Legalizing Gambling

Ed Miller has an interesting article on the shootings and legalizing gambling. He is a well noted and intelligent professor of the game.

While I appreciate and somewhat agree with his notion that legalizing gambling will cut down on the number of players in Illegal games I am not sure that it is totally accurate and think his statement that legalizing gambling would stop these kind of events is far fetched.

Even if the small NY games are legal that is not going to stop robbery and death. There is a lot of money at the games and not a lot of security. I do not see legalizing the game changing the situation much. The small clubs are probably not going to hire armed guards for the games. The guards would cost them MONEY and they probably are not going to be willing to spend it. I could be wrong but just because it is an illegal game does not mean they currently could not have armed guards and yet they have not done so.

I would think the illegal games would dry up where brick and morter casino's opened and a legal, Vegas scale, type game was run. Big corporations would obviously hire armed guards and a professional team to make sure THEY were not cheated or robbed. However people in general are lazy. Not every place like bumble fuck Ohio is going to be able to support a large casino. I currently have a casino 3-hours from me and I am not willing to make that drive regularly and I think anyone outside of an hour from a casino is not going to change the way they play.

Also people who play at these live games probably enjoy the live game. These people I am sure also play online. The "illegality" of the whole thing has not changed that. I just do not see where making poker legal would change anything that happens in these impromptu illegal casinos. I think they will continue to be as unsafe as they always have been.

I do think legalizing poker is important and will help in many other areas but using the death of someone as the rallying cry for legalized poker just does not seem to make sense. It does have a nice media spin to it but I think the reality is something far different.

Am I wrong about this? Does anyone have another opinion?