Gun Control And A Deck Of Cards

lancekates, this one's for you.

When I was a sophomore in high school, three of my friends and I would play spades at lunch. If you don't know, spades is a 4-player card game, similar to bridge, except that spades are the trump card (hence the name).

We like to play a variant called suicide spades. One member from each 2-player team had to bid nil - vow not to take any tricks (not what you're thinking) - each hand. We'd keep score in one of our notebooks and generally finish a game within one lunch period.

Midway through the year, we had gotten pretty good. We had honed our strategy and skills and games were generally pretty close.

But our fun was soon spoiled.

One day, a student's parent called in to complain that her son had lost $50 in a poker game at lunch. Upon further investigation into the matter, the administration found out that the poker game had been going on for quite a while.

From that day forward, students were not allowed to have playing cards at lunch.

Our spades group was annoyed, angered, and - worse yet - bored.

I can only imagine this must be the same dispair that gun enthusiasts in the District of Columbia faced in 1975 with the Firearms Control Regulations Act. The law called for a ban on all firearms except those owned by police or disassembled arms registered before 1976.

If anyone has been to Southeast D.C., then you'd know that the firearm ban does not make anyone safer. All it does is take guns from those who want to use them properly.

A couple months after the school banned playing cards at school, several students started having poker nights at their houses. My brother got involved with one. He would make (or lose) anywhere from $50 to $200 a night.

I never got to play spades with those kids again.

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