Ok, so I think I did missed the point because i was extrapolating from David saying people who drunk drive should receive the same punishment as people who kill someone in a car accident and then you comparing it to the gun.
I in general disagree with the idea that the risk of a bad activity should carry the same punishment as if that bad activity leads to tragedy, but perhaps im still missing your point. I think its more of a grey area because i wouldn't actually be for completely legal drunk driving I would be for raising the limit from .08 to.2 and perhaps more lax "suspicion of drunk driving " laws. I think people from the country are more likely to be libertarian on this issue.

It's factually correct though.

I'm saying the punishment for someone pointing and shooting a revolver with 6 bullets in the chamber should be the same as for someone pointing and shooting a revolver with 3 bullets in the chamber - regardless of if the victim gets lucky with an empty chamber.

I agree. And being from a rural area I think its because they are able to drive drunk without a bad outcome more often.


I have no idea, but I know birds have wings is factually correct too.

When you are a mod you can tell who can and cannot comment on your stupid opinions but until then you should probably stop telling people what to do.

Thanks,
The mods.

I agree with a lot of this and I'll expand on the bits I disagree with later but luck plays a part in getting caught, I also live in a rural area and there is very little chance I get stopped, if I lived somewhere else my chance of getting unlucky would be very different. Do you think it's okay to accept the luck involved in getting caught while not accepting the luck in causing further harm?

Of course there will always be an element of luck involved in being caught I'm just not sure why we are trying to eliminate it from sentencing. Clearly you can't account for those lucky enough to not get caught.

I guess it comes back to what we want a criminal justice system to do, sentencing principles are varied from punishment, deterrence, reparations, protection I agree that it's about society's well being but then society may feel increased well being when drunk drivers who kill are given greater sentences than drunk drivers that don't. Fwiw I actually agree with a number of your punishments and generally prefer not to lock people up.

Yes? I don't think they have to be related. One (probability of getting caught) is just the way it is - not much we can do about it. The other (punishment based on EV of harm of action) we can do something about.

Although, I'm generally of the opinion that punishments should also coincide with likelihood of getting caught. I haven't thought about it in terms of drunk driving, so it may not be applicable, but things like punishments for fare skippers on a subway should be based on the probability of getting caught.

I'm going to take a wild stab here and say so has the number of drivers.

Ok. I can agree to that since i basically dont post here anymore anyway.

That is correct. I would say that if drunk driving was The core problem with driving, it would have gone down anyway because those bans would have been such a great detterent.

Apologies for the derail but I'm thinking out loud while waiting to leave the office. What if we could demonstrate that deaths caused by drunk driving were more likely in the country but less likely to be caught, should we distinguish between the standard sentences applied to rural and city drunk drivers?

Drivers are the core problem with driving and we still have those.

May be replaced soon and I'd happily bet that accidents will plummet very quickly.

Yes, just to add to that, in like new york city the situation might be wait until your 17 to get a drivers license and then you basically rarely use your car. In rural kansas you can get your license when you're 15 and then its common for a bunch of 15 year olds to get in the back seat and drive around for 100's of miles and smoke pot/ drink the whole way.

I don't think that's how numbers work.

Hypothetically lets say you have a million drivers and 50000 accidents. Then you had 1.5 million drivers but outlawed drinking. You can see how much of those accidents were caused by drinking by the new number of accidents. If drinking was the primary cause despite there being more people the number would still go down.

You're comparing when drink driving laws came in to now. So the number of cars hasn't gone from 1m to 1.5m. It's gone from a handful to a couple of hundred million.

I don't know. There are other ethical issues to be considered as well. You have to figure out what features are allowable for determining punishment. Extreme examples are BAC is obviously ok to base a punishment on, race obviously isn't.

I don't feel good about rural vs urban being used to determine punishment.

When did drunk driving laws come into effect? I have no idea because when i was young and learning to drive in west virginia there was certainly anti-drunk driving laws but they werent enforced ever. I assume but dont know for a fact those laws never being enforced was one of those "white male privilege" things. Ive never gotten a dui and i also dont drink and drive (now).
I was using those number as an example the percent increase is certainly lower than what you're suggesting and i know the law used to be in effect no one pulled you over unless you were zig zagging down the road .3 drunk. So it would be tough to apply those numbers.

New Jersey was apparently the first to issue a ban on drink driving in 1906, but laws have changed significantly over the years. I don't know how many people are car owners regularly driving, but the numbers on license holders is around 200 million - about twice what it was at the start of the 70's.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinfor...8/chapter4.cfm

That's why I made the point that the number of drivers has increased beyond dramatically. I'm not even sure what the adjective is for that kind of increase. Astronomical, probably. Even if the ban on drink driving had a huge impact on the rate of offence the number of actual offences should still be a dramatic increase because of the enormous increase in drivers we're dealing with.

Is the point you were getting to that drink driving has increased in proportion with this? i.e. x% of drivers were drink driving before the ban, and now it's >x% of drivers? Numbers on this would be cool. And then let me know where you're heading with that.

Great question, adios.

One area to examine are the methods and mechanisms which have slowed and impeded progress towards social justice. Probably best summed up in one word as "denial".

The best one word to sum up how to achieve social justice faster is "organize".

Quick point about DUI which was probably made already, there's a big difference between .08 and .25. I am going going to guess that a person registering .25 is a whole lot more likely to do bodily harm than someone registering 0.08. So I think that should be considered in sentencing.

Yes was thinking about this earlier today and had the same thoughts. Organized protesting would seem to be a positive approach.

Organizing is a bigger than just protesting and it's smaller too. You have done a small act of organizing just making this thread, for example.

Then I have done well

Government doesn't function well, so we need more government.

Ok Proph you don't like the idea of giving up due process rights, I get it. I don't think anyone else posting here does either which is actually something I am glad to see. Kind of a conundrum really. Justice delayed is justice denied but the process of achieving justice to me anyway, via the legal system, is necessarily slow.

If someone is playing Russian roulette with the public, they should be charged with murder if they kill someone.

IMO, each incident needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Drastically cutting the workload by no longer pursuing victimless "crimes" would help with this.