Free Republic

ATLANTA - Nearly 200 years of legal precedent should not apply to a 20-year-old man who wants to carry a gun, his lawyer argued before the Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday. Thomas Stephens, who turns 21 next year, was denied a license to carry a handgun in public when he applied for one in Lumpkin County. He sued, and his case made it to the high court, which heard arguments by his lawyer and by the state attorney general's office. The state contends in a legal brief that the restrictions on adults under age 21 are "baked into the Georgia...

<p>A California Democrat has proposed a bill that would raise the state’s minimum smoking age from 18 to 21 in an effort to keep cigarettes out of the hands of teenagers.</p> <p>State Sen. Ed Hernandez introduced Senate Bill 151, which would make California the first state in the country to raise the minimum smoking age to 21. Similar proposals have previously failed in New Jersey, Utah, Colorado and Maryland.</p>

For the record, I tend to think that a cigarette ban for minors may be appropriate. While I oppose prohibition for adults, I think it makes sense to say that adults shouldn’t be permitted to entice children into certain unhealthy choices. Of course, if such a prohibition is put in place, it needs to be justified by banning a substance that is clearly dangerous, not just “unhealthy” by some statistic that we know doesn’t apply to all people. If the evidence qualifies tobacco as such a substance, then I can see restricting it from children.But recent news about a new...