Quote:When I was young I used to street race, and from 18 until 23 or so I racked up quite a few moving violations. I'm not proud of that time, but it was my way of acting out after my parents divorce. However, during that time I never caused an accident. The first time I caused an accident was last year in fact when I rear ended someone causing no damage to their tire, but wrecking my grill and hood. It took a long time for me to get past my bad driving record, so to see more and more rules piled onto the code makes me cringe. We are legislating common sense. If someone drives with one hand on a cell phone, is swerving from lane to lane, speeding up and slowing down and not paying attention to the road they deserve a ticket. There are plenty of laws in place already for which an officer could stop them including inattentive, careless or reckless driving. The last two are misdemeanors in my State which require a court visit.
Nicole Richie drove down a high way the wrong way while high on drugs and intoxicated. Then she got caught driving on a suspended license again. She got sentenced to 4 days in jail. Last year a man from MA hit the headlines for being caught Driving Under the Influence for some unreal number of times (~20 I believe). Luckily he didn't kill anyone over the years.
I'm not sure you'll convince me that we're in a tyrannical age of outlawing common sense.
I'm not espousing a police state; I do believe there needs to be an eye to maintaining that fine line. And I know there's some nonsense laws out there that cause a real hassle from time to time (like giving bad cops an excuse to pull over people like Maitre on dubious charges). But I do have a very hard time saying 'don't ban cell phone usage for teenagers' when they are operating a 2 ton slab of metal at high speeds. Those are hard words to eat when someone you know gets hit.
Cheers,
Munk
PS. With that said, I should say I'm a fan of going very lightly on first time offenders, and going harsh on multiple repeat offenders for breaking laws that endanger other people. Everyone makes mistakes, and no amount of laws can stop harsh tragedies from happening. But targeting a group which has a high record of causing these kinds of incidents doesn't seem that terrible to me.