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State Bans Texting While Driving
netbuzz writes "The state of Washington yesterday became the first in the nation to ban text-messaging while driving. The law could use sharper teeth, but it's a natural and necessary progression of the movement to clamp down on those who find the need to constantly communicate more important than the safety of their fellow travelers."
-b.
The law could use sharper teeth, but it's a natural and necessary progression of the movement to clamp down on those who find the need to constantly communicate more important than the safety of their fellow travelers."
Nonsense. There are already laws on the books which deal specifically with driver inattention. They have been there for some sixty or seventy years.
Why is it that anything involving a cel phone demands a special law prohibiting it? It's all feeling rather moralistic.
Tell you what, I'll let you ban cel phones in cars if you'll also ban coffee, donuts, makeup, radios, small children, pets, smoking, chewing tobacco, notepads, newspapers, and passengers, all of which can distract a driver.
Once every car contains only one hermetically sealed individual we should be 100% safe.
Three Squirrels
The problem with texting while driving is that it usually put OTHERS in danger because your driving will be affected. Common sense is not so common unfortunately, and texting while driving does not only affect you, but also others around you.
Oh and by the way, this is not "liberal" as you say. True liberals are on the side of liberty, which this clearly is not. Just the same, true conservatives would not do this either, because there is nothing conservative about passing more and more laws on the same exact subject. This is the doing of people who do not really fall on either side. They are extremists, totalitarians, or quite possibly just people without common sense. Personally, I like to think there is no devious motivations behind these stupid laws. I think they are just that, stupid.
If you want to exercise your first amendment rights pull off to the side of the road and do it.
It has been proven that talking on the cell phone while driving is almost as bad as driving drunk. I can only imagine how much worse 'texting while driving' is.
Remember that you have your rights only up until you become a danger or menace to society. And since society as a whole is not apparently capable of something called 'common sense' we have to legislate common sense unfortunately for the people who are 'common sense deficient' to put it in policially correct terms as not to offend people by calling them what they really are *cough*STUPID*cough*
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Tell me this is a parody, someone please! Please, won't someone? It is a parody, isn't it? I mean, surely not even in America... Come on, someone... it's gotta be a parody, right?...
The only problem with your solution is to define reckless. It will be at the appreciation of the policemen, so the punishment will depend on the hour of the day, the fact that he was hungry, that his girlfriend dumped him, that his boss told him he was too merciful ... It already happens with the current laws but would be far worse with only a vague and undefined law about "reckless" behaviour.
... Laws like this one would not be necessary.
You prefer to have a total faith in the capacity of the policemen to judge if an action is reckless. They are only persons too, so they are not perfect.
I much prefer to have some railings, limiting their freedom, but also protecting people from abuse. That's why laws have to be precise, to reduce the part of interpretation.
If only people could think a little bit by themselves and not act only out of fear of the punishment
Here too in the US, we have laws against "reckless driving" and "reckless endangerment". Cops can use these charges as sort of a carte blanche for any kind of dangerous driving. But those charges take some interpretation or perspective. A defendant might argue, "Yes, I was texting, but I was in control of my vehicle; I wasn't endangering anybody". A law specifically banning testing while driving is harder to defend against.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
As a non-smoker, I absolutely agree! The bartender/bar owner should be able to just post smoking/non smoking on the door, and tell anyone who wants to work there that there will be smoking if there will be. If people don't like it, they can go to a different bar.
I'd rather risk getting cancer than the socialist disease.
I, for one, am automatically suspicious of arguments that begin with "people have done research." Who are these anonymous people? Where was the research published? Has it been repeated? You're appealing to a nonsense authority.
Are you saying that someone shouldn't be able to present an argument? The point of a common law system like ours is the ability to adapt the law to the facts of a particular case. By passing laws like this, we simply limit the judge's ability to do his job. As a result, we'll have coarser justice. If a judge is letting people off for texting while driving and the people really disagree with that, then that judge will be replaced. And who knows? Someone might indeed deserve to be cleared of the charge.
And I bet 90% of the bad drivers you see are listening to music. Let's ban that in cars too. The fact is that when you notice that somebody is driving badly, you tend to look for someone to blame that driving on.
For example,
But you don't notice all the poor, black, or female people who are in fact excellent drivers. The same idea applies to cell phones. Most people can drive well and use cell phones responsibly. You just don't notice these people.
Furthermore, it won't change the fact that society as a whole accepts the practice, and that the law is the work of a vocal minority. I live in New York, and we've banned cell phone conversations in cars for some time now. Yet people think of it as wrong in the same sense that driving five miles per hour over the speed limit is wrong -- that is, not morally wrong at all.
Contrast that with how people feel about drunk driving -- if you tell friends you drive drunk, they'll give you the look they'd give you if you told them you killed kittens as a hobby. The difference is that drunk driving is a real danger.
*sigh* In more general terms, the law should reflect the morality of society as a whole. When someone not wrong is made illegal, the credibility of the law is diminished. People lose respect for all laws, not just the ridiculous one. They become cynical; participation in government drops as people feel that they can't affect their own government. The government abuses that cynical indifference to grab even more power, and the cycle repeats and repeats until we live in an authoritarian police state. It's happened before and it's happening again.
If these kinds of driving things really are wrong enough to warrant laws of their own, then the public needs to be educated FIRST. If they don't clamor all over their legislators to pass the law on their own, then perhaps the law isn't needed in the first place.
The problem with that analogy is smoking is a legal activity performed voluntarily by millions of people, including many business owners and employees, and exposure to second-hand smoke is far less dangerous than, say, climbing too high on a ladder.
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