PROVIDENCE — Five years after a college student was struck and killed by a bus during a pub crawl in Newport, Rhode Island lawmakers have voted to impose a statewide ban on such events with the onus on bar owners to enforce the rule or risk losing their liquor licenses.

What started as a low-profile proposal erupted this week into full-scale debate on civil liberties and the General Assembly’s role in legislating public behavior.

“I think we need to make it a state policy not to encourage irresponsible drunkenness,” said Rep. Charlene Lima, D-Cranston, in proposing the ban. “We need to say, this is not acceptable behavior in our state. Too often action isn’t taken until there is a tragedy, which is why we need to do this now.”

Opponents, among them Minority Leader Robert Watson, argue that tragedies happen and banning pub crawls won’t prevent them.

“The idea that you are telling me that I can’t get a bunch of friends together and go from one bar to the next flies in the face of what we believe is constitutional and our rights as citizens, not only in Rhode Island, but in America,” Watson said in the floor discussion this week.

House lawmakers approved the bill by a razor-thin 35-33 vote. The Senate gave unanimous approval to the bill on Thursday night. Once each chamber passes the other’s version they will head to the governor’s desk for his signature.

In May 2004, a 21-year-old Fairfield University student, Francis J. Marx V, fell in the path of a bus bringing University of Rhode Island students to Narragansett after a pub crawl. Months later, state lawmakers passed a bill allowing individual cities and towns to ban such drinking events, but only a few did, with Newport, Narragansett and Cranston among them.

If the statewide proposal becomes law, communities won’t have that choice, something Lima says will go a long way in keeping Rhode Islanders safer.

But critics predict the proposal will cause problems for bartenders and their establishments whose job it will be to distinguish between organized crawls and groups of friends out for a drink — risking their liquor licenses if they are wrong.

As for Marx, opponents argue that as tragic has his death may have been, he was not killed because a pub crawl happened, but because he was hit by a bus.

“What we keep trying to do in this building is control how people live their lives,” said Rep. Joseph Trillo, D-Warwick. “We try to give people common sense. You can’t legislate common sense and that’s what we keep trying to do.”

cneedham@projo.com