Welcome to the new and improved CarSeatSite!Changes to weight limits and carseats tested to a national side impact standard are a couple of big changes coming to carseats!Wait—you mean we didn’t already have these things? No. Really, no we didn’t. But thanks to some...
read more
I think that when people drive drunk, they should be punished harshly. Drunk driving is more likely to kill people than almost any other action you could take (without actually saying “I’m gonna go out and kill people tonight.”)
Basically, each time a driver chooses to drink and drive, s/he is choosing a path with a higher-than-normal likelihood of killing someone.
That he happened to get into a “worst case” scenario as far as survival odds of the people he hit was not his fault- but that he hit them while driving impaired in the first place WAS.
I don’t have much sympathy for either drunk drivers OR adults that refuse to wear seat belts. This isn’t 1985, so it’s not like the benefits of wearing seatbelts are new information. I’m of course horrified that the children had to pay for their parents’ foolishness, as well as the drunk driver’s.
As far as penalties go, I think the legal consequences of driving drunk are ridiculously low regardless of the circumstances or outcome. Here’s my (admittedly hyperbolic) solution: first conviction you get a fine, maybe a license suspension, and some time to get your life together. Second conviction you get your license back right away and your airbag replaced with a claymore mine. Too many people have died at the hands of habitual drunk drivers and it needs to stop.
I was driving to an appointment yesterday and while sitting at a red light, noticed a shockingly high number of unbelted drivers going past. This was a major intersection–not a neighborhood intersection where drivers are pulling out and “just getting around” to putting their seat belts on. And yet my legislature refuses to pass a primary offense law for seat belts because some study showed inflated seat belt usage in my state. Getting back to drunk driving and intent, when you’re drunk, do you necessarily have intent? What I mean by that is, do you know you’re not safe to drive? So does the drunk driver who kills someone know that they’re not a safe driver when they get behind the wheel in the first place? Ugh. We have the technology and it’s easy to do–every vehicle should have an ignition interlock.
My personal view is that while the victims’ failure to buckle up is very unfortunate, it does not really lessen the drunk driver’s guilt in any way. By choosing to drive while intoxicated, he took on the risk of potentially injuring others, whether bicyclists, pedestrians, or motorists, and whether they were restrained or unrestrained.
In civil matters, some states apparently do allow a contributory negligence or comparative negligence defense in cases where the victim was not wearing a seatbelt. However, most states do not.
Heather/Murphydog77 – what state are you in? My summary sheet from NHTSA lists California as having a primary enforcement law. Are you in a different state or are you referring to some other proposed upgrade to the law?
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811691.pdf
California does indeed have a relatively high rate of seatbelt use, somewhere around 96%. Interestingly, my state of Massachusetts has the lowest seatbelt usage rate in the country, at 72% — even lower than in New Hampshire, where seatbelts are not legally mandatory for adults. Baffling.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811651.pdf
The drunk driver is 100% responsible for the consequences of his actions. He happened to hit a car with unfastened passengers – that’s his bad luck and he’s entirely responsible for such luck. If he didn’t want to be responsible for it, then he should not have hit them in the first place.
That’s like saying to people with a smart car “YOU made the decision to buy a tiny car, and when my drunk self rammed into you, you died! Should’ve gotten a Hummer, not my fault!”
I just this afternoon had to call the police and report an unrestrained child – about 4yo, front seat, no belt at all, in a late ’90s Jeep Grand Cherokee. If I would have thought faster, I actually could have even given them a brand new HBB since I had just spent all day running an educational booth at a safety fair. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that quickly enough and the light changed. I followed them for a bit see if I might have another opportunity to get the driver to roll down her window so I could simply say “I’ll give you a free booster seat right now if you just let me talk to you!” Unfortunately I didn’t get another chance, so I had to settle for reporting it to the police.
The difficulty with that type of situation is how can you expect a parent who is that careless to even use a booster if it was given to them? Of course, the driver also wasn’t belted. I just don’t know what’s wrong with people …
Heather is not in California. 😉
As far as are drunk people capable of choosing not to drive- yes. Evidence does indeed show that people don’t realize how drunk they are and think they are “safe to drive” when they aren’t, but evidence also shows that if people plan before drinking an alternate way to get home, or to wait a safe time before driving, the incidence of them driving home anyway goes way down. Also, people who know they should not drive if they have had a drink in the last x amount of time and buy into that, are likelier to choose not to drive, last time I glanced over the research. Education is certainly key- but at some point the onus has to be on the person making the choice to drive impaired, because you’d have to be living under a rock at this point to not know that driving after drinking is not ok or legal.
My husband almost got hit by a drunk driver when he was walking on the sidewalk one evening and the car jumped up the sidewalk! It’s too easy to drive in this country! Everyone should be forced to watch videos of accidents and then they’ll be more careful.
Do you know that when I went back to China with my 1 year old I had to sit in a taxi nervously holding her tightly with no seatbelt? The vehicle was not moving very fast luckily. Well, drivers in China drive much better of course.