“You can think that all day long, but the fact of the matter is that if it were true, then our “legal” BAC would not have been reduced to .08 and MADD wouldn’t be pushing for still lower limits. Data shows that the true improvement in safety (lower number of accidents/deaths) was from .16 to .12, and there was statistically no improvement from .12 to .08.”
Actually, I don’t have any problems with your numbers...you are correct. All one has to do is read articles where drunks cause accidents, they are almost always over 0.12...often much higher - whereas most tickets (without accidents) is lower than that.
My point is that drunk driving would not be the way it’s perceived without the 7-time DUI’ers finally starting to take out lives. If those people were somehow off the road, the public would be saying, in essence: “What’s the big deal” as there would be few accidents...and thus they would not be supporting these arbitrarily low limits.
As to being a way for government to make money - sure, of course. But there still has to be some public acceptance of it. For example, you could fine ever driver $1,000 for driving between 1 and 5 MPH over the speed limit. You could do it with cameras and make a HUGE windfall (i.e., you’d get 95% of the cars on the road, at any given time or place). But the public would SCREAM, as they don’t see the danger from these “habitual” speeders as something that warrants such huge fines.
...so you need to have a way to hook-in the public - and these particular people (7-timers) are PERFECT for the purpose of getting the public to scream “DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING!!!!” ...and so they do.
You’ve summarized the Alynski message pretty well. If a people valued liberty, it would not be a success. Sadly, Americans no longer value liberty, so it is rather easy to execute this strategy. Heck, it is even prevelent on supposedely liberty loving discussion forums like FR. All you need to to is pick one of a few subjects, and folks scream for security over liberty.