Vaping vs Guns
That is the Question

I was watching the news last week as Ginger and I had dinner together. It was a quiet time for me and my Irish Setter. Then it happened. I felt the same pain and outrage that Captain Renault felt in the movie, Casablanca. “I’m shocked, shocked….”

Apparently, Donald the Dumb read something or rather someone told him that there is a growing epidemic beginning to rage like wildfire across the country. So, Trump announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be announcing “some very strong recommendations…in a couple of weeks.” Trump is distressed about all the deaths occurring due to e-cigarettes.

Even Melania Trump is into the fray against e-cigarettes. In a recent tweet, she wrote, “I am deeply concerned about the growing epidemic of e-cigarette use in our children. We need to do all we can to protect the public from tobacco-related disease and death and prevent e-cigarettes from becoming an on-ramp to nicotine addiction for a generation of youth.

The Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar said, “It'll take several weeks for us to put out the final guidance that will announce all the parameters around the enforcement policy, and then there will likely be about a 30-day delay to effective date, as is customary…at that point all flavored e-cigarettes other than tobacco flavor would have to be removed from the market.”

Vaping, JUULing, and electronic cigarettes (e-cigarette) are the problem. If you haven’t vaped lately, allow me to explain. You can pick up a small device like one from this photo.

E-smoke choices

A small battery is hidden inside the device and creates a vapor or smoke, which contains nicotine or e-juice. Now, you can pick your favorite flavor of your e-juice.

Pick your favorite flavor smoke

Now, to be honest with you, I am not into vaping. I think that laws should be written to protect anyone from dying and/or causing serious medical conditions. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claim that the majority of e-smokers are between 18-34 and half of those are under 25 with 75% being males. As I was writing this essay, there have been a total of eight vaping deaths in America. That is eight too many deaths.

Oh, by the way, each day there are more than 100 people killed by guns in America. Pew Research found that 39,773 died annually in the most recent data available. The following is how we rank worldwide in deaths due to guns.

The U.S. gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the study, which uses a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6). But the rate in the U.S. was much lower than in El Salvador (39.2 per 100,000 people), Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3), Colombia (25.9) and Honduras (22.5), the study found. Overall, the U.S. ranked 20th in its gun fatality rate. Sandy, can you move the Pew link-up a line and centered?

Pew Research

These are the choice weapons that mass shooters used since 2012, but the weapons used go up to only early 2018.

Mass shooting guns

Now, let’s try to determine why Donald the Dumb wants to save 8 vaping deaths vs. 39,773 gun deaths. Let me ponder that for a moment and get back to you.

I have your back Trump




This is an interesting video of a teenage vaping…creatively.