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It was bad enough when I hit my 30s and realized the bars I was hanging out with were filled with 21-22 yr old girls that were too young for what I was looking for.
Wait till you hit 40, let alone 50. Even at 30 though, you realize how immature early-20's kids are.
Having said that, I'd go with 18, both for alcohol purchase and handgun purchasing. If you're an adult in all other ways, why not these two?
That's a terrible argument. The whole point is that if you are declared an adult by law at eighteen almost everywhere, you should be granted all your rights.
If you're old enough to register for the selective service, old enough to enlist without parental consent {18} and old enough to go to Afghanistan or any other conflict the United States get's Americans involved into, then you're old enough to drink any alcoholic beverage you choose to.
A lot of that was simply because drinking water was often contaminated. Alcohol was guaranteed to be disease free. If you could drink water and risk getting sick due to contamination or drink beer and know you would be OK, why wouldn't you choose alcohol?
Well, those drunkards built a pretty nice country.
I wish for no age limit on alcohol, but I don't think that will be possible straight away. Lowering it to 16 or 18 first seems to be a safer bet than total elimination of the drinking age.
A lot of that was simply because drinking water was often contaminated. Alcohol was guaranteed to be disease free. If you could drink water and risk getting sick due to contamination or drink beer and know you would be OK, why wouldn't you choose alcohol?
Since Americans[1700-1900] were no longer living in the squalor citiess of Europe, that disease thing is bull hockey. Native Americans could find sweet water...Were the colonist incapable of doing the same?
A drunkard always has an excuse.
Not calling you a drunk...nor am I opposed to drink. Just saying.
I thought the drinking age being 21 was absurd when I was 20 and I think still think it's absurd decades later. Take away some of the taboo of alcohol and you take away a lot of its appeal at younger ages.
And to echo what others have said, if you're old enough to die for this country, you're old enough to drink.
There are two issues here and neither of them has anything to do with the drinking age.
The first is a culture that condones and encourages binge drinking. In Europe (not the UK), kids can drink from age 16 and often drink younger than that at the dinner table with their parents. And yet, binge drinking is not common and getting drunk is considered stupid, not clever. We need to start by taking the prohibition element out of drinking and fostering an environment where having a drink is considered a normal and pleasurable activity but where youngsters do not have a desire to have 20 drinks.
The second is the whole issue of drunk driving. Quite rightly we have strict laws which punish such anti-social behavior. But one of the reasons that the age was raised back up to 21 was the problem of kids drinking and driving. However, I think that kids today have much more awareness of this issue and are probably more trustworthy than my generation was.
Since Americans[1700-1900] were no longer living in the squalor citiess of Europe, that disease thing is bull hockey. Native Americans could find sweet water...Were the colonist incapable of doing the same?
A drunkard always has an excuse.
Not calling you a drunk...or am I opposed to drink. Just saying.
Why don't you just admit you don't have a grasp on history? From your own link:
Quote:
Water, on the other hand, could make you sick. Though the New World had plenty of fresh, unspoiled water, incautious Americans sickened and sometimes died by drinking from polluted sources. Jamestown gentleman George Percy, relating the troubles of the settlement's early days, wrote that the colonists' drink was "cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men." In some cases, even when it was safe to drink, river water had so much mud that a bucket of it needed to sit long enough to allow suspended material to settle.
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