Gambling Slots Opponents in DC Area Rally

Opponents of a campaign to bring video lottery terminals to the Washington D.C. area said yesterday that the introduction of large-scale gambling would stunt economic growth and increase crime in an area that has struggled for decades to improve its image.

As cars whizzed by and bulldozers worked in the background, politicians wearing suits, ministers carrying bullhorns and teenagers worrying about the future held a rally in the historic neighborhood to deliver the same message: Nothing good could come from more gambling.

"We're appalled," said Ahmad Braxton-Jones, an advisory neighborhood commissioner from Woodland Terrace. "We're not going to have it."

Montray Brown, 16, had different worries.

"People who don't have money to gamble are going to get jealous and want to start gambling," said Brown, one of about a dozen teenagers who walked to the event and wedged themselves between politicians and civic leaders. "The crime rate is going to go up. It's going to be a lot more robberies."

The rally was meant to disrupt a political action committee's petition drive to obtain more than the 19,000 signatures required to put an initiative on the November ballot. If approved, the Video Lottery Terminal Gambling Initiative of 2006 would allow its backers to put an undisclosed number of slot machines near Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road SE. The initiative would allow similar sites to be established across the city.

July 7, 2006
Posted By Susan Torres
Staff Editor, CasinoGamblingWeb.com    Previous Page | Internet Gambling | Top Online Casinos | Submit News!