There’s Always More Angry Problem Gamblers Where Those Came From

This week, five sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS) and their associated players' unions sent letters to gambling regulators in 35 states requesting that something be done to curtail the increasing amount of harassment athletes are facing from angry gamblers. Their proposal: Give teams and players a way to report harassing behavior directly to regulators, and then have the offending bettors banned from placing future bets. It would certainly be good to prevent antisocial losers who type "kill yourself" into an athlete's Instagram comments from ever loading up a betting app again, but the existence of these letters makes one wonder what else these leagues and their unions could be demanding, and why they are not. The problem with sports gambling is not that it gives antisocial losers an excuse to harass athletes, but that it constantly creates new antisocial losers. The population of American sports bettors is not one in which there are just a few bad apples that need to be dealt with, but rather a self-replenishing orchard of bad apples. Legalized sports gambling is all but designed to produce the kind of behavior these athletes and leagues are decrying, and the sportsbooks will go on doing just that no matter how many bans are issued, so long as every year brings a fresh crop of impressionable 18–24 year olds for them to market their products to.

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