29 people died yesterday, senselessly, unnecessarily. Do you care? 29 more will die today. Each of these deaths could have been prevented, with sufficient safeguards and government intervention. They were killed – will be killed tonight – by drunk drivers.
Why Can’t We Stop Drunk Driving?
About 1,400 people have been killed by drunk drivers so far this year, according to NHTSA statistics. A disproportionate number of them are in their youth – their teens or twenties. Far more are seriously injured or maimed, sometimes with lifelong disabilities, as a result of collisions caused by drunk drivers.
What kinds of public policy choices are we willing to make in order to protect our children, to protect the public? When will we get serious about drunk driving? What kinds of choices can we make?
Gun control laws are unique. In no other area of public policy are the proposed solutions to criminal acts aimed at people who haven’t committed crimes or shown any inclination to do so. Likewise, no other discussion of the misuse of free will focuses on inanimate objects.
Here are a few policy suggestions you will never see in the context of drunk driving deaths. You will never see anyone demonstrating in favor of seizing all private cars & licenses. You won’t even see anyone advocate for banning alcohol.
Nobody will suggest that only professional drivers should have cars, or a license to drive them. No Hollywood celebrities will tweet that anyone who argues for keeping private cars in private hands is marked with the blood of innocent victims of drunk drivers. No politician will introduce a grandstanding bill calling for a ban on certain types of cars, or certain types of alcohol.
But 29 people died yesterday, and another 29 are going to die tomorrow. Parents are sending their children out with an expectation they will be safe, but that cannot be guaranteed. Why can we not agree to do something about this carnage?
Please keep in mind that we’re talking only about the victims of drunk driving, not about victims of automobile accidents. These are victims of a criminal act. In spite of that fact, no one will call for additional laws, to further criminalize this already criminal act.
Gun Laws
The foregoing discussion is not really about drunk driving, of course. It is intended as an analogy to the current discussion about gun control, in the wake of another horrible act of violence. The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last week took 17 young lives, and wounded several more.
There is broad and deep agreement among all political factions that the shooter should never have had access to guns. His case is a clear demonstration of bureaucratic failure. Many governmental authorities received multiple warnings and saw multiple red flags that he was troubled and prone to violence.
There is much less agreement about what public policy options we should take now. In the wake of an event this horrible, we try to understand how to prevent its recurrence. We all agree on that. But when the only policy options under discussion are the traditional ‘gun control’ reflexes, the discussion is doomed to futility.
Laws meant to exercise government control over gun ownership and gun use are in a unique class. In no other area of public policy are the proposed solutions to criminal acts aimed at people who have neither committed crimes nor shown any propensity or inclination to do so. Likewise, no other discussion of a problem involving misuse of free will focuses on inanimate objects.
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Social media discussions are bursting with analogies like the one at the start of this article. Users cite counts of death from various causes, and suggest facetious preventative measures, like wearing helmets in the bath to prevent slip-and-fall deaths. Some readers are offended by the tone these posts can take.
The analogies are not meant to be sarcastic, or insensitive to our grief for the victims. They are an old rhetorical device called reductio ad absurdum, reducing a principle or a pattern to absurdity. The purpose is not to make light, or to create gallows humor, but to strip an argument down to its component parts, replacing those parts with absurd examples, in order to examine the argument’s internal logic more clearly.
Insanity
As long as the discussion revolves around taking away guns, rights, or property from people who use them responsibly, we will make no progress. Some partisans suggest that politicians don’t want to solve the problem. They say the ‘gun grabbers’ want to use the issue to generate outrage to help raise money and turn out voters.
There are serious options under discussion, however, that can keep our schools and public places safe. It is time to turn our attention to those options, rather than continuing to argue the same tired points that have been argued for 50 years. They are addressed in a separate article. We cannot continue doing the same things, expecting a different outcome. That’s insanity.
