In Maryland and Washington, D.C., the ongoing liberalization of sports-betting law is confronting a counterinsurgency. Since 2018, the year in which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, state-level legalization of sports betting has proceeded quickly. Sports betting has clinched legal status in 38 states and the District of Columbia, of which 33 (and D.C.) legalized sports betting online.

Notwithstanding these developments, 2025 has begun inauspiciously for sports bettors. A pair of lawsuits — one in the nation’s capital, the other in Maryland — cut various angles to threaten ongoing legal gambling operations. In the first case, DC Gambling Recovery LLC (the plaintiff) alleges that the law legalizing sports betting in the district contravenes federal law. The second suit, brought by the City of Baltimore, charges sportsbooks DraftKings and FanDuel with unscrupulous promotional tactics prodding users toward irresponsible gambling. Worse still, in Annapolis, the Old Line State’s legislators this session considered a bill to ban online sports betting altogether — a proposal at odds with the legislature’s recent tax increase on gaming, passed in an effort to address the state’s structural deficit.

The simple (and correct) argument favoring sports betting — the one that has triumphed thus far — says that American adults should be free to choose their pastimes, provided they harm nobody else. The best argument in opposition has less to do with the choice of pastime per se than with its externalities. Legalization tends toward gambling addiction and financial ruin, even such other crimes as domestic violence, critics allege. If sports betting truly unleashed hellish financial, domestic and social chaos, lawmakers might consider banning it. But critics’ arguments cannot weather empirical scrutiny. When lightly poked by skeptical analysts, the methods of myriad studies purporting to document disasters unleashed by sports-betting legalization cave in. For example, in one such debunking, the Reason Foundation’s Guy Bentley reported recently that the authors of the paper in question — which argued that legalization raised rates of gambling addiction — relied on internet search trends, not clinical data or other reliable information. In fact, it seems that legalization, if anything, brings lower rates of problem gambling. “In 2021, the latest year for which we have data, problem gambling in New Jersey was 5.6%,” Bentley writes. “But in 2017, before sports betting was legal, New Jersey’s problem gambling rate was 6.3%.”

A just-published report from the American Consumer Institute had similar findings. “Comparing gambling expenditures in 2015 and 2023 across states that did not legalize sports betting, only legalized retail sports betting, and legalized both retail and online sports betting, suggests that legalization did not drive significant increases in gambling behavior,” the report states. “In fact, a weighted average of inflation-adjusted changes in per capita gambling expenditures shows similar increases in states that did not legalize sports betting and those that only legalized in-person betting, and far less in states that legalized both retail and online betting.” At the very least, this data should dispel the notion that spikes in gambling addiction necessarily follow legalization.

All this underscores what common sense should dictate. Betting on sports is a consumptive leisure activity. In the main, it is neither an investment plan nor a homewrecker, but a way many Americans choose to dispose of their disposable income. Indeed, only about one in five bettors wager more than $100 per month. A bet, like a beer, increases the fan’s enjoyment of a game. Both are likely to leave the fan poorer by game’s end. Both irk prudish scolds. If taken to excess, both can ruin lives. But lawmakers only seek to ban one.

The liberalization of sports-betting regulations is an advance against an infantilizing urge among some in politics to police the little details of Americans’ lives, a movement of second-guessers and micromanagers. Evidence in their favor is scarce and, when challenged, makes itself scarcer still. Moreover, a legal, regulated platform — on which bettors enjoy the protection of ordinary consumer-protection law — provides a far safer ecosystem than illegal platforms, which beckon to bettors in prohibitionist jurisdictions or in those that regulate too heavy-handedly.

Revanchist opposition to legal sports betting arising is, perhaps, not unexpected, yet it should be turned back. Summer will soon arrive, the skies are sunny and the fields are green; and if a person wants to bet, nobody should gainsay that choice (through regulations, at least). If sports betting is not his jam, that’s just fine, too. But lawmakers should have little to say about it.

David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.