When one of its planes crashes, the official term that the Air Force typically uses is “mishap.”
Nicely put reminder, cochrane. 
“Inaccurate”??? How could my scenario be “inaccurate”???
You posted a significantly different scenario from mine. My scenario has one set of consequences. Yours will have a different set of consequences. How can one of them be “inaccurate”???
Absolutely baffling.
Note: The issue is the use of the word “accident”. It all too often bundles actual “nobody’s fault” situations from non-accidental someone did something wrong. (By commission or omission.) So it increases the inclination to let people off for something bad they did that caused harm. “It was just an accident.”
People saying “It was an accident”, when they spoke of the death of my father, made me very angry. And if I tried to argue, or express my point of view, the would just get upset themselves and change the subject, or walk away.
You posit that unintentionally shooting a neighbor child would surely give you significant jail time and that is inaccurate. (You emphasized the word “unintentionally” as if that was of paramount importance, and it isn’t.) It is also an inaccurate comparison unless you assume that drivers are randomly running into things until one one of those things is a bicyclist. So yes, doubly inaccurate.
I accept your characterisation of Seattle traffic, but in London a study has shown that zipping between cars and riding through red lights is safer for bike riders, as measured by the number of accidents.
Cutting through red lights cleared the bikes out of the high-accident intersection area, preventing accidents and improving traffic flow.
PS I personally stopped last year for a bicyclist who had been wiped out by a turning truck, which did not stop. If she’d had the sense to cut through the red light, instead of waiting, she wouldn’t have been there when the truck cut across in front of her.
Doubling down, are we?
No, if a person is just shooting around at random things in their back yard and kills someone they are going to do non-trivial jail time. What could possibly be “inaccurate” about that"???
I was focusing on “unintentional” because of what previous posters were saying. You can go to prison for harming/killing other people even if it was unintentional. Hence “negligent homicide” and other such terms. Doing something without it being intended to do harm doesn’t get you off the hook. It’s a lesser crime than doing it intentionally, but those are still crimes. It’s not “paramount” but it does make a difference.
I think we can all agree that deliberately ramming a bicyclist is a very serious crime.
“Random” is a completely different concept from being negligent. If you kill someone while you were driving and texting, that is not random. Your comparison of “random” to “negligent” here is, in fact, inaccurate.
Can you see that at all?
But it is negligent and unintentional.
Atamasama, ftg, you two seem to be violently agreeing to me. Both of you are differentiating between reckless behavior and incidents that arise from happenstance.
ftg was emphasizing “unintentional” to stress that reckless behavior with an unintentional result is still potentially criminal. I think Atamasama agrees with that. Atamasama was stressing that intention isn’t the only determiner, that recklessness itself can also be a factor. ftg agrees.
Drivers give you a much wider berth if you appear to have the silhouette of a gun in the back pocket of your jersey. :eek:
Cite, please? Because this sounds about as plausible as the old saw about always bringing a bomb on a plane, because what are the odds there’ll be two bombs? Intersections are high-risk areas precisely because there are people trying to go in multiple directions there, and letting them go in multiple directions at the same time can only increase the risk, not decrease it.
Meanwhile, I’m a heavy bicyclist. Nearly everywhere I go, I go by bike, and I don’t even have a car. And while I don’t know precisely what proportion of bicyclists are scofflaws, I do know that it’s far too many, and I believe that the first step towards bicyclists getting more respect is for the police to treat offenses like running red lights and driving on the wrong side of the road equally for all vehicles.
I rode my bike a lot as a child and a bit in college. For me personally, I’ll ride around a low-traffic neighborhood, but not a busy street. Having cars come up behind me and pass right next to me - hell no!
The argument for not stopping at intersections is that when bikes come to a stop, they lose maneuverability, and the ability to respond to an emergency. It takes more time to get moving again than it does for a car.
Again, I wouldn’t recommend that on busy city streets, but in low traffic neighborhoods, it makes much more sense to let the bikes go.
If I’m on a bike and I see a car, I’m not whipping across in front of him. I respect the car not to ride like a maniac, I expect them to show the same respect and not drive like one.