Are 20-Year-Olds the Same as 2-Year-Olds?
Democrats have been quick to point out the flexible and situational values of conservatives in the Trump era, abandoning policy positions and moral touchstones they had previously claimed to hold as bedrock principles all in the interest of tribalism. It's a very fair criticism, but liberals need to look at their own reflection on occasion as well, and one increasingly common theme on which the left is losing its mind is the growing consensus that adulthood doesn't begin until 21. Worse yet, the left's new love affair with infantilizing young adults appears entirely cherry-picked, isolated only to things they don't like and thus lacking any kind of legal or ethical consistency.
Before I get into the gun issue, the newest frontier of the left's push to reclassify young adults as children, it's an interesting reminder that this movement began with Ronald Reagan, who in the mid-1980s, leveraged highway fund allocation as a means to strong arm state legislatures across the country to raise the age to purchase and consume alcohol to 21. The argument was that 18-year-olds were buying alcohol for younger kids in their high schools, an argument I consider dubious generally and even if accepted at face value would only justify raising the legal drinking age to 19.
The consequences have been disastrous for young adults, with millions of 18-20-year-olds having been funneled through the legal system over the last 30 years simply for consuming a product legal for those 21 and over. I'm no fan generally of alcohol and don't touch the stuff, but giving criminal records to nonviolent consumers is insanity. My sophomore-year college roommate in the late 90s was a whip-smart pre-law student who partook in some alcohol consumption on weekends, and was always paranoid about getting an underage consumption charge that would deny him entry into law school. I always think back to him and how insane it was that our laws on harmless college campus alcohol consumption could derail a promising 20-year-old college student's future, and always hoped sanity would prevail and the legal age for drinking would drop back down to 18, the same age that we've set as a legal threshold for adulthood on every other matter.
Instead, the trend is the other direction, expanding the scope of legal pastimes on which young adults will be reclassified as criminals for partaking in, with the left leading the charge to finish what Reagan started. Most prominently--and most cynically--the left has been pushing hard in the last couple of years to raise the legal age to 21 for their biggest bugaboo of all, tobacco. All critical thinking goes out the window on anything related to tobacco and is replaced by ends-always-justify-the-means equivocating. Just last week I read a stomach-churningly craven editorial in the Seattle Times mindlessly advocating for criminalizing tobacco use by young adults with an insultingly thin argument that surrenders the principle of the legal rights of 18, 19, and 20-year-olds with a degree of breeziness that should everybody's intelligence. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/raise-smoking-vaping-age-to-21-and-save-lives/ This editorial could have replaced cigarettes with anything one doesn't like, from pornography to abortion, and make the same idiot argument with no consideration of the mockery it makes of the law.
And while that narrative is convenient when it comes to the left's culture war against tobacco, it's jarring that they appear comfortable maintaining the existing the prohibition against their preferred form of smoke when it comes to young adults. Even with marijuana legalization gaining momentum in jurisdictions across the country, buoyed by arguments about the insanity of cycling users through the criminal justice system, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that continuing to make criminals out of 18, 19, and 20-year-old marijuana users is a dumb idea as the legal age to purchase and consume marijuana has been 21 everywhere it's legalized. What could possibly justify this distinction? Why should any 20-year-old still be arrested and be branded with a criminal record for using a legal product?
Which brings us to Dianne Feinstein's proposal in response to the latest mass shooting at a Florida high school to raise the age for purchasing a rifle to 21. Political leaders, even in an environment where Democrats retake the reins of power, would have very limited capital when it comes to the issue of gun control. A proposal like Feinstein's needlessly dirties the pool and makes other efforts that much harder. It's an unwinnable argument tactically that an 18-year-old can deploy overseas and learn how to master a weapon serving his or her country but then be forbidden from returning home at age 20 and buying a rifle of their own. But even if the argument was winnable, it's still a dumb idea that further redefines young adults as children.
The principle seems to be the same as what drove Reagan to muscle through an increased legal age for alcohol consumption in the 1980s and is driving the left to do the same thing with tobacco today....that raising the age of purchase would prevent young adults from shooting up their current or recent high schools. But consider Virginia Tech where the mass shooter was a college student. There are students older than 21 at college. So do we next raise the purchase age for rifles to 23 to keep guns entirely of campus? Or possibly 35 to account for all grad students? Ditto for alcohol and tobacco. By raising the drinking and smoking age from 18 to 21 to "keep it out of high schools", it moves the goalposts to where the same argument could be made to keep raising the legal age to "keep it out of colleges". Do we ever get to the point where adults are considered adults if we take this mindset to its logical conclusion?
I was amused at the irony watching "Real Time with Bill Maher" this weekend and listening to a couple of his guests muse how the voting age should be lowered to 16, arguing that the kids couldn't do worse in selecting our elected officials than adults. Now I can't know for sure if the panelists making this argument about trusting the wisdom and judgment of 16-year-olds to make adult decisions when it comes to complicated decisions of how the country runs also believe that these same 16-year-olds should spend five additional years being treated with the same legal rights as two-year-olds when it comes to the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or firearms, but given the cherry-picking of the left on these matters in recent years, it would surprise me if they didn't.
I'm sure some will think this is a tone-deaf argument to make in the days after a mass shooting where 17 people died, but remember that a lot of really bad choices were made in the interest of "security" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks too. Using this tragedy as a backdoor means to weaken the legal rights of young adults is shameless and deserves to be called out as such. How do we as a society reconcile decisions by young adults regarding sexual activity, financial investments, and the signing of legal contracts, all of which have tremendous short-term and long-term consequences but which are currently legally permissible for 18-year-olds? Should we take those rights away from them too? With criminal justice consequences for those who dare to defy a legal system reclassifying them as children?
