Texas Arrests Bar Patrons

Is this America? Well, not really, it's Texas. More than 2,200 people have been arrested or cited by the TABC in Texas bars over the last six months. For drinking. In a bar. It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, or shooting domestic quail with clipped wings; not fair. Not fair at all.

Undercover agents target drunks in Texas bars
Carolyn Beck, the commission's spokesman, said the arrests were designed to detain drunks before they left bars and behaved in dangerous ways, such as driving.
"We feel that the only way we're going to get at the drunk-driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this," Ms Beck said. ''There are a lot of dangerous and stupid things people do when they're intoxicated, other than get behind the wheel of a car.
"People walk out into traffic and get run over. People jump off balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss."
Only those who were clearly drunk were targeted, Ms Beck told the Houston Chronicle. It was not about "people who had a couple of beers with dinner. They are people who are so drunk that they caught the attention of a TABC agent".

Clearly drunk? What exactly catches the attention of an undercover cop? Laughing a bit too loudly, too many trips to the bathroom, cruising enthusiastically for a date, unwieldy dancing techniques? Is the determination based on a breathalyzer? A blood test? The bartenders/vendors can also be arrested or cited for serving the deadly beverages. Should bartenders give breathalyzers to cover their assets?
The safest route for Texans who like a beer, or two or three, is to buy booze at a supermarket and drink at home, alone, with no witnesses. Rather an unhealthy anti-social alternative, but other than total abstinence, it's the only sure way to avoid arrest...unless Texas sends undercover cops to front doors to check for people drinking...or thinking of drinking...or thinking.
When Dick Cheney shot Harry Whittington in the face, he had been drinking, with full knowledge that he would later use a shotgun. Texas should focus on the really dangerous people in their midst who have many DUI convictions, like Dick and Bush, and stop inflicting criminal records on regular citizens for what they might do.