On my eighteenth birthday my family took me to a casino to gamble for the very first time. I started off the night with three hundred dollars. When I got there, I thought I was going to be the dark horse, gamble well and win it all even though everyone was expecting me to lose. I was so excited to gamble that I kept betting money. By the end of the night I had actually gambled badly and lost all of the three hundred dollars I brought to the Casino.
The United States Supreme Court declared the ban on sports betting unconstitutional in 2012. Of the people who gamble about 76% are likely to develop a depressive disorder (Thomas). Sports betting became legal across the United States in 2018. I am against legalized sports betting because of how gambling affects culture, education, family and morality.
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Culture is negatively impacted by legalized sports betting. Every year, millions of Americans choose to fill out brackets and gamble their hard-earned money on a tournament called March Madness. According to Joe Lunardi, an American college basketball analyst for ESPN, “March Madness - the United States’ national college basketball championship - is a straight knockout tournament that involves the best 65 teams in the country, representing virtually every state and certainly every region” (Lunardi). Fans across the country spend their time and money to complete their brackets attempting to predict the entire lineup. The number of fans who actually predicted the entire bracket is extremely small. The Forbes article discloses, “The NCAA Tournament brackets and pools generate gigantic interest, and $4.6 billion is expected to be wagered on a collective 149 million brackets by more than 40 million people” (Ginsbach). With such a little success rate of brackets, and such a large amount of money there are millions of betters losing money. According to Edinboro University mathematics instructor, Michelle McCarney, “the odds of picking a perfect bracket at random are one in 14 quintillion” (Dudley). The chance of one winning is incredibly tiny, yet millions of fans still spend their hard-earned money. Knowing these odds people would become less likely to continue betting money on their brackets.
Education can also become threatened by legalized sports betting. Student gamblers will lose lots of money from these sports bets due to the extremely small chances of winning. Legalized sports betting also negatively impacts student athletes. The NCAA prohibits betting on sports for all student athletes, this could be detrimental to a student (Rpowell). If a student becomes addicted to sports betting they could lose their scholarships to their school and be unable to pay for their scholastic education at their college. These students become fanatical gamblers who are completely obsessed with sports betting and lose sight of their education.
Family is majorly affected by gambling problems. When one person has a gambling addiction they often turn to their family for money after they lose their own money. On Debate.org, a Casino Insider rationalizes, “We should have a choice to spend OUR money any way we choose” (Is Gambling Bad for Society and Should It Be Made Unlawful?). This quote demonstrates a good point that people should be allowed to use their money in whatever way they see fit, which is true, but when compulsive gamblers lose all of their money they turn to their families for money. This is an issue because now the gamblers family is losing their money as well.
Morality is an issue brought up by legalized sports betting. Gambling is not a moral activity. Robert Faugno proclaims, “Sports gambling is a vice and it can be highly addictive for some individuals” (Faugno). It is not morally good for sports betting to be legalized when so many people are susceptible to becoming addicted. The Washington Times, disclosed that teenagers have a much higher probability of cultivating a gambling problem than adults do (Thomas). Teenagers who develop these gambling addictions early in their lives, struggle with it for the rest of their lives.
Legalized sports betting should be prohibited in the future. Some may argue it is the individuals choice, but many individuals hide it from the people close to them and destroy them. Clearly, legalized sports betting is a bad idea.
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