As well, driving laws regulate driving on state-owned roads. As far as I know, you’re perfectly within your rights to drive a vehicle you own on your own land without any proper license or registration. As far as I’m concerned, the state is perfectly in the right to make laws concerning their roads; they’re also within their rights to make laws concerning age restrictions upon alcohol consumption in public places. However, I would submit that states that attempt to regulate drinking in private (say, in your own or parents’ home) are overstepping their boundaries…not that I want to turn this into a debate.
Bingo. The simple reality is that the vast majority of minors consume a fair amount of alcohol long before their 21st birthday. While I can understand why such a law is kept on the books (people believe it reduces underage drinking, nobody wants to be the one to propose the change, etc.), I do think that it’s fairly dishonest to loudly extoll the virtues of the ban on the one hand, and wink at your kids while reminiscing about the wild times you had at that age on the other.
In 1983, one year before the National Minimum Purchase Age Act was passed, 88% of high school seniors reported any alcohol use in the past year and 41% reported binge drinking. By 1997, alcohol use by seniors had dropped to 75% and the percentage of binge drinkers had fallen to 31%.
The number of alcohol-related youth fatalities among drivers dropped by 63% between 1982 and 1996.
Your argument may very well be true, but the statistics are hardly conclusive. You’re comparing figures that are fourteen years apart, and assuming that the statistical change is due to one particular factor that occured in the intervening time.
It all sounds too bizarre for me. I had access to alcohol all my life. I drank wine with meals at home from the age of 6. My mum even went to buy me beers at the off-licence when I was 12-14 'cause I couldn’t get served. Been drinking in our local bars since I turned 15.
I give up (serious) drinking when I turned 19.
It’s just too weird to think that people are still waiting at that age for their first taste of alcohol.
Mangetout, is it legal in the UK to drink alcohol from the age of 5 in your own house? I read that somewhere.
And, IMHO, anyone who drinks alcohol and then drives a car should be taken out and shot. No comeback, no mercy, no appeal.
My city in California, USA, recently made the most bizaare drinking law. They made the fine for
a minor caught drinking in private at home higher than if they are caught doing it in public. I asked
a lawyer in my church if that should apply to kids drinking our diluted port communion wine & she
said that’s one of our freedoms.
Keep an eye on these ordinances. Many times, they give the local cops an unreasonable amount of power to conduct searches in homes where parties are “suspected”. Something similar was promoted in a local burg round my area, with the police campaigning heavily for it. The rhetoric flowed like wine, let me tell you.
What people outside the US do not understand enough is that most laws in the US are made by the 50 states and District of Columbia, not by the federal government. Therefore, your question depends on what state you are talking about. In the state of Wisconsin, people under the drinking age of 21 can drink, theoretically, at any age as long as they are accompanied by their parent or guardian. See the quotation from the Wisconsin statutes I gave above.
Wisconsin is one of the three most liberal states regarding alcohol consumption (it has a large beer industry), so other states may have more restrictive laws about underage drinkers.
Before the change in the mid-80s, the law in D.C. was that you could drink beer or wine at 18, but had to wait till 21 for liquor (on the theory that it’s quicker, I guess). On the whole, I think that age limits for different activities probably make as much sense as any incredibly broad generalisation. I know thirteen year olds to whom I’d lend my car before I’d lend it to the 38 year old across the street, but I sure wouldn’t want to share the road (or a pub) with a bunch of 13 year olds.
Well it seems to me the reason for raising the drinking age, and for having a drinking age in general, is to BE ABLE to stop certain underage people from drinking, not to stop ALL underage drinking.
If you drink in a private residence, your parents know about it, and you aren’t making a bunch of noise, NO ONE WILL EVER CARE. Is the law a pain in the butt? Of course. But so is scraping underage drunk drivers’ bodies off of the asphalt. Think the figures are bogus? Look them up.
If your argument is that you’re being denied equal protection under the law based on your being under 21 years old, the problem is that your not a member of a suspect class. Therefore, the government needs only a rational basis for its discriminating against you. Since there is a long history of governments regulating alcohol consumption based on age and there are rational arguments for it, there is no problem here for the government to make its case.
I’m a chump for responding to this fallacious analogy, but here goes …
(any logicians out there want to enumerate the logical fallacies?)
You’re not going to win in any court with that argument.
Slavery is specifically prohibited by the 13th Amendment. Age-based restriction on alcohol consumption is not. Indeed, the 21st Amendment explicitly recognises the power of government to regulate alcohol.
Slavery impacts on rights that are considered fundamental human rights. Consumption of alcohol by minors has never been recognised as a fundamental human right. The government needs only a rational basis to regulate such behavior.
Slavery impacts the rights of a suspect class (i.e., a racial minority). Indeed, racial discrimination is specifically prohibited by the 15th Amendment. Minors are not considered a suspect class.
Your argument implies that no rational argument can ever be valid because what were once considered rational arguments for slavery have since been rejected.
“Minor” in the sense of “underaged” is a legal term and minority and majority are defined by statutes. If the alcohol law prohibits the sale of alcohol to minors, then it will define minors as being under 21 or under 18 or whatever. It can vary from one law to another.
It seems to me that usually these days such statutes just refer to the age rather than using the word “minor,” but still, it’s accurate to refer to any underaged people as minors with regard to that law. So if the alcohol law says you can’t have alcohol until you’re 21, then a 20-year-old is a minor.
Historically, though, in Anglo-American culture, 21 has usually been the upper limit of minority. It would be strange to call a 24-year-old a minor just because he or she isn’t yet old enough to run for the House of Representatives.
Believe it or not, “infant” can be used in the same way, especially in property law, I think. You can be 18 years old and be called an infant.
