Later this month, a City Council committee will hold a public hearing to discuss the pros and cons of criminalizing the sale of spray paint. The reasons for this particular obsession are many and varied: the perceived connection between graffiti and gangs, the annoyance of cleaning up after even the more artistic (mostly suburban) taggers, the belief that any blemish on the landscape will lead to some public safety crisis. All these are viable threats to civil society, I suppose, but such a prohibition doesn’t really solve any problems.

The proposed ordinance would require that spray paint be locked in a cabinet at every hardware store (or whoever else sells it these days) and would prohibit sales to anyone below the age of 18.

Now, it may not be fair to compare the criminalization of spray paint to the prohibition against guns, but it seems to me that if 13-year-old boys can acquire a 9-millimeter handgun with little or no effort, it’s probably not going to be too tough for a determined teen tagger to locate a can of paint or two. (Of course, a majority of the artsy graffiti folks come from the suburbs, where no such prohibition exists--and wouldn’t folks just travel outside the city limits to find their paint?)

Like the move by CM Robert Lilligren to keep strangers out of our alleys, this latest bit of legislative overreach will do little to solve the real problem (gang graffiti) while just making it more difficult for regular folks to go about their business.