Ban Legislation Crawling

With emphasis on the likelihood that it would stick, Governor Carcieri should veto this nonsense:

Five years after a college student was struck and killed by a bus during a pub crawl in Newport, Rhode Island lawmakers have voted to impose a statewide ban on such events with the onus on bar owners to enforce the rule or risk losing their liquor licenses.

Cynthia Needham's writing muddies the issue, here, although the relevant point is clarified farther down the page:

In May 2004, a 21-year-old Fairfield University student, Francis J. Marx V, fell in the path of a bus bringing University of Rhode Island students to Narragansett after a pub crawl.

The people on the bus were the ones who had been pub crawling, so unless the General Assembly has information that the bus driver him or her self had been drinking, the evening's itinerary was irrelevant. (Even if he or she had, the nature of the event would have been largely irrelevant.) It could have been members of a senior center returning from a late night bridge party; would that sort of event have thereafter been banned?

As I began by saying: Governor Carcieri should veto this legislation with the statement that legislators should not presume to meddle so minutely with the lives of their constituents, especially when they (the GA totalitarians) so clearly lack the brainpower to target details that are actually relevant to a presumed problem.

Moreover, the governor should take the opportunity to announce a much lower threshold for vetoes until the truly critical issues — notably, the budget and pension reform — have been addressed.