I can only circle back to the left getting their inspiration here from Ronald Reagan, the architect of the modern "adulthood starts at 21" movement. Was he right? Should there no legal difference between college students and toddlers? Some good-faith critical thinking by the left could go a long way here, but I'm not confident that it's coming.
Before I get into the gun issue, the newest frontier of the left's push to reclassify young adults as children, it's an interesting reminder that this movement began with Ronald Reagan, who in the mid-1980s, leveraged highway fund allocation as a means to strong arm state legislatures across the country to raise the age to purchase and consume alcohol to 21. The argument was that 18-year-olds were buying alcohol for younger kids in their high schools, an argument I consider dubious generally and even if accepted at face value would only justify raising the legal drinking age to 19.
The consequences have been disastrous for young adults, with millions of 18-20-year-olds having been funneled through the legal system over the last 30 years simply for consuming a product legal for those 21 and over. I'm no fan generally of alcohol and don't touch the stuff, but giving criminal records to nonviolent consumers is insanity. My sophomore-year college roommate in the late 90s was a whip-smart pre-law student who partook in some alcohol consumption on weekends, and was always paranoid about getting an underage consumption charge that would deny him entry into law school. I always think back to him and how insane it was that our laws on harmless college campus alcohol consumption could derail a promising 20-year-old college student's future, and always hoped sanity would prevail and the legal age for drinking would drop back down to 18, the same age that we've set as a legal threshold for adulthood on every other matter.
Instead, the trend is the other direction, expanding the scope of legal pastimes on which young adults will be reclassified as criminals for partaking in, with the left leading the charge to finish what Reagan started. Most prominently--and most cynically--the left has been pushing hard in the last couple of years to raise the legal age to 21 for their biggest bugaboo of all, tobacco. All critical thinking goes out the window on anything related to tobacco and is replaced by ends-always-justify-the-means equivocating. Just last week I read a stomach-churningly craven editorial in the Seattle Times mindlessly advocating for criminalizing tobacco use by young adults with an insultingly thin argument that surrenders the principle of the legal rights of 18, 19, and 20-year-olds with a degree of breeziness that should everybody's intelligence. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/raise-smoking-vaping-age-to-21-and-save-lives/ This editorial could have replaced cigarettes with anything one doesn't like, from pornography to abortion, and make the same idiot argument with no consideration of the mockery it makes of the law.
And while that narrative is convenient when it comes to the left's culture war against tobacco, it's jarring that they appear comfortable maintaining the existing the prohibition against their preferred form of smoke when it comes to young adults. Even with marijuana legalization gaining momentum in jurisdictions across the country, buoyed by arguments about the insanity of cycling users through the criminal justice system, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that continuing to make criminals out of 18, 19, and 20-year-old marijuana users is a dumb idea as the legal age to purchase and consume marijuana has been 21 everywhere it's legalized. What could possibly justify this distinction? Why should any 20-year-old still be arrested and be branded with a criminal record for using a legal product?
Which brings us to Dianne Feinstein's proposal in response to the latest mass shooting at a Florida high school to raise the age for purchasing a rifle to 21. Political leaders, even in an environment where Democrats retake the reins of power, would have very limited capital when it comes to the issue of gun control. A proposal like Feinstein's needlessly dirties the pool and makes other efforts that much harder. It's an unwinnable argument tactically that an 18-year-old can deploy overseas and learn how to master a weapon serving his or her country but then be forbidden from returning home at age 20 and buying a rifle of their own. But even if the argument was winnable, it's still a dumb idea that further redefines young adults as children.
The principle seems to be the same as what drove Reagan to muscle through an increased legal age for alcohol consumption in the 1980s and is driving the left to do the same thing with tobacco today....that raising the age of purchase would prevent young adults from shooting up their current or recent high schools. But consider Virginia Tech where the mass shooter was a college student. There are students older than 21 at college. So do we next raise the purchase age for rifles to 23 to keep guns entirely of campus? Or possibly 35 to account for all grad students? Ditto for alcohol and tobacco. By raising the drinking and smoking age from 18 to 21 to "keep it out of high schools", it moves the goalposts to where the same argument could be made to keep raising the legal age to "keep it out of colleges". Do we ever get to the point where adults are considered adults if we take this mindset to its logical conclusion?
I was amused at the irony watching "Real Time with Bill Maher" this weekend and listening to a couple of his guests muse how the voting age should be lowered to 16, arguing that the kids couldn't do worse in selecting our elected officials than adults. Now I can't know for sure if the panelists making this argument about trusting the wisdom and judgment of 16-year-olds to make adult decisions when it comes to complicated decisions of how the country runs also believe that these same 16-year-olds should spend five additional years being treated with the same legal rights as two-year-olds when it comes to the purchase of alcohol, tobacco, or firearms, but given the cherry-picking of the left on these matters in recent years, it would surprise me if they didn't.
I'm sure some will think this is a tone-deaf argument to make in the days after a mass shooting where 17 people died, but remember that a lot of really bad choices were made in the interest of "security" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks too. Using this tragedy as a backdoor means to weaken the legal rights of young adults is shameless and deserves to be called out as such. How do we as a society reconcile decisions by young adults regarding sexual activity, financial investments, and the signing of legal contracts, all of which have tremendous short-term and long-term consequences but which are currently legally permissible for 18-year-olds? Should we take those rights away from them too? With criminal justice consequences for those who dare to defy a legal system reclassifying them as children?
I can only circle back to the left getting their inspiration here from Ronald Reagan, the architect of the modern "adulthood starts at 21" movement. Was he right? Should there no legal difference between college students and toddlers? Some good-faith critical thinking by the left could go a long way here, but I'm not confident that it's coming.
posted by Mark at 5:33 PM
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