The push for ever lower blood alcohol levels for DUI does little or nothing to make roads safer. If the desire is truly to lower the rate of alcohol-related accidents, it would be much more effective to focus on repeat offenders and cases of extremely high blood alcohol content (e.g., > 0.15),which are the causes of the vast majority of alcohol-related fatalities.
The desire to continually push for lower blood alcohol thresholds stems from the same urge of ‘progressives’ who want government to manage every personal detail and habit of our lives.
Well stated CM.
Absolutism is never a good guiding principle. It is the proverbial foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds.
The usual rush to signal virtue means that politicians and far too many others are willing to uncouple scientific definitions of impairment from colloquial ones.
Exactly what ‘pro-life’ ie a term typically used in the context of abortion, has to do with the medical and/or legal definition of impairment, remains a mystery. At best one might say we are anti-death or anti-accident but isn’t every rational person?
The reality is that DUI is a safe political target for states who have turned the ‘crime’ into a huge revenue stream on which they have become dependent. Fines are ratcheted up, limits lowered and 4th Amendment mocking checkpoints erected with federal grants paying for overtime. If your house is burgled while the majority of the cops are standing idle on a roadside somewhere, that’s hard luck.
The other reality is that MUCH stricter licensing requirements, from tests to vision to operation with retesting every 10 years, would increase road safety a thousandfold beyond getting a few so-called impaired drivers arrested and fined. Most of us know at least one senior citizen with bad eyesight, cataracts, loss of peripheral vision, loss of physical ability (arthritis, surgeries, hearing loss, etc.) who keep their license and are even coaxed through vision tests at the DMV.
We have all seen panic defensive moves and near wrecks caused by someone putting along 10 mph below the posted limit especially on freeways. They don’t check mirrors, they don’t signal, they don’t know or care
Why? License fees, tags, vehicle/property taxes, and fuel taxes are an even bigger earner for states. Keeping seniors on the road, even if they don’t belong there, keeps the dollars flowing. The state is never as interested in safety as it is cold hard cash.
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And to punish those who fail to live up to their moral standards.
Liberals are the puritans of our age.
Don’t be surprised if stocks reappear in our town squares.
Public shaming is already appearing in Liberal protest marches. It won’t be long if some version of the Scarlet Letter in handed down from some court for someone who offended some Liberal standard of morality. (it probably already has)
“The push for ever lower blood alcohol levels for DUI does little or nothing to make roads safer. If the desire is truly to lower the rate of alcohol-related accidents, it would be much more effective to focus on repeat offenders and cases of extremely high blood alcohol content (e.g., > 0.15),which are the causes of the vast majority of alcohol-related fatalities.”
Amen.
People have been propagandized into believing drinking and driving is a far more serious safety issue than it is.
You will never see a thorough cost/benefit analysis of enforcing the law which includes the effects on otherwise law-abiding people who were no danger to anybody.
The overwhelming number of people killed by drunk driving are the drunk drivers themselves. The next category are the passengers (also drunk) who got into the car with the drunk driver. A tiny fraction are other people, and it is not unheard of that they are inebriated pedestrians.
Like the opioid “epidemic,” domestic violence, animal abuse, and smoking, driving while intoxicated seizes on relatively rare and dramatic individual cases to permit the criminalization of average, law-abiding citizens, causing far more practical devastation to individual lives than the problem warrants.
Next time someone breathlessly informs you about the victims of drunk drivers, ask what percentage of those victims was the drunk driver.