Smoking in public has to be banned

I will now say my argument of against the banning of smoking in public. The banning of smoking in public places may have some positives but it is for certain that more things will be affected negatively. Your first point was that cigarettes are poisoning people and giving them cancer. I believe this is true. There was another point that also agreed that yes, it is a person's choice to smoke. Also, only the second-hand smoke even having any affect towards the ban. The chemicals that the people smoke in the cigarettes is not the main point in this other than for the fact of the second-hand smoke. According to the EPA, the risk ratio for forty years of exposure to a pack-a-day smoker is just 1.19. The 6.8 million children in the United States that have asthma only account for 2.1% of the entire United States population (Not saying that it isn't a lot). According to some calculations I have made, that would only be rounded to about 9.2% of all children in the United States, which currently holds a child population of over 74.2 mil. The current amount of kids affected by asthma is 6.8 million, as said before, but that is not how many of them have gotten asthma by second-hand smoke. Children are more than likely to develop an illness for a short period of time from it than ever getting asthma. The children that do have asthma are affected by smoking with more frequent asthma attacks. The banning of smoking in public places would infringe private property rights. "Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental legal entities" (Wikipedia 2016). Cigarettes are private property and are used for personal consumption. Banning smoking in public places would infringe on these rights to have cigarettes and smoke them in public places. 40 million adults in the United States would be affected by this ban. Several of the campaigns against tobacco use it to demonize smokers only based on the chemicals and supposed science in behind the real cigarette. Your argument on "Children See." "Children do." explains on how teens are more influenced to smoke because of peer pressure, adult and elder"s passion for cigarettes and the premature deaths caused by the chemicals in the products. Several campaigns insist we ban public smoking because it does influence teenagers. Sadly, that is not the problem. According to CDC (2014), by achieving a teen smoking rate of 15.7 percent, the United States has met its national Healthy People 2020 objective of reducing adolescent cigarette use to 16 percent or less. Teens are less influenced now than ever to smoke cigarettes. You also asked the question of why not shoot themselves? Teens that do smoke only do it to try to destress from a situation, not to kill themselves. No one smokes to slowly kill themselves. If someone wanted to kill themselves then yes, a bullet would be easier. But this argument is not on if teens should just kill themselves if they want to smoke cigarettes because apparently that's what would happen anyways. There is a thing about reality; we all die. It would be like telling someone to kill themselves just because they know that their lives will inevitably end in the next 60-65 years. Teens also have a sense of responsibility that they will gain and they will be able to make their own choices, whether it is to smoke or not to smoke. Your next argument explains that a burning cigarette causes a lot of pollution. This conflict can be resolved by electronic cigarettes. In April 2014, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a report summarizing a survey of more than 19,000 past and present users of electronic cigarettes " the largest survey of its kind to date (From the Article "In Defense of Smokers"). Just one of the things that the survey found was that electronic cigarettes helped 81% of the survey respondents quit smoking. Among those who had not quit entirely, one-third were non-daily smokers, and the rest had decreased consumption from 20 cigarettes to 4 per day. A lot of them switched to electronic because they were concerned about the second-hand smoke exposure. It even worked for highly dependent smokers. The amount of pollution caused also by stubs can be fixed also by the electronic cigarettes. You also stated that several people throw their stubs on the ground instead of throwing them into the trash. Normal garbage cans in public places also have a sand/gravel/rock ashtray just for the people that need to put out their cigarettes if they do not use electronic cigarettes. For my conclusion, Smoking should not be banned in public places. There are very simple ways that America can fix its errors. America is a great country, as you said. But, America can be an even greater country if it would take these things into consideration and try it's best to fix the problem. You cannot snuff out a problem by passing a law against it and thinking that the problem is ultimately over. Fix the problem with what it needs. Sources: https://www.heartland.org... http://www.cdc.gov... http://www.cdc.gov... https://en.wikipedia.org... https://mises.org... http://www.cdc.gov... http://getasthmahelp.org... http://www.cleanair.org...