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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."
Whatever happened to common sense?
-b.
That there was a need for the State ban such moronic behaviour in the first place.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
This reminds me of the time I got a free dashboard sun-shade at Road Atlanta one year. (These are the accordion-fold things you sit on the dash and stretch out across the entire windshield to help keep the sun from getting the interior of your car too hot in the summer).
It had a safety label: "Do not drive with sun shade in place!"
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
They can get a court order to subpoena your phone records. Or if your provider is Verizon, they can just ask for them.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
This is just more liberal do-gooding and interference with our everyday lives. This is by the same people who want to ban smoking, force our kids to learn junk science, and stifle honest American toil.
We can only pray, before these nannying socialists force us to use inferior and dangerous operating systems.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Jeff Gordon, is that you?
I come here for the love
I have done it, many times. I read blogs, email, etc. on my phone, studied for tests, read magazines, and so forth while driving too. I even change clothes -- everything except my boxers -- while driving. I've done so regularly for years. And how many accidents have I had?
Zero.
It comes down to prioritization and common sense. I didn't say I read *efficiently* while driving -- I certainly don't operate anywhere nearly as quickly on my reading/writing/etc. while driving as I do when I'm not engaged in driving. I check the road ahead of me and to the sides once every second or two, then glance down at my text to be read, get a line or sentence, then look up again at traffic while I process that line/sentence. I don't do these things at all in severely-inclement weather: snow, ice, heavy rain, high winds. Nor do I do them in situations where traffic conditions are changing rapidly: at high speed with lots of merging traffic, in crowded downtown streets with lots of pedestrians, along twisty mountain roads, etc.. I do it primarily in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, sub-10 mi/hour traffic where, if an accident were to occur, it almost certainly would not be serious.
The simple fact is that we are not all created equal and we do not all evolve equally-fast or in the same directions. Some people are competent to perform actions which are dangerous if managed poorly, while others are not. I'm not competent to do something as dangerous as landing an airplane -- but plenty of trained pilots are; the mentally insane (as the VA Tech shootings exemplified) are not competent to use firearms safely, and nor are (IMO) people convicted of any violent crimes - but most other people are, or would be with sufficient training & education.
A better approach, rather than banning an activity outright, would be to test an individual's competence to perform the activity. An outright ban is too broad and inspecific; it has all the surgical precision of the Bush administration's "it's for national security" argument used to justify its actions...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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.