Should drunk driving be a crime?

Great Debates
21

Its all about what risks we, as a society, consider reasonable to inflict on others. You do plenty things that could conceivably kill your fellow citizens. Do you ride a bike ? What about leaving your home without screening yourself for dangerous contagious diseases ?

As a society we decide what is a reasonable risk to inflict on others, and what is not. Based both on the amount of the risk, and the benefits to you and other of the action involved. There are plenty of benefits to driving, and as a society we deem that the benefits outweight the risks. The benefits of drunk driving, are not enough to outwiegh the risks.

In your gun example, in the UK it would be in most cases be considered an unacceptable risk for your fellow citizens simply to own and fire the gun irregadless of who its pointed at and how many bullets are in it. In US that is not the case, its just a judgement call we make as I society as whole.

22

As I responded to you before, which you ignored, your approach to drunk driving negates all possibility of attempt or conspiracy as crimes. It requires the police to stand by and watch until the negative outcome has occured, because they don’t have the right to stop someone who isn’t commiting a crime, whether that be careening all over the road after a fifth of Jack, or driving a semi full of Semtex towards the Capital at 95 miles an hour.

As for your position against driving, many things have negative effects for society, that we consider are outweighed by the benefits involved. Driving is one of those things. There cannot be a set cut off point where we say 1 in X chance of causing death means something should be banned, because that ignores the benefits side of the equation. Your consumption of electricity leads to a chance of death for others on an ongoing basis, whether from melt down of a nuclear reactor, or mine collapse, or multiple other potential problems. I am sure you could live a life without electricity - people did it for years. It’s probably easier for a city person to live without a car than electric power. But for other people, a car might be of greater import. Doesn’t really matter to the overall argument, though.

23

An answer to this would be nice. Every time I see some asshole straddling two lanes, I say, “Bet $10 that person is on a cell phone.” If I could ever find anyone to take me up on that bet, I’d be rich. To be clear, I’m not condoning either one, but there seems to be a general consensus that anyone who drives home after happy hour should be thrown in jail and have his driving privileges indefinitely revoked, but this is not the same of otherwise chronically reckless drivers. Is alcohol, specifically, worse than other methods of potentially dangerous driving?

I always assume my pilot has had at least three G&Ts.

24

This reminds of an always instructive line in the first Naked Gun movie: “I know. You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street, sticking your face in a fan.”

Which is to say: I don’t buy it. It’s simply a law that prohibits making an already dangerous act much more perilous. Statistically, drunk drivers are responsible for about 30-32% of vehicular fatalities and, you’d assume, that 30-32% of the driving population isn’t drunk at all times. So all that’s happening is the state is trying to limit risk. We do this by revoking licenses of drivers with multiple moving violations or folks who can’t drive well enough to pass the test. We limit risk. It’s obviously impossible to insulate you, the citizen, from all accidents, so we attempt to remove the most pernicious circumstances and go from there. Your argument that “either you can drive blotto or not at all” can be extended to every voluntary action that can be construed as possibly dangerous to others like, say, any form of transportation. Unless you have tube technology. If so: give it here.

25

I’m going to verrry cautiously play a little devil’s advocate here on the OP’s behalf:

The main point of most people’s arguments in response to the OP is that a person who drives after drinking some X amount - which varies from person to person - is impaired, and therefore less able to drive safely. They can’t see as well (blurry, double vision), their reflexes are slower, their sense of relative distance is skewed, their sense of acceptable risk changes, etc. The drunker the driver, the more impaired their senses.

But those descriptions - impaired vision, reflexes and judgement - also describes elderly drivers. The older the driver, the more impaired their senses.

How come sweet little grannies and grampas don’t raise nearly the same bile with the kill-all-the-drunks crowd, even when they themselves kill? This confuses me. No one cries “age discrimination!” at the idea of a minimum arbitrary age under which teens can’t get a driver’s license; reasons include the fact that teenagers are idiots and can’t be trusted with a half-ton of steel barrelling along the road. But attempts to legislate driver’s licenses at the other end of the age spectrum often fail, or at least have most of their teeth removed.

Texas passed a law a couple years ago that seems to be helping according to preliminary data. (Note the part of the article that quotes elderly drivers at AARP classes saying things like drivers should stop and wait before merging onto a freeway, rather than easing into traffic. :eek:)

So since the OP is asking for logic, and rational arguments: where’s the logic behind allowing one group of high-statistical-risk drivers to continue driving, while condemning the other group to torture and death?

Answer me that, and with that answer perhaps we can answer the OP.

26

According to this study, no. (though I’d note that they’re dealing with 0.08 blood-alcohol level and nothing above). Also interesting: study finds that hands-free cell phones are no better.

So, no: Personally, I have no problem with stiff penalties for driving while cell phoning. I would like to see statistics on the severity of these accidents before saying that drunk driving and driving while talking on a cell phone should be enforced with equal punishments.

27

The problem I have with DD is that it’s a “might crime” - you are arrested because you might commit a crime. This does not sit well with me.

Laws are supposed to exist to punish people for infringing upon the rights of others. If I drive drunk, whose rights am I infringing upon?

28

Well, he is fooling himself.

29

If I hire a hit man to kill you, and he decides just to pocket the money and not do the deed, have I infringed on your rights? Should I be considered to have committed a crime?

