When I Was a Boy, We Didn't Buy Drinking Games. We Made Our Own Fun.
Over at When Falls the Coliseum, Scott Stein notes a New York Post report that Suffolk County, New York, legislator Tom Cilmi "hopes to curb underage drinking by banning the sale of booze-themed board games, like beer pong, to minors." Stein observes that the underage drinkers Cilmi has in mind, whom he calls "our children," are largely 18-to-20-year-olds, "minors" who are treated as adults in virtually every other context. Even if we do not question the wisdom of the current drinking age, says Stein, Cilmi's reasoning is hard to follow:
Drinking is already against the law for people under the age of 21. If alcohol is illegal, how is it possible that these children could be playing drinking games? I mean, there's a law against them drinking. Duh, Tom Cilmi, the kids can't play drinking games since we've already stopped them from drinking with our drinking age law. What's that you say? The law hasn't stopped kids from drinking? Oh, well, then this new law is surely going to do the job and keep them from playing drinking games, because while the kids are ignoring the law about not drinking, they'll definitely obey the one about not playing drinking games.
Because most of the kids playing beer pong and quarters and asshole are certainly buying drinking game sets and not just playing drinking games. And once they can't buy the sets, there's no way they'll play beer pong, which requires obscure items like cups and a ping-pong table. And there's no way they'll play quarters, unless they can somehow get their hands on a quarter. And playing asshole is out of the question, because only the rich kids have a deck of cards.
