The tobacco companies made the supreme mistake of thinking that they could compromise with their critics and put the issue to rest. Once they smelled weakness though their opponents repeated drove to the hoop.
Gun owners and the NRA watched and learned.
Interestingly, it seems like many of the places with the strongest anti-tobacco laws were the ones where hardly anyone smoked anyway. I remember when the Metrodome in Minneapolis was first considering a smoking ban back in the early 1990s -- before the city or state had ever regulated smoking in public places. They spent a lot of timing agonizing over this "controversial" measure, until someone suggested they do a survey of the fans of the sports teams that played there. It turns out that the smoking ban wasn't just non-controversial, it was also pointless ... because you could walk around Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding suburbs for days and never see a single person smoking a cigarette.