warm wind and cloudy

waiting to build my garden

feeling overlooked

How do you feel about drunk driving?

Do you think it's a crime?  Do you think it's selfish?  Arrogant?  Do you see it as a substance abuse issue?  Should there be mandatory minimums?  Throw the book at them?  Use restorative justice?

I read a post this morning.   The guy who killