Parents, if you stay awake at night worrying that one day when your kids go to college they might try to throw a ping-pong ball into a cup of beer, you can rest easy, as long as the college is in Suffolk County:

A Long Island lawmaker hopes to curb underage drinking by banning the sale of booze-themed board games, like beer pong, to minors.

It would be against the law to sell beer-pong sets to minors under the measure proposed by Suffolk County legislator Tom Cilmi.

“I am not one who would typically advocate for regulation of our free market, but this is simply common sense,” said Cilmi. “Our children’s lives are at risk.”

No one on the entire planet could have guessed that this law would be for the children. Politicians hardly ever use that one. And run for cover when someone has to tell you anything is “simply common sense.” It usually means they don’t have an actual argument for their position.

I don’t want children playing beer pong any more than Cilmi does. That’s why I don’t let my child drink beer. He doesn’t really want to drink beer, anyway, because he’s seven. By “children,” of course, my guess is that Cilmi mostly means college students or people between the ages of 18-20. Maybe some high school seniors are in the mix, though many of them are 18 (and even 19) these days, or 17 anyway, the age at which some were heading off to fight in Vietnam a few decades ago. 

They might be underage, but they are not generally children. If some younger kids are getting themselves into trouble because of drinking games, the burden is on Cilmi to make the case that drinking games that are sold in stores are the cause, that the problem is sufficiently large to require a law, and that the law would do a damn bit of good in reducing the problem.

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.

And since you asked, I was quite a ping-pong player in my youth, and had many a fun evening playing a little beer pong in college. We didn’t buy any sets (what kind of suckers would buy such a thing?) and there was no shortage of beer despite the drinking age being 21. Binge drinking was allegedly a problem then as it is now, 20 years later, showing just how effective the drinking age has been at reducing drinking among college students.

 

Hat tip: Dan Feigenbaum

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: drugs & alcohol, on the law // 6 Comments »