How can we prevent drunk driving deaths?

Great Debates
121

We actually have people arguing for both. That said, limiting ownership obviously limits the use of guns.

Are you really this obtuse? Let’s try a thought experiment to help you work through this. Let’s say we magically eliminate all bullets. How dangerous would guns be? Read this very carefully. Ownership of a gun that is unlikely to be used for any purpose is far less dangerous than one that might be used or stolen. I don’t mean that each time some individual uses a gun in a innocuous way makes us all less safe. I mean that the more people have occasions to use firearms, in aggregate, the greater the likelihood something bad will happen. Mere ownership rates will influence that number, but they don’t tell the whole story. For example, basically all police officers carry guns. Yet, the guns carried by officers in violent areas will be likely be used more often, and will thus end up killing more people. This is also why the danger posed by a gun is not the same for all individuals. A gun owned by a depressed teenager, or a gang member is far more problematic than one owned by a 55-year old former cop. Why? Because the teenager/gang-member is FAR more likely to USE the gun to do something stupid.

Geez. If everyone who owned a gun only went shooting, you would be right. The problem is that that is not what actually happens. Let’s make another simple analogy. The more people drive, the greater number of accidents we will see. The more miles you drive, the more likely it is you will be in an accident. Do you agree with these (true) statements? If so, the same applies to guns. Why? Because even though many people who drive (or go to the shooting range) will be completely law abiding and responsible, on a macro level, the correlation is strong enough to effectively quantify risk. Your complaint about shooting ranges is like arguing that if I only drive at 3 am around a cul-de-sac, the increased use of my car wouldn’t make an accident more likely. That is correct, but we are not looking at things on a micro level.

Do you think using the word orthogonal makes your point any less nonsensical? First, you are drawing a distinction that is not codified in law as it pertains to our discussion. For legal adults, there is no “illegal” use of alcohol. There is illegal operation of a car while drunk, but that is not the same thing. Second, the discussion is not how often a gun, as in one particular gun, is used. It’s about how often guns in total are used. Why is that a useful metric? Because we know that a certain percentage of those uses will be bad. Whether it’s a cop shooting an unarmed person, a wannabe neighborhood watch guy shooting a teenager, homeowner shooting their kid by accident, or a depressed kid blowing his brains out. Why is this relevant? Because it tells us how risky gun use is. The risk is deliberately absent context because it is not meant to apply to every individual or every situation. It’s like if you asked how risky is it to climb Mt. Everest. Of course that risk for me is different from that of a Sherpa. But that number is still valid as a general guideline.

You are pretty much alone in that estimation.

Feel free to quote any of them.

Probably not because guns are easily stolen and misused. You can’t restrict guns to only responsible people, which is part of the problem.

Yeah… someone somewhere suggested it. :dubious:

I thought the whole point was to some dumbass gotcha that ended up blowing up in your face.

Not really. Very few thieves will break into a home to steal alcohol, whereas guns are almost always stolen. Secondly, most people don’t actively try to kill themselves with alcohol. Even the biggest drunks are usually not drinking for that purpose.

No, you haven’t. That’s particularly funny since you started by implying alcohol is more dangerous by a factor of 3 to 1. Then you found some new numbers to glom on to, deciding it was roughly equal. Either way, you have not proved either claim.

Dude, do you actually read the links? It’s not a counter factual. The people who compile the numbers are not claiming alcohol was causative (as you suggested). They ADMIT it was* not a causative factor* in many cases. For example, if you are a DD driving a car full of drunk friends, and then you are t-boned by a old (sober) lady, the accident can be classified as alcohol related.

This definition has been applied so broadly as to even include pedestrians who have been drinking being hit by a sober vehicle who was in the wrong. The reality is that number is grossly inflated, and anyone really trying to have a substantive discussion would admit that point instead of trying to pick nits.

We don’t need “data to work with” as the two things are not really related. How we regulate alcohol is not really relevant in a discussion regarding how we should regulate guns. Do you think our laws regarding heroin or oxycodone are relevant here? What about the the laws regarding workplace safety At some point the difference between the two things being compared makes the connections we could draw too tenuous.

I am saying you do not have the data to make a do an accurate quantitative analysis wrt risk, and the differences between the two things make qualitative regulatory comparisons meaningless.

122

Okay, well this is really the key point we are hung up on. I am assuming that the total number of legal firings of guns and total number of illegal firings are uncorrelated. You are assuming that the total number of illegal firings is correlated with the total number of legal firings.

