Cops Bust Poker Game at Idaho Senior Center

This kind of rampant stupidity happens a couple of times each year, gets everyone upset who reads about it, makes the police look like fools, and in an age of fiscal frugality it represents a huge waste of police resources. Last year we blogged about the Dallas TX swat team raiding illegal poker games, bashing in doors, and in general playing cops-and-robbers, while scaring the daylights out of everyday people like you and me—folks just enjoying a friendly poker game.

Last month a group of Idaho pensioners had their friendly poker game raided and shut down by police officers.

The game had been going on about five years. Approximately twenty retirees gathered at the Twin Falls Senior Center every Friday to play Texas hold’em. Each player ponied up $20, with the prize money shared by the first few finishers.

Retiree Norman Pohl was quoted as saying, “I don’t have many things that I can do. I met so many people … I would look for it every week.” Since the bust, players altered the rules of their game and now play without money, and as everyone knows, that can’t be much fun.

With budgets tight everywhere, can busting a $20 buy-in poker tournament at a senior center really be a priority of Twin Falls law enforcement? While I realize the cops are there to enforce the laws—they don’t make them—it makes them look like a bunch of schmucks, while the city fathers who enact such inane laws in the first place never seem to get the blame.

What this country really needs is a constitutional amendment forbidding sumptuary laws. Eliminating laws that regulate personal behavior where no one is hurt in the process, and killing off all the laws that seek to regulate victimless crimes—an oxymoron if there ever was one—is the only way to make this sort of stupidity go away for good.