Ravenwood - 10/17/05 07:30 AM
Rob Smith is mad at MADD, and those that are congratulating the neo-temperance group for a job well done.
I really like THIS piece of "proof" about how effective that organization has been.Prohibitionists have collected many a dollar to spend lobbying for lowering the legal BAC from .10 to .08. The money would be better spent combating the real drunks instead of pushing for zero tolerance.He rightly congratulates them on a job well done, noting drunk driving deaths are down more than 35% since the 80s. He goes on to tell us by the mid-90s the deaths began to level off, thus validating MADD's success in changing public priorities and perceptions.
Yep. MADD deserves all the credit for that. Better designed cars with more safety features didn't have a damned thing to do with the statistics. Mandatory seat belt laws and air bags didn't have a damn thing to do with it. Anti-lock brakes didn't have a damn thing to do with it. Front seat headrests didn't have a damn thing to do with it.It was ALL acomplished by MADD.
If you get a DUI in the state of Georgia now, you are REQUIRED to pay $10 and attend a MADD class, where people tell horror stories about drunks with a BAC of .350 going the wrong way down the interstate at night, at 120 MPH and no headlights on, then wiping out a good, loving family. That's sheer tragedy, caused by sheer stupidity on a selfish person's fault.
But that's not the driver MADD attacks today. I had to attend one of those classes in 2001. I didn't hear ONE SINGLE STORY about someone with a .08 BAC doing something like that. In fact, I compared notes with some people sitting around me in the meeting, and I had the highest BAC (.14--- almost "twice the legal limit," don'cha know.)of anybody I talked to. Most of the people in there were caught by revenue enhancers "random roadblocks," where they blew a .09 or a .10 on a breathalyzer.
Category: Pleasure Police
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Forgive me if I'm repeating (can't keep track of where I've mentioned this) but Joseph Gussfield did a study of drinking-driving as a model of how groups create ``public problems'' and take ownership of them. Before MADD, drinking-driving was a personal moral failing, and not a public problem at all.
MADD, intially supportive, became hostile to him when they discovered that he was studying _them_ not drinking-driving.
Joseph R. Gussfield _The Culture of Public Problems : Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order_ U Chicago 1981
updated and generalized as to methods, _Contested Meanings : The Construction of Alcohol Problems_ U Wisconsin 1996
He's the rare sociologist who can actually write, working in the ironic tradition of Erving Goffman, who wrote so well that he was really a poet as much as a sociologist.
A BAC of .08 and .10 is hardly zero tolerance. The DC version that you claim criminalizes .02 is zero tolerance. A BAL of .08 and .10 is the same as drinking 4 or 5 bears and then hitting the road.
I'ld also like to see how you react to someone posting statistics about how crime 'went down 40% after CC laws were passed'. I'm sure we will hear you snort and sneer that it was better security measures and lock construction instead of the threat of armed resistence that produced the change in statistics. LMAO.
I have issues with MADD and the heavier sentencing laws they demand for drunk driving offenses, but their impact on Americans' attitudes toward the 'harmless' drunk driver are clear. Drinking and driving is now considered a selfish, deadly practice, as it certainly is.
Beers, not bears. (for the ATF paranoids)
Posted by: mikem at October 17, 2005 10:02 PMMikem,
I didn't mean to say .08 and .10 were nothing. I meant that the difference between the two is negligible. It's called the law of diminishing returns. You expend a huge effort to get the legal BAC lowered from .10 to .08, and get hardly anything in return.
Certainly not as much as you would have gotten had the money been better spent.
Posted by: Ravenwood at October 17, 2005 11:13 PMI saw one person on a ride along who acted totally hammered and he only blew a .06. I think the laws are about right including the exception of those who can't hold their liquor. MADD is just full of vengeful parents who think alcohol is the biggest threat to Americans since Nazi Germany.
Posted by: Rhett at October 18, 2005 2:35 PMPROPHITION failed and the Womens Chritian Tempreist Union admited to it we dont need youth drinking but we dont need nannies in the bar HOW YOU GONNAWET YOUR WHISTLE IF THE WHOLE DARN WORLD TURNS DRY
Posted by: screaming eagle at October 18, 2005 10:04 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