30

Someone is going to point out to you that driving while intoxicated is a crime. So I’ll point out that yes, we’re all aware that it is a crime, but the topic of this thread is whether or not it should be. It is crime because they (you know, they) have made it a crime in order to combat an increased likelihood of a crime.

31

Again it boils down to risk-benefit analysis that our society undertakes. If you make it illegal for a senior to drive you are taking away a something that is of great benefit to them, in fact you have drastically reduced their quality of life. If you make it illegal for a drunk person to drive, you have not reduced their quality of life all that much. Which is why we ban drunk people but not seniors.

Not that I agree with all such judgements we make as a society, in fact some of them are plain wrong IMO. But in this case it seems a good call.

32

Theoretically, I’m with you, and you could make this argument for blood-alcohol checkpoints, maybe. But if you’re pulled over for swerving over a couple lanes, then get breathalized, and it turns out you’re well above the legal limit? Well, by your logic, you haven’t commited a crime worse than driving like a jackass which, as we all know, is not something you’re arrested for. You believe the cop should let someone like that go? This is the way drunks are usually brought in: they’re stopped for moving violations, the officer notices that the driver seems intoxicated, and they’re taken off the road.

Not trying for snark, just clarity.

33

No.

34

…except that whole “attempted murder” thing.

35

Yes…of course it should be.

Cite? I think your statistics are skewed by including all manner of vehicle death INCLUDING those due to alcohol. A rather large percentage of motor vehicle deaths are due to intoxication, which would rather skew the odds.
Let me put it this way…do you think that firing a gun in public should be a crime? If I take a gun to a mall and randomly fire it into a crowd, should that be a crime? What if I don’t hit anyone? Would that change whether it should be illegal or not?

-XT

36

My point was, under that rationale, attempt would have to cease to be a crime.

It’s kind of silly, to me. It focuses on the result of the action, which is relevant, to the complete exclusion of the morality of the actor. If a good shot aims at someone and kills them, they are guilty fo a crime, whereas a bad shot who aims and misses is guilty of nothing (ignoring property damage from the stray bullet).

It reduces criminality of actions in many cases down to dumb luck.

37

Whose rights has he infringed upon?

Is he more prone to cause an accident? Perhaps. But liberty is more important than safety in my book. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”

38

No, you are arrested because you have committed a crime, as others have pointed, and will point, out.

You and the OP seem to be saying that it’s perfectly okay to **voluntarily **drink to the point where you **know **that your reaction time will be significantly reduced, your judgment will be impaired, your motor skills will be shot to hell, and you may enter an emotional state where rage (or happiness, or confusion, or depression, or anything else) may cause you to do really destructive things. *That *is the crime.

The key words there are in boldface. You know all of that will happen, and yet you choose to drink anyway, and then climb into a projectile weapon weighing a ton or more and attempt to operate it.

You’re seriously saying that we should permit this?

39

[quote=“SmashTheState, post:1, topic:501503”]

Intelligent discussion only, please. QUOTE]
I’ll try, but I’ll doubt you’ll understand it:

There is a part of your brain called the cerebellum which looks very similar to a wrinkled, apple-shaped tumor that sits behind your brainstem. It’s the most active and possesses more neurons than any single region in your brain. The reason its particularly active is because the cerebellum is responsible for your spatial sense (e.g. am I sitting? am I standing? am I moving? am I doing a cartwheel?) and motor control.

When I talk about motor control, I speak of your ability to ride a bike, to play a Wii, to type on the keyboard, and, yes, even drive a car. When ethanol is consumed, the firing frequency and transmitter release of neurons in the cerebellum are reduced. This is done by two mechanisms. The first is that ethanol molecule itself facilitates the movement of a negative ion, called chloride, into cerebellar neurons, reducing their ability to transmit and receive messages to and from other neuronal circuits. The second method is that ethanol specifically cause cerebellar neurons to secrete a neurotransmitter called GABA, which reduces the activity of neighboring neurons.

Got that? Good. Now here’s where I’ll probably lose you. Remember when I told you that the cerebellum is most excitatory part of your brain? Well, it’s excitable because it has ongoing and incoming connections that go down your spinal cord, to other regions of the brain, and itself. It sends messages to both sides of the cerebellum to compare input where specialized cerebellar circuits, called Purkinje cells, act as a “comparator” between two distinct streams of information. This “loop” between the two lobes of the cerebellum allow for constant, **second-to-second **error-checking and maintence of balance. Pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, even minor cerebellar impairment grossly affects motor control.

Believe it or not, this is one law in which science is on its side. I know, I am shocked too. Consumption of ethanol has a statistically significant impact on driving performance.

Now for my opinion: Most drinking-and-driving laws don’t aim to get offenders off the road, instead, these laws are intended to generate revenue while, at the same, giving law-breakers a clear path forward to getting their license back. If law enforcement was serious about cutting drinking and drinking, they’d slash the monetary penalty and permanently remove their driving license.

  • Honesty
40

How about the truck driver carrying a few tons of volatile explosives who overloads his truck and has poorly maintained brakes. He is commiting a “might crime” he could get to his destination perfectly safely, or could plow into to an orphanage. If the cops pull him over on the freeway before he crashes into anything should get away scot-free ?