Should Gambling Be Legalized?
...and
social conditions have been promised to the communities that have embraced
legalized gambling. However, with twenty years of experience it is time to
look back and analyze whether this is true or not.
It could easily be said that gambling is as American as apple pie.
Gambling has shaped American history since its beginning. Lotteries were used
by The First Continental Congress to help finance the Revolutionary war. Many
of our founding fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George
Washington, have sponsored private lotteries. It has been said that "Our
founding fathers were just numbers guys in wigs" At one time baseball would
have seemed to be the American pastime. This is not so now. In recent years,
the attendance at casinos has nearly doubled the attendance at all major league
baseball games, with close to 130 million people visiting casinos every year.1
With so much money at stake, the average gambler does not stand a chance
against this big business. The casinos go to every length to analyze what makes
a gambler bet, stay longer, and loose as much money as possible.
Gamblers who come to casinos with the intention of winning money are
habitually disappointed. As casino crime lord, Meyer Lansky's universal
gambling truth states; "Gamblers never win, the house never loses"2 Slot
Machines and most table games allow players to make bets where the probability
of winning is relatively high. Frequent wins are characterized by low payouts.
These frequent wins encourage further gambles with low payouts.
Frequent winning, low paying games are not the only way casinos get
people to keep playing. Nothing less that psychological warfare is going on at
casinos across the country. "The days of shaved dice, missing face cards and
rigged roulette wheels are long gone. But the pursuit of profitability in the
corporate era of...
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