Tackling a Different Danger
Sarah Brady, the most visible face and loudest scold about the dangers of handguns, announced last week that she’s in a fight she “may not win” with lung cancer, a disease that she attributes to her inability to shake her decades-long addiction to another danger, cigarettes.
No one has argued more forcefully than Brady for tighter gun laws, a conviction that was, sadly, born in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan that left Brady’s husband permanently disabled. As president of Handgun Control Inc., now the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, she scored a huge victory with the passage in 1993 of the federal Brady bill, named for her husband, James. The law imposes a waiting period on the purchase of handguns and bars felons, among others, from buying such firearms.
Sarah Brady knows the statistics by heart--that in 1998, for instance, 17,424 people deliberately killed themselves using firearms. She also knew the health risk from cigarettes, that smokers account for 87% of lung cancer cases and that smoking causes a grim list of other diseases. She understood but felt powerless to kick the habit she began as a teenager.
Last week Brady, coughing and close to tears, was Exhibit A at a news conference at which scientists reported on new research indicating that “low-tar” or “light” cigarettes pose the same health risk as regular ones. In 1981, the U.S. surgeon general urged smokers to switch to light cigarettes if they couldn’t quit.
That was a “bad mistake,” National Cancer Institute scientists now admit: People who smoke the “low-tar” brands tend to smoke more and inhale more deeply to get the same nicotine. For Brady, that meant two packs of Marlboro lights a day.
Aren’t we, all of us, like Sarah Brady--a bundle of contradictions, a jumble of strengths and weaknesses? Steely and clearheaded in some areas of life, in others we can be weak-kneed prisoners of our appetites. Brady’s contradictions are now painfully, tragically apparent. Once again, she teaches a sad lesson.