123

I’d like to see a cite that premiums increase with firearms ownership. The MSN cite says no such thing, and only implies that it is an issue in case of actual use of a firearm. When I got State Farm Condo owner’s insurance, their only interest was the value of my firearm. Granted, this was before I owned an “arsenal.” I pay like 17 bucks a month so if it affected premiums, not by much.

124

Ok, upon further review of your post, I am done arguing this with you. You are being as obtuse as you accuse me of being. I feel like I am arguing with a chatbot that is decently good at English and can compare two numbers but incapable of any logic or abstract understanding whatsoever.

And you are cherry-picking quotes from my posts to repeat the same objections over and over again, while neglecting to quote the immediate next sentence which addresses them.

125

Again, the legal/illegal distinction is meaningless. It’s not really illegal to kill yourself is it? It’s not always illegal to “stand your ground”. It’s also may not be strictly illegal to accidentally shoot someone. A cop shooting a suspect may not be illegal either. Yet, all of those things would be less than desirous in the eyes of most.

Secondly, I think you meant to say you assumed the were causally related, not correlated. Of course they are correlated, as “mistakes” will almost certain rise as the number of trials grows absent mitigating influences . To your point, it doesn’t really matter if they are causally related since we are theoretically trying to find the risk, on average, of using a gun, which is just a more sophisticated model of bad outcomes/total outcomes. Could the denominator grow without increasing the numerator? Sure, but it’s just as unlikely as increasing the number of cars on the road without increasing the number of accidents.

The title of the article is “11 things that make home-insurance rates soar”. It also says:

The point was that IF you want to be covered for the likely outcomes that arise from owning a gun, your insurance will go up, often by a lot. Sometimes, they will even drop you completely. Obviously if you do not want the insurance company to assume that risk, you might not have to pay more. It’s like getting health insurance with diabetes. It doesn’t have to be expensive if it’s not gonna cover your treatment for that disease.

Ah… so now the guy who tried to jerk everyone’s chain with a deliberately inflammatory riddled with half-truths, strawmen, and unsupported assumptions now wants to take his ball and go home. Fair enough. It was pretty clear you didn’t want to have an actual discussion about either issue given you were too lazy to do a basic google search on the relevant statistics, or bother to understand what they numbers mean. But you are right, I am being obtuse :dubious:.

126

Thanks! Wiki says

127

Don’t need any. We know that the particles cause cellular damage that causes the mutation into cancer cells. We know that cancer is a statistical risk – one cannot say which particle will cause a mutation, but more particles means greater likelihood – which, in turn, does NOT mean one particle is completely safe. We know that smelling smoke is possible only if the particles are inhaled.

Therefore, if I smell it, I am exposed to it and am, on some level, being exposed to a cancer risk. This is self-evident. To believe otherwise is to engage in magical thinking – the cancer is caused by the particles, not by being indoors or outdoors.

The fact that it’s difficult to quantify doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and certainly shouldn’t mean I have to put up with it.

128

So you want to regulate other people’s behavior even if there is no quantifiable risk to you, but you assume it must happen?

Personally I don’t smoke myself, but I actually appreciate the efforts of other people to decrease their life expectancy and keep Social Security economically viable.

129

You’re mischaracterizing it. It’s not a case of assuming – risk happens. It would be assuming if I asserted harm was certain, but risk is certain, just hard to measure or not yet measured.

Remember, it’s hard to find comets outside the inner solar system, but nobody doubts they’re real, even though we see them infrequently. Your assertion is equivalent to saying they don’t exist; I’m just saying they’re hard to predict.

Other people regulate my behavior all the time, for trivial interests of their own. I don’t see why I can’t want to regulate their behavior that inflicts risk on me.

Let them wear patches for their nicotine and we’re all happy.

130

Clever OP, but a more appropriate analogy would be guns=cars than guns=alcohol. Alcohol is more like mental illness in this equation. And even then, I’d need to see evidence that your statistics account for the normal accident rate.

131

This is not a very bright OP at all.

The existence of one problem does not preclude attempting a solution merely because other unrelated problems exist.

Issues regarding guns, drugs, driving etc all have their own dynamic and must be addressed appropriately. Now if you wish to debate what is appropriate for gun control then that is ok. If you wish to debate drink driving rules, then that is ok, and if you wish to debate the control of alcohol as a general social issue then that is fine too - but to conflate issues, compare and use false analogies is to use poor, and unclear debating tactics and can only result in confused thinking and non-effective solutions.

There is a name for this sort of fallacy, but I cannot remember what it is.

In terms of drink driving, we had a culture of it in the UK for decades, but the rising cost of insurance along with it losing social acceptability and also vigorous enforcement with hefty punishments(with a high likelihood that you will no longer be able to attend your place of work due to increasing travel times) all have worked together to reduce this.

