Question – should driving if a person is legally blind be permitted?
Hate to burst your bubble, but you’re incorrect on that. Here’s why.
You insist that nowhere is there listed a “right to drive a vehicle”. That is correct. No such right exists.
Driving a vehicle is a licensed privilege that is granted by the state at the convienence of the state. The state does NOT have to grant you the right to drive a vehicle. Caselaw has established that the state government has the right to regulate as that privilege as it sees fit. Therefore, the state government has, at its discretion, the ability to pass regulations prohibiting drunk driving if it so sees fit.
We now move on to your next erroneous statement:
Ah, but it is NOT the same argument. There is a definite and established difference.
Stating that an African-American is more likely to commit a crime and committing racial profiling because of that is illegal as race is a protected class, and as such racial profiling violates the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which being federal law takes precedence.
Unfortunately for drunk people, drunkeness is not a protected class, and so laws regulating drunk driving cannot be considered to be discriminatory. Nice try though - the argument has been attempted in court and, well, failed badly.
BTW, if you pointed a revolver with only one bullet and 10,000,000,000 chambers at me? Besides being a really impressive and heavy hunk of metal, it’d still be an assault charge just for the pointing. You don’t even have to pull the trigger.
Anyhow, if you come up with a good legal basis for an argument on the subject, let me know. 
Certainly. After all, simply getting behind the wheel carries a non-zero risk of harming yourself or others. The fact that by driving blind you increase that risk is irrelevant and really should be simply hand waved away. The only caveat being if you actually hit someone while driving blind…then, presumably, you’d face the exact same consequences as a normally sighted person (or someone impaired by drink or drugs) who get’s into an accident (drawn and quartered? Forced to watch Dancing with the Stars for 16 straight hours? Paper cut with lemon juice?)
-XT
This is where you are absolutely incorrect in your assumption. Yes, statistics do in fact show that drunk drivers a far more likely to cause an accident that results in injury or death.
We get it, you hate cars. But even your gun analogy is bad. Even a drunk driver generally doesn’t have the intent to kill or harm someone. A person holding a loaded gun, spinning the chamber and then pulling the trigger does have that intent.
Because the act of aging is impossible to avoid and has no degree of intent, whereas drunk driving does.
I do agree that conditions for older people need to be enforced pretty often, like yearly eye/coordination/driving tests or something, but there are plenty of old folks that can see and drive just fine, albeit a bit more slowly than younger people.
I’d still be interested in hearing if and how SmashTheState and Crafter_Man apply their arguments thus far towards attempted murder and conspiracy charges.
What I find interesting is the threads vibe to ignore Statistics. In fact to accept the posters numbers (1 in 10,000) without question. Here’s some quick research courtesy of the cdc & MADD.
In 2006
43,664 people were killed in vehicle accidents in the US. This is 0.0145% of the total population (est 299,398,484).
or 1 in 6,857 people would be killed in a vehicle accident.
13,491 of the vehicle fatalities involved alcohol.
or 30% of total vehicle deaths involved alcohol. (1 in 22,193 persons)
1.46 million people were arrested for drunk driving. (.48% of gen pop)
Draw your own conclusions.
Sources:
http://www.census.gov/popest/states/NST-ann-est2006.html
http://www.madd.org/Drunk-Driving/Drunk-Driving/Statistics/AllStats.aspx
BTW: I agree with you concern in regards to getting behind (the most likely place for a child aged 5-20 to die is in a car with their parent driving.)
-Joe
Aside from the point made about voting, because they’re simply not the problem drunks are. They don’t kill 14,000 or so people in the USA every year.
Yes, it should be illegal and the perpetrator should be incenerated by 1,000 mirrors.
Good god, if you’re going to quote Abbie Hoffman, at least get the quote right:
What he really said was, “Free speech is the right to shout ‘theatre’ in a crowded fire,” in his book Soon to be a major motion picture, published in 1980. It’s called humor.
God rest his soul. I’m sure that Abbie was aware that you don’t have a right to shout anything in a privately owned theater. Freedom of speech is about what restrains the government can’t put on you.
You are overplaying the Devil Advocate a little here. We’re not all that sweet and some of us are not all the senseless. When I go somewhere with one of my friends, she always drives. She’s sharp and knows Nashville streets inside out. She’s ninety years old and for our journeys together, she’s the safer driver.
When I know exactly where I’m going, I’m just fine. I’m a very careful driver – not unreasonably slow, but I don’t speed. I drive at the limit. I’m very courteous and cautious. I’ve never had 3-demensional vision because my vision is very limited in my right eye. It has always been that way and for me that’s normal.
I am a very strong advocate of retesting of elderly drivers! I don’t think that it is too discriminatory. My vision should be checked along with my reflexes and my knowledge of the rules of the road. Sixty-five seems to be a reasonable age to start without over-burdening the system. Instead, they have given me the privilege of not having to show up at all – not even to have a picture made! I just send them money and they renew my license. I will be 66 in two weeks. I drive a red convertible.
I not only think that driving under the influence should be a crime, I think that if you are the owner of the car you are driving, the car should become the property of the state and be auctioned off on the first offense.
When I first started teaching, I stood with my students at the windows of my classroom as the funeral procession for one of our seniors – killed by a drunk driver – passed by. Don’t talk to me about judgment and backroads.
Well both speeding and tailgating are crimes - whether you injure someone or not
The elderly - I don’t know about where you are but where I am the elderly must pass driving competency and eyesight tests
Inexperienced drivers - I think many / most countries now have some form of graduated driver licensing system, so this is also a bit of a strawman - “the authorities” try to mitigate the inexperience factor.
