SELLING BEER to minors is one of those crimes that’s not likely to be witnessed by police or reported to police. So about the only way we have to catch violators is through undercover operations, where kids working with police attempt to make illegal purchases.

These stings allow us to punish people who are breaking the law, and they put convenience store clerks, bartenders and others on notice that the next 18-year-old they sell alcohol to could land them in jail.

But there’s a problem with this: State law says you can’t convict someone of selling beer or wine to a minor unless the purchaser is also charged — even if the purchaser is working for the police. (The same law does not apply to hard liquor sales; go figure.) It’s not a new problem; legislators have been trying for a decade to change the law and allow an exception when the purchaser is working with police. The House has voted to change it, the Senate has voted to change it, but somehow the change has never managed to make it all the way into law. There is absolutely no excuse for this.

So for years, police have been working around this rather serious problem by using a law that makes it illegal to “transfer or give” alcohol to a minor. The problem is that this law wasn’t intended to stop people from selling alcohol to minors — there’s another law that does that. This one was intended to stop people from letting minors drink at a party, and things like that. If you’re not careful, a law like that could literally make it illegal for Johnny to help his next-door neighbor carry in her groceries, if one of the bags included a bottle of wine. So the statute says it’s only a crime to transfer alcohol “for the purpose of consumption.”

Still, this elbow-to-nose approach to enforcing the law worked until recently, when criminal defense attorneys figured out that the kids who purchase alcohol during a sting have no “intention” of drinking the alcohol; their “purpose” for buying it is merely to get the clerk to sell it, so he can be arrested. So they’ve been using this argument to get charges dismissed.

Some have suggested we need to remove the “purpose” language from this law, but that is ridiculous. That condition makes perfectly good sense — indeed, it is probably a necessary part of that law.

Others have suggested putting an exemption in the other law so that minors don’t have to be charged when they work with police. That’s what legislators have been trying to do for a decade, and it’s certainly better than the status quo. But frankly, we don’t see any need for the law that requires both parties to be charged. It’s not a standard we apply in other crimes: We don’t say a prostitute can’t be convicted unless her “client” is charged. We don’t say a clerk can’t be convicted of selling cigarettes to a minor unless the buyer is charged — it wasn’t even against the law for a minor to make the purchase until this year.

But in South Carolina, the rules are always different for alcohol. And that difference always favors the drunken driver, the person selling alcohol to kids, you name it. And usually, everyone is shocked, shocked when they learn about these differences.

Let’s be clear: These different rules and loopholes and oversights aren’t mistakes. They are deliberate policy decisions made by a Legislature that hasn’t gotten the message that South Carolinians don’t want their kids drinking and don’t want their drunks driving. Until we send that message, these “problems” with our laws will keep cropping up — and they won’t be corrected.