Did they just ban spray paint?

Those who yearn to see government expand until it regulates every nook and cranny of our lives whimper that in Washington there's a shortage of new laws because a lack of "bipartisanship" (read: Republicans willing to vote like Democrats) has led to "gridlock" and that, here in Nevada, the just-adjourned 2007 Legislature "didn't do much."

In Washington, we haven't heard of any layoffs among the 18 attorneys who work full time in the Office of the Law Revision Counsel preparing new editions of the U.S. Code and its annual cumulative supplements of new laws.

That's right, new books full of laws. Every year.

Meantime, in Nevada, Gov. Jim Gibbons sat down last Wednesday to sign a modest 155 new bills into law, including Assembly Bill 212, which raises the age of compulsory schooling from 17 to 18, apparently in response to the crackpot theory that the best way to inculcate a love of learning into a 17-year-old who already hates school because they haven't managed to teach him to read in a decade of trying is to require him to hang around till he's 18, unless he wants to be sent to jail, commonly defined as "school without the boom boxes."

The governor also signed Assembly Bill 14, which aims to fight graffiti not by outlawing spray paint and ink markers, but merely by making it illegal to carry such products "in public places," leaving unanswered the question of how legitimate purchasers are supposed to get them from the store to their car without carrying them through a "public" parking lot. Or does someone intend a bit of selective enforcement here?

Lawmakers were not as reticent with Assembly Bill 148, which bars convenience stores outright from selling decongestants that contain pseudoephedrine, still a (theoretically) legal product. Bootleg drug manufacturers reportedly use the stuff as a precursor for methamphetamine. Of course, dangerous home labs to manufacture the stuff were unheard of back when such users as President John F. Kennedy could get the pills legally at 14 cents apiece. The government cracked down, driving the price up and spurring a wave of illicit manufacture using the precursor P2P (phenyl-2-propanone).

When the government banned that, manufacturers switched to Sudafed.

But surely the meth craze will be nipped in the bud, now that pseudoephedrine is only available in "inconvenience stores." Those darned druggies will never find it there!

Meantime, let's all be thankful they don't use such common household products as alcohol, ammonia, salt, drain cleaner, camping fuel, paint thinner, lye, match tips, and lithium strips extracted from batteries to manufacture the stuff, or else the geniuses in Carson City would have to go back and ban ...

Oh, wait. Never mind.