Any argument to the contrary here about DUI laws is a strawman. Since its nonsensical to say *“You should be able to get liquored up and drive, and it should be okay as long as you don’t hit anyone or anything”, *(**which actually has been said **:eek:), people are saying “What about old people!? They’re dangerous on the road!”, *“I hate cars!” *and in the Pit thread that started this some are even blaming the victims of a DUI accident!
Unbelievable. I like to have a few cold ones myself, but defending my right to drink a 6 pack and then go careening down the highway in my Jeep requires a level of lunacy I can’t achieve.
By this logic, if I want to drive down the street shooting out of my window, it’s no harm no foul, unless of course, I actually shoot someone. The law doesn’t always work on the premise that harm must a necessary end to some action, only a likely one. Or, in some cases, a possible one which “but for” the issue in question likely wouldn’t have happened.
Here’s a little thought experiment (actually more than that since there are actual data for it). I’ll water it down tremendously and even outright just change the facts so it’s more amenable to you. Suppose that drunk drivers have no greater risk of being involved in a collision (not true, but we’ll roll with it). Further suppose that it’s not the sheer number of collisions in which they’re involved so much as the severity of the ones they happen to find themselves in. So, they have an equal chance of being in a collision as you or I, but when they are in one, they have a far greater likelihood of it being more serious. That alone is sufficient to my mind to proscribe the behavior. Consider for a moment that drunk driving accounts for the largest single contribution to collision fatalities while still not accounting for the overall highest amount. That is to say that no other cause ranks as high, but the sum aggregate of all other causes is greater than it alone. That fully a third of all motor vehicle fatalities are caused by a single factor seems to imply that such factor might, alone, be considerable. Admittedly, the site to which I linked has a bias (anti-drunk driving) and cites nothing for its data. So, you can take a close look at the data NHTSA has and crunch your own numbers if you’re dubious of the first cite.
I suppose I’m going to go with an idea along the lines of why I won’t let drunk surgeons operate on me: people who are inebriated don’t make the same good choices people who aren’t likely would. Booze is a central nervous system depressant which means that it reduces motor control and cognitive function. The ability to react on the roadway to minimize dangers is reduced considerably by depressing the brain’s ability to perceive the hazard and react. Incidentally, your argument that driving slow is de facto safe fails. Indeed, slow speed (10 MPH or more below the posted limit) during the hours of darkness is all by itself probable cause to stop a motorist to check for impairment. About 60% of the time, the motorist will, oddly enough, be impaired.
A slow speed isn’t default safe; it must be considered against the expected speed of the roadway.
One could ask the same of you, but as it appears, intelligent conversation wasn’t on the menu.
SmashTheState - I don’t know if there is a formal name for your style of OP, but it seems to follow a common message board pattern where a person takes an intentionally contrarian and extreme point of view and attempts to rationalize it by taking minor or pedantic points to their logical absurdity.
Yes, the act of driving inherently has an element of danger to it. Just about everything has an element of danger to it. However, that risk can be greatly eliminated by taking the proper precautions and following the rules.
By drinking and driving, you are intentionally reducing your capacity to operate a motor vehicle safely. It would be the same as if you decided to drive around with something that obscures your vision or restricts your movement.
If we were to follow your “logic” then pretty much everything would be legal because everthing has a non-zero percent element of danger and since we can’t ban everthing, we should ban nothing. Clearly this is absurd.
We, as a society, have decided to allow or ban particular activities based on their risk, their utility, possible consequences and other factors. Since driving while drunk is unnecessary, preventable, greatly increases the risk of serious injury or death to others, and offers no upside you would be unable to convince many people that there is a legitimate reason to allow it.
There is a very simple principle at play here that you are not understanding. You are correct that every action entails some risk of harming other people. When that risk gets to an unacceptable level, then society makes the action illegal.
The drunk driving threshold in every state I am aware of is a BAC of .08. Society apparently thinks that it is perfectly ok to drive with a BAC of .05 but illegal to deive with a BAC of .08, because apparently society believes that the risk of harm gets too high at the .08 mark.
You can argue that society has misjudged the risk of a particular action if you want. You can also use the political process to try to advance your own theory of the risk of an activity. But it makes no sense to argue that society must outlaw everything if it wants to outlaw anything.
MADD is run by a bunch of prohibitionists.
Now define “involved alcohol.” This probably means someone involved in the accident, whether he caused it or not, had been drinking. There is a distinction between alcohol-caused fatalities, which means the driver had a BAC of .08 or higher, and alcohol-related, which means someone somewhere had a cocktail. MADD likes to press the alcohol-related numbers to scare everyone into supporting their prohibitionist agenda. Bunch of Dry Agents, all of them.
Wanted to add a link from the NHSTA: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809-528.PDF
“Alcohol related fatalities are defined as fatalities that occur in crashes where at least one driver or
nonoccupant (pedestrian or pedalcyclist) involved in the crash has a positive Blood Alcohol Concentration
(BAC) value.”
The OP’s general idea appears to be that nothing should be illegal unless it actually harms someone, not just because it has the potential to harm someone. It’s an interesting concept but the arguments in this thread don’t do a good job of supporting it.
MeanOldLady: That’s not what I’m reading. Another NHSTA link (PDF alert) says: “In 2007, an estimated 12,998 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes — a decline of 3.7 percent from the 13,491 fatalities in 2006.” (bolding mine)
“Alcohol-impaired” is footnoted as “crashes that involve at least one driving or motorcycle rider with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 g/dL or above.”
And alcohol-impaired driving does account for 30-32% of driving fatalities. You just happened to cite a study with the wording “alcohol related”; studies from the same gov’t source using “alcohol-impaired” gibe squarely with the jsmooth’s stats.
Yeesh, I know there’s a distinction between alcohol-related and alcohol-impaired. That’s what my entire post was about. That and a snipe at MADD.