Comment by cgriswald
15 hours ago
There’s “no room for debate” in your argument because you’re basing it on false assumptions, trying to gaslight me, moving goalposts and you personally don’t care about the trade offs. It’s very easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. Congrats.
There are clearly trade offs with any law, but your argument was never that the benefits aren’t worth the price it was that minimum age laws don’t work.
There’s no gaslighting going on here. “As an adult Looking back to when I was an 8 year old, I belong that had I been motivated I could have acquired alcohol and cigarettes” is not a persuasive argument that most or even many 8 years olds have access to alcohol and cigarettes.
It’s not even a good argument that you had access because you don’t know that you did.
“I think that I could have got teenagers to get me cigarettes” is not good evidence that you had access to cigarettes. Maybe there were teenagers who would have given you enough cigarettes to feed a habit. Maybe the first 5 you asked would have told you to get lost and you would have given up.
We’ll never know because you didn’t try it. But again even if you had, the evidence shows that minimum ages laws substantially reduce the number of cigar smoked by kids, and the rate of kids who smoke.
If you want to make the argument that the price of making people show ID isn’t worth that benefit then fine make that argument. But you can’t make the argument that minimum ages laws don’t have their intended effect.