Quote:
Originally Posted by Vampyr
Pretty bad reasoning. The amount of people who are alive that die is also staggering, but you don't outlaw living. You could also say that people walking out the front door of their house are putting themselves and others in danger, but you don't outlaw going outside just because accidents happen.
There's a difference between going outside and going outside holding the trigger down a fully loaded machine gun, which is comparable to driving sober or driving drunk.
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Ok, first off let me clarify and say that I was being glib and I don't really think that driving should be made illegal. Life as we know it wouldn't exist without vehicles, so we can't just outlaw them even if we could. (Sound familiar to drinking?)
My intention was to bring up just how dangerous driving is. Assuming the stats from Acebot's link that 17,448 died in 2001 from alcohol related vehicle accidents and the stat from my link that 43,200/year is also from 2001, that means 40% of vehicle deaths were related to alcohol. That still leaves 25,752 deaths from sober drivers, and it's not like you can really separate getting drunk from the driving part. The deaths caused by drinking and walking home is virtually zero compared to driving drunk. Driving is still the dangerous part of the equation here. So your analogy doesn't really hold up.
A lot more can be done to make driving safer that simply isn't done because people would throw a hissy fit if it were implemented. Do you have red light cameras around where you are? I think they're great, but the amount of people who bitch and moan about getting caught running red lights is laughable. Here's an idea, guys --
don't run red lights!
But I digress. I think we should implement similar systems to control speeding. Speeding cameras are a simple method. We could also introduce chips that force cars to not go over a posted speed limit. These are easily feasible systems. The speeding cameras have been tried from over a decade ago near here. But what happened? The public outcry put it out of commission.
Sorry to hijack the thread. I guess I should make another debate thread about this, but I'm not very good at starting discussions.