One thing that surprises me when I see US real life traffic cop shows is just how tolerant of drink driving you are, it is very striking, specially to see repeat offenders return to the roads again and again without removal of the driving licence.

Out of interest, what would the main source of illegally held firearms in the US be? I am betting that it will be from legal owners who have them stolen - so reduce the pool of weapons and perhaps you reduce the number of illegally held ones. I am quite sure a gun advocate will be able to debunk this little theory of mine quite easily.

132

Oh, do try, I think this thread really could use a bunch of people throwing named fallacies at each other like magic spells.

I did not say that gun control should not be attempted because the problem of alcohol exists. I agree this is an invalid argument. Perhaps I may have said this somewhere on the board in a moment of sloppiness, hurry and frustration, but it’s not a position I support.

I have been saying that many people are focusing on the negative consequences of guns because they have no experience with guns, or a visceral dislike of guns. And since many people enjoy alcohol, they tend to discount the harmful effects of alcohol. In reality guns cause harm at roughly the same rate as alcohol. Both of these are examples of confirmation bias. The fact that opinions on guns are highly politically motivated and opinions on alcohol are not just exacerbates it.

If anti-gun folks would at least understand that gun owners are approaching their position on guns from the same perspective that alcohol users approach their position on alcohol, the whole discussion would be better off.

133

That alcohol is directly responsible for more harm (or not) is completely irrelevant to a gun control policy.

I do struggle to find a non-negative aspect to guns, so perhaps that is why the only way I can think of them is in a negative manner.

This is hardly surprising given the other aspect of guns is to impose power over others, and this is one of the troubles of the world. This is hardly relevant in a direct way to the US, but it does inform the views of many folk.

The enforcement of anti-alcohol laws in some countries is also an imposition of power on others too, you could well argue that religion is responsible for more deaths than all these things put together and the exercise of power in its name is completely repugnant.Maybe religion should be restricted and licenced, or even outright banned.

As for people taking a political outlook, pretty much everything that affects you directly has a political aspect, but the things that seem to many people to affect life and death most directly are going to be at the high end of the political priority. Right now its obvious why there is such a lot of concern about gun ownership, but it will pass until the next spree killing comes along, and along and along. Folk are kind of weird that way, yet spree killings are such a small number of untoward deaths that we will see all the outrage again and again.

We will not see much concern over the long slow killers, we never have and I don’t expect that to change, one person dies here, another person dies there - it just doesn’t gather the public interest like a good shooting spree does.

Cancer deaths from asbestos or other serious work related health issues kill far more people every year than everything we have so far noted, but I don’t see much of a cohesive campaign to deal with it, not many votes there I suspect.

134

Yes, I pretty much agree, gun control policy can and should be set on its own merits. I am not trying to argue that the existence of alcohol negates the need for better gun control.

The purpose of my analogy is simply to point out to people who are considering their own positions on guns that their visceral response is not the One True Way of thinking on the issue, by pointing out that guns are really quite similar in many ways to another recreational activity with harmful effects, that they may think of differently because of their own biases.

In practice, most people seem to respond by reflexively and dogmatically rejecting the analogy and defending alcohol in one way or another, rather than sitting back in quiet contemplation and thanking me for helping them evaluate the issue rationally. Oh well…

And of course, anything the government does is an imposition of power over others, be it restrictions on drugs, alcohol, guns, speech, religion, etc.

135

That’s basically what you did in your OP.

Guns are not a “recreational activity”. Hunting and skeet shooting are, but guns are not. Guns are tools that are unfortunately used many times in tragic ways. Again, this just highlights your complete misunderstanding of the issue. If guns were only used to hunt, few people would have an issue. It’s because they are tools that are often used in crimes and by criminals (among other things) that people have a problem. And unlike alcohol, the negative effects are not a bug, they are a feature.

More stupidity. Do you realize both alcohol and cars are far more highly regulated than guns are? Do you also realize there are few people calling for looser DUI laws, or laxer regulation of alcohol? That’s why your analogy is even dumber than it initially seems. You can’t even legally drive a car that emits too many pollutants. Eighteen states have a government monopoly over the wholesaling and/or retailing of most liquors. Do we have anything comparable wrt to guns? Even if your analogy was good (it’s not), the point you are trying to make is not really borne out by the facts. I, an many others, would be more than happy to treat guns like we do alcohol.

136

Has anybody argued that the solution to drunk driving is more booze yet?

137

If they get drunk enough then they probably can’t get the car door open. My roommate and I had a laugh watching a drunk friend trying to change a tire until we took his keys away and drove him home.