Banning Spray Paint

Last week, we had yet another stupid idea from our group of morons at Hamilton City Hall. If you're not from around here, I should explain: like any large city, we have a pretty heavy graffiti problem. Now, what do our local representatives want to do about it? Make it illegal to sell spray-paint, to people under 18. I can already tell you, it ain't going to work, Bunky!

This blunder is the brain child of Councillor Chad Collins, who has saved me a lot of trouble in poking holes in it, with this pitch: "Any kind of business operation that has aerosol cans for sale, we could implement a licence -- it doesn't have to be a large fee -- similar to cigarettes."

There's just one problem: I know for a fact that this city can't even keep 13 year-olds from buying cigarettes, no matter what laws are thrown at it, so how the hell do they expect an age limit on spray-paint to work?

One of the reasons I find it so enraging at times to be in Hamilton, is that it is really really self-conscious about a clean image, yet it doesn't like to do much about it. We've always had a poor environmental record, but our waste collectors can't be bothered to pick up recycling a lot of times, nor do we do much about the smog spewing from our steel mills. We have road signs all over the place that are falling over, yet the city is adamant that no one talks about it openly. We have a lot of spray paint in public places, yet rather than do something about social assistance and community services -- so the vandals actually have something to do or think about, besides living in this shithole town -- Hamilton just wants to put a small cash grab on the people selling paint. It's known as sweeping something under the rug. That doesn't usually work, either. Enough said.