How the War on Tobacco Could Reshape America’s Relationship With Guns

The public health playbook that helped drive down cigarette smoking in the United States over the past six decades could be adapted to reduce the appeal of firearms, particularly handguns, according to a new paper from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The argument, advanced by APPC research director Daniel Romer, does not call for new restrictions on ownership as its centerpiece. Instead, it proposes a shift in emphasis: rather than focusing exclusively on individuals considered at high risk of violence, policymakers and researchers should consider a universal strategy aimed at reducing demand for guns as consumer products, much as anti-smoking campaigns reduced demand for tobacco.

The paper, titled “Universal Strategies to End Appeal of Firearms in America,” is in press in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and is available as a journal pre-print. Romer’s central claim is that existing approaches to firearm violence, which largely target people believed to be at risk of harming themselves or others, remain important but could be complemented by population-level interventions that change how Americans think about guns in the first place. The model for such an approach, he argues, is the sustained campaign against cigarettes, which combined public education about health consequences with measures that curbed the promotion and glamorization of tobacco in popular culture.

Personal protection is now the most commonly cited reason for owning a firearm in the United States, and that framing matters well beyond marketing. It has shaped constitutional law. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court described handguns as the “quintessential self-defense weapon” and used that characterization as part of its justification for extending Second Amendment protection to carrying handguns in public. In Romer’s view, this makes the self-protection narrative a strategic target: if the perception that firearms are a safe and effective means of protecting oneself and others could be challenged with evidence, the consumer appeal that underpins both the market and the jurisprudence might begin to erode.

One concrete target Romer identifies is the portrayal of guns in movies and television. Entertainment, he writes, frequently depicts firearms as reliable tools for subduing adversaries and defending one’s family, and it does so in ways that sanitize the consequences. “Those shows make it seem that it is easy to hit their targets with effects that appear bloodless,” Romer writes in the paper. “A young person viewing these portrayals could easily get the impression that handguns are a simple and effective way to protect oneself.” The concern echoes a well-documented dynamic from tobacco research: when smoking was routinely glamorized on screen, adolescent exposure to those portrayals was associated with increased smoking initiation.

The evidence base for an analogous effect with guns is still developing, but several findings are suggestive. Earlier research by the policy center’s Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute found that the rise in firearm use in popular movies and television crime dramas is associated with an increase in firearm homicides, particularly among young people ages 15 to 24. A separate analysis found that the increase in firearm use in popular movies from 2000 to 2021 closely tracked increased handgun purchases over the same period. Romer is careful to note the limits of these data: they parallel what was once observed for adolescent exposure to movie portrayals of cigarettes, but more research is needed to determine the causal impact of exposure to firearms in movies, in the way that was ultimately done for tobacco.

The tobacco campaign offers a technical template for how that causal case was built and how policy followed. Anti-smoking efforts combined several mutually reinforcing elements: epidemiological evidence linking smoking to disease, mass-media education campaigns that debunked the image of smoking as glamorous or safe, regulation of advertising, and the elimination of paid tobacco product placement in entertainment. As those measures took hold, portrayals of smoking in popular movies declined, and they declined in tandem with population smoking rates. The lesson Romer draws is that changing the cultural environment around a consumer product, not only informing individual consumers, can shift population-level behavior.

Translated to firearms, similar strategies could be studied, Romer argues. These include reducing firearm product placement and portrayals in entertainment, educating the public about the risks associated with firearm ownership, and emphasizing the specific dangers of leaving firearms unsecured in the home. Each element mirrors a component of the tobacco effort: product placement restrictions correspond to the entertainment-side interventions, ownership-risk education corresponds to health-hazard messaging, and unsecured-firearm warnings correspond to targeted safety communication. The paper frames these as research priorities rather than ready-made policies, stressing that their effectiveness for firearms has not yet been demonstrated.

The consumer-product framing is the paper’s most distinctive analytical move. Tobacco control succeeded, in part, because advocates reframed cigarettes from an ordinary commodity into a dangerous product whose marketing deserved scrutiny. Romer suggests that firearms, and handguns in particular, could be examined through the same lens, with attention to how they are advertised, depicted, and normalized. “The public health approach to cigarettes as a consumer product demonstrated how various forms of public education can debunk the claim that owning a firearm is worth the risks that accompany widespread possession,” Romer says. Whether that debunking can succeed in a cultural and legal environment so different from the one tobacco faced is an open empirical question, and the paper does not claim otherwise.

The distinction between universal and targeted strategies carries practical weight. Targeted interventions, such as crisis intervention programs, extreme risk protection orders, and violence interruption efforts aimed at people at elevated risk, address the sharpest harms but leave untouched the broader market dynamics that put handguns in millions of homes. A universal approach, by contrast, operates on the entire population, aiming to lower demand at the source. Romer acknowledges that further research is needed to determine whether such strategies would be effective for firearms, but he points to the historical record as grounds for optimism. “The success of the universal public health approach to cigarettes serves as a model for the reduction of the consumer appeal of firearms,” he writes.

Published as a commentary in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, with the article dated 23 September 2026, the paper is positioned as an argument for a research agenda rather than a legislative proposal. Its measurable claims are specific: firearm portrayals in entertainment have risen alongside handgun purchases and firearm homicides among young people; the self-defense rationale dominates ownership motivations and has been endorsed by the Supreme Court; and the tobacco precedent shows that education plus cultural de-normalization can reduce a product’s appeal. What remains untested is causality and intervention efficacy, and Romer’s paper explicitly calls for the kind of rigorous studies that eventually justified tobacco’s entertainment restrictions. For researchers, the immediate task is to establish whether screen exposure to firearms shapes attitudes and behavior the way screen exposure to smoking once did. For policymakers, the paper suggests that the tools of public health, evidence, education, and cultural change, may offer a path that complements, rather than replaces, the targeted violence-prevention efforts already in place.

Subject of Research: Applying tobacco-control-style public health strategies to reduce the consumer appeal and use of firearms in the United States

Article Title: Public health strategies used against cigarettes could help reduce appeal of firearms, paper argues

Article References: Public health strategies used against cigarettes could help reduce appeal of firearms, paper argues. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: firearms, gun violence, public health, tobacco control, cigarette smoking, handguns, self-defense, entertainment media, movie portrayals, Annenberg Public Policy Center, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, consumer products