Originally Posted by
'58 Flat
At the time, I favored a two-tiered approach: At .05 or above but less than .15, drunk driving would be a misdemeanor - and at .15 or above it would be a felony, carrying a mandatory minimum 16 months in state prison, with no exceptions; this would also make killing someone while driving at .15 or above first-degree murder en passant, in that the latter would then constitute killing during the commission of a felony.
Insurance lobbies had much to do with the laws that we have.
This I offered as an alternative to age discrimination; i.e., raising the drinking age to 21 (what if statistics showed that people of certain races, religions etc. have higher drunk-driving-related accident rates? Should we then prohibit members of those groups from drinking?).
We have different standards for adult behaviors based in part on predictable effects of maturity. Automobiles are designed to be driven by just about any adult with an IQ of 80, which suggests that the average 16-year-old is capable of driving a car competently. Driving an 18-wheeler is more complicated; in view of the 'trucker' culture an adult with an IQ of 90 is a reasonable minimum. Age 18 is the usual level of high-school graduation, which says something about educational attainment at age 20 and later: high-school dropouts (unless they passed up a senior year of high school to go to college) are generally recognized as dullards, and mediocrities generally don't get to grad school of any kind.
People are not fully adult in their physiology until they are about 25, as I can tell you from my experience in selling men's suits. I cringed when someone 20 years old wanted a men's suit because men that young still do not have adult bodies. From what I have seen in baseball, peak performance by batters is to be found between ages 25 and 29. Anyone could tell that a George Brett or Miguel Cabrera already in the majors at age 20 was going to be a major star if he kept a reasonably-clean life (well, that's a qualification for Darryl Strawberry) as he became stronger and filled out a youthful frame.
Alcohol has different effects upon people based upon age. Someone drinking at age 24 gets different effects from what at such an age is a relatively-tame drug (unless drinking to pathological levels), but on someone 14 years old, alcohol is a hard drug. There is no safe level of drinking for someone in early teens other than zero. An 18-year-old might be marginally tolerable as a drinker as I was -- I spaced them two hours apart and drank them slowly and never got drunk, but that was in a college dorm on a Saturday-night party and I wasn't going to do any driving that night -- many 18-year-olds lacked the judgment about alcohol and might provide it to children in their early-to-middle teens, which is a disaster.
And as chance would have it, this ties in with the now-rekindled debate over gun control: Why should some 85-year-old woman living alone in a dangerous neighborhood be deprived of her only means of protecting herself because some 20-year-old spoiled brat shot up 26 people in Connecticut?
Canis lupus familiaris poses severe and sure danger to any intruder. Nobody wants even one dog bite. I can attest from an unintended and non-hostile scratch from a strong swipe of a paw with large, sharp claws that a dog scratch is to be avoided (I got hospital treatment for an infection that a cocker spaniel inflicted upon me with his cat-like claws). Multiple large dogs make a house as dangerous to a burglar as the Sunderbans, the swamps of the Ganges delta where lurk man-eating tigers. Dogs are as deadly as predators of similar size and in concert are as deadly as a predator similar in size to the group. They simply behave better than any other large predator except for the whale shark.
Or, with an eye on "progressives" who opposed the Iraq war because, in their view at least, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, why punish all gun owners by taking a fundamental citizenship right away from them (as was done to 18-to-20-year-olds with their fundamental citizenship right to purchase alcoholic beverages) because of an incident they had nothing to do with?
Between 1918 and 1933 the manufacture, import, sale, and use of intoxicating liquors -- even the comparatively-mild beer and wine -- was not understood as a fundamental right of Americans of any age.
Constitutional rights are not add-ons, you know.
You are far safer from gun-related violence in Canada than in the United States without having lost any significant rights.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The Well Regulated Militia
