Ravenwood - 12/17/03 06:30 AM
While I cetainly do not advocate drunken driving, I think that lawmakers might be going just a bit overboard when cracking down on drunken driving. For instance lowering the legal BAC limit from .10 to .08 has done little to help the problem. The reason being that people between .08 and .10 are not the cusp of the problem. It doesn't do much good to treat someone who has had 3 beers and blows a .08 on the the same as some nut who has had 20 beers, can barely walk, and blows a .20.
That's why I am skeptical about Virginia's attempt to get tougher on drinking and driving. Some of the proposals include a mandatory sentence for first offenders, and mandatory jail time for driver's with a BAC level of .15 (lowered from .20). There would also be tougher penalties for people who dare to refuse a field breath test. (Current law assumes you are guilty and suspends your license for a year.)
Despite past attempts to get tough on drunk drivers, state officials claim that 41% of traffic fatalities are related to drinking, and that drink driving deaths have outnumbered homicide in the past two years. (Not that officials would pad those claims to drum up support for tougher laws.)
Drunk driving is very common and mostly benign, just like regular driving. It became a ``public problem'' rather than a personal moral failing in the 70s I guess. Joseph R Gussman, a sociologist who writes in the spirit of Erving Goffman, which is to say he's readable and interesting, has a couple of books on the topic.
_The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order_ (1981) where he reports an initial enthusiasm on the part of busybodies turned hostile when they realized what he was actually studying; and
_Contested Meanings: The Construction of Alcohol Problems_ (1996) which generalizes the rhetoric of public problems, how to create them and take ownership of them.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at December 17, 2003 8:47 AM> Joseph R Gussman, a sociologist who writes in the spirit of Erving Goffman, which is to say he's readable and interesting, has a couple of books on the topic.
Gusfield, sorry.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at December 17, 2003 8:49 AMWhile I was in college, I had give a persuasive speech for a public speaking class. As one who would never miss an opportunity to tweak the lefty libs in the class, I talked about the need to raise the BAC limit.
One of my sources (I really wish I had kept my work) was a shelved report out of Pennsylvania that determined that 83% of all alcohol related accidents involve those with BAC levels over .18 (I believe that is the number, but I could be off by a tenth). The percentage of multivehicle accidents is much higher. It seems that if you are around .10 they only accidents that you are likely to get into are silly things like fender benders getting out of parking spaces.
Everytime I hear about the crackdown on drunk driving, I remember that this report was shelved and if not for a disgruntled employee on the way out the door, it never would have seen the light of day.
Posted by: Jeffro at December 17, 2003 9:35 PMA handy quip by my late friend F.T.Grampp on the Mothers against Drunk Driving, ``If it weren't for the drunks, a lot of them wouldn't be mothers.''
I've found it handy.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at December 18, 2003 11:57 AM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
