Plenty of fiction about gambling

Proponents of legalizing casino gambling should deny opponents some of the comfortable fictions to which they now cling.

For example, the fundamental question lawmakers might take up during the legislative session is not whether Texas should have gambling.

Texas has gambling and plenty of it. Illegal gambling halls have become as common as convenience stores.

Video slot machine gambling halls are all across this county and all across the state. They constitute a booming industry.

If gambling brings social ills, then by inescapable extension, Texas already has those social ills.

If gambling attracts a bad element, as opponents argue, then the bad element already has arrived, bought property and moved in.

Casinos already are here. They are just illegal, unregulated and not taxed appropriately.

Local communities already are dealing with the crime, addiction and any other bad consequences of gambling.

They just are not getting as much benefit as they would from legal, regulated and properly taxed casino operations.

Neither are the gamblers, by the way.

Instead of playing in safe casinos policed for at least minimum levels of honestly, local gamblers must risk being robbed or murdered in speak-easies that might themselves be practicing a form of theft rather than offering games of chance.

One North Texas prosecutor told editors that many of the video slots local law enforcement confiscated were set to never pay off.

It’s interesting to ask why the ardent foes of legal gambling have raised such little fuss about all the illegal gambling going on under their noses.

The question also is not whether Texans will gamble. Texans already are gambling in big numbers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Nevada and New Mexico. If you doubt the size of the market here, drive south along Interstate 45 from Houston until you see the billboard offering $15 bus trips to Louisiana casinos.

Much of the bad inherent in gambling resides in the gambler, not the gambling hall. If a person is inclined, or compelled if you prefer, to blow the rent money or the diaper money or the food money on gambling, he’ll do it here or elsewhere.

As it stands now, Louisiana gets the money, and Texas gets the problem.

The real questions facing lawmakers are these:

• Will Texas finally take effective steps to end illegal gambling? Probably not.

• Will Texas replace illegal, unregulated, inappropriately taxed casinos with legal, regulated and appropriately taxed casinos?