I agree. When you leave the bar, the screen is all wavery and your character stumbles around. He’s shitfaced. Driving is hard enough in the game already, so when the game offered me the choice to take a taxi, I took it. Plus I had a girl with me. Lesson illustrated, lesson learned.
I wrote that basic thing to MADD, they’re probably getting lots of e-mails about now.
It could have been second degree murder, which implies a lesser kind of premeditation The guy didn’t need to intend to kill, he just needed to intend to do something that could reasonably have been forseen to kill – like drive drunk.
Ed
Is your opinion for “driving drunk” or just “driving after drinking”? I might be able to accept this argument if the person was powering down vodka straight out of the bottle and had a BAC approaching the upper limits of intoxication before roaring off into the sunset, but if someone at .05 get’s into an accident and causes a fatality he wasn’t operating the vehicle while drunk, but while legally “impared” which does not take actual intoxication under consideration. The lowering of the legal BAC from “actually kind of looped” to “something I could do at a corporate work function and not feel bad about” is stupid enough, but to now allow the idea of charging that person with murder approaches the vindictive catagory.
I’d just like to attach a brief parasitic rant to say “fuck you” to Best Buy, where (against my better judgment and my previous vow never to set foot there again, and only because they were the only retailer I found in my area who claimed to actually have it in stock) I stopped earlier this evening to purchase this game, along with an Xbox 360 console with which to play it.
“Fuck you” because just as I feared, when I got to the store there were plenty of Xbox consoles, but no copies of GTA IV. Instead, lots of empty cardboard boxes that could be used to “pre-order” a game that was released three days ago. I’m very glad—and you should be, too—that I was skeptical and didn’t pay for it online before I drove there, as I briefly considered doing. It spared one of your blue-shirted dipshits from being garotted with a 12’ gold plated S-Video cable, and saved me from a murder conviction.
So, now I can order it online instead, and go back to never giving Best Buy my business. And they can go back to doing what they’re best at: sucking shit.
This isn’t the first time. Four words: “Kill all the Haitians.”
Behind drunk driving, the next biggest accident causer is driving while sleep deprived. Would you argue that a person who had worked a sixteen-hour day and had been awake for twenty hours that got in a fatal accident on the way home from the job is guilty of second degree murder?
I’m not arguing anything. I’m just wondering if that might be the prosecutor’s theory.
Ed
You’re arguing that working long hours and then driving is morally no different from ingesting a substance known to impair your judgement and then driving. Do you realize how silly that sounds?
I’m arguing that driving while deprived of sleep also causes accidents and is also preventable.
The same can be said for texting and driving.
Yes. Yes it can.
Excellent point. People want to crack down on “drunk” drivers, but don’t realize that the law has crept to a point where the few drinks that you had at the company party has put you into the “drunk” driver category…
And if you talk to a few poor souls who have gotten tagged for Driving While Impaired they’re just as surprised, even if those same people would normally be vocal advocates against “drinking and driving” before they got tarred with that same brush.
Now, a guy who had two beers with the boss after work can potentially lose so much more than most would imagine. Good bye thousands and thousands of dollars, even more if you were to get tagged with a murder charge, forget going to Canada without special permission, forget working at a job that requires either a clean driving record or for you to be bonded and insured (such as a bank or an insurance company) and forget having your license for a while too. Oh and say hello to crazy high insurance premiums for your car insurance too. You could lose everything because a couple of crazy soccer moms started a group that now actively persues prohibition of all alcohol. Fuck that. You would suffer less trouble if you went to the mall and kicked the shit out of someones grandmother with steel toed boots on. Which is a worse crime?
Just one more way we’ve totally lost our way as a society.
Er… not at all?
Both are well-known to impair motor function and reflexes. Both are easily avoidable - driving while sleep deprived perhaps more so since it has less effect on judgment.
How do you know what they are thinking? Do you read minds? Revenge? Revenge on whom? Video game players? People who drive drunk?
Don’t most states test the driver’s reflexes and ability to concentrate before issuing a DUI?
Have you ever known anyone killed by a drunk driver? Have you ever loved anyone killed by a drunk driver?
Not all countries are as casual about drunk driving as the United States. I spent one New Year’s Eve in a Scandanavian country many years ago. Those who weren’t within walking distance of a place to stay arranged weeks or even months in advance for a cab to pick them up. Or they had a reliable designated driver. No one left the party with a driver who had been drinking. It just wasn’t done. A person who drove under the influence there automatically lost their license (and I believe their car) for something like two or three years.
I don’t mind being corrected if I am mistaken. But I know that the laws were very strict and enforced and everyone was very careful about not breaking them.
What’s the big deal about not driving drunk in America? Have you no self-control? Do you think it makes you cool and so that’s how you prove you’re a man? You climb in a big piece of metal and hurl yourself through space at seventy miles an hour or more without being fully in control of where that metal is going?
We are all so impressed, I’m sure.
I like the term and I’m going to steal it.
Huh it all makes sense now. My aunt was just trying to prove she was a man last New Year’s Eve.
I must have missed that. What happened?
Yes. Yes I have. More than one, in fact. And still, your (and MADD’s) appeal to emotion fails to convince me you’re not overreacting.
I don’t think anybody thinks it’s cool or proves they’re a man to drive drunk, at least not in this thread, since nobody’s said anything remotely similar to that. As some have said, there’s a big difference between driving drunk and having a 0.05 blood alcohol content while you’re behind the wheel. And there’s not even any comparison between these acts and driving drunk in a friggin’ video game, which is what the thread’s about, for Chrissakes. You’re not going to do yourself any favors by aliigning with MADD on this nutball issue.
I never drive drunk, BTW. In fact, I no longer own a car, so it’s not even a possibility. But I still recognize zealots.
Story here. Basically, simple-minded fools claimed another victory in the war on common sense. GTA: Vice City contains the line “Kill all the Haitians” in very clear reference to the Haitian gang, not the nationality. Attention whores saw an opportunity to get some recognition, so they decided to take it the wrong way and raised a stink until Rockstar finally caved and changed the dialogue.