and get caught and fined again. Isn't that pretty much how the roads work? Do something reckless on the road, put other peoples' safety at risk, get caught, and get fined....and as long as you pay enough money, you'll get that license to drive back, so you can go right back and do it again. The smoking ban is nothing more than cosmetics to make people think the government cares about our wellbeing. If they passed liability back to the bar owners, there would be no smoking in bars, and therefore safer for the population. With liability placed on the individual offender, nothing gets solved. People are still at risk. Bar owners don't care because it isn't hurting their bottom line. The only one who wins is the government collecting the fines at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing. So yeah, that is comparable to road safety. The more I thought about it writing this, the more I realized you were right, although I doubt your initial reasoning was along these lines