A Gambling World

SLOT machines are often called one-armed bandits. But unlike real bandits, they don’t force money out of anybody; people line up like sheep to be fleeced by them.

There are about 420,000 such machines in the Federal Republic of Germany, busily draining about $900,000,000 from the German people every year. Five million people there spend an hour each week pouring money into the machines; 80,000 people spend over five hours a week at it.

Spain now boasts 750,000 slot machines. Gambling was legalized there in 1977. By 1988, Spaniards were already spending $25,000,000,000 a year on all types of gambling. Reportedly, 200,000 Spaniards are compulsive gamblers. The Italian people gambled about $12,000,000,000 in 1989​—or about $210 dollars per person, children included. In a single week early in 1990, Italians spent $70 million betting on soccer matches.

Gamblers in the United States spend over $200,000,000,000 a year just on legal forms of gambling! The president of a chain of casinos there boasted recently: “Gambling is this country’s fastest growing industry, as large as the [U.S. military] annual budget.” He attributed Americans’ love affair with gambling to the same “philosophical drive” and willingness to take risks that drove the discoverers and frontiersmen in the nation’s past. But the gambler’s dream of instant wealth is a far cry from the years of sweat and toil that explorers and pioneers put into their ventures.

Sociologist Vicki Abt said: “Lotteries play into the notion that rewards are unrelated to your efforts.” Such thinking can do terrible damage to the quality of life. Debt, poverty, ruined work habits, shattered families​—these are the dismal dividends of gambling. For millions, a growing portion of whom are teenagers, gambling turns into an uncontrolled compulsion. Surely, the Bible is right when it says that “the love of money is a root of all sorts of injurious things.”​—1 Timothy 6:10.