Reply to comment

Ok, how about *fighting* breast cancer with actual *awareness*. I understand that the issue of breast cancer strikes a chord with many of us. We all have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and since this is a growing epidemic, many of us have experienced its effects up close. I think this debate has gone off topic. The issue at hand here is not gun safety. It's not about statistics of the ways in which women die. It is about the *breast cancer awareness* campaign itself.

We're all so caught up in the hype of finding a cure, that we're forgetting to resort to the most important tool in this fight - knowledge. It's not about money. It's not about seeing pink and thinking about your Aunt Mildred who died the year before last from breast cancer. It's about educating ourselves and our children about the hazardous chemicals in everyday products that may one day become cancer.

The fact that *awareness* still means pouring money into a cure is just a way of passing off responsibility, instead of taking control and actually being aware of where this cancer, and others, are coming from. The fact that there's a pink handle on a gun is just as ironic as cosmetic companies jumping on the pink bandwagon even though their products contain known carcinogens. It's marketing. It's about money. And it promotes the wrong kind of awareness. It's a distraction: a way for citizens to turn a blind eye from the real problem because they feel they've done their part in contributing to the eradication of this disease.

It needs to be about intention; about staying true to one's own values; about taking responsibility for one's own awareness; about learning the facts, the causes. The best way to avoid dying from cancer, is to never have it in the first place. There are over 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the US, of which less than 7% have been tested for effects on human health. That's scary. We are obviously not being protected, so we need to save ourselves. Let's wake up before it's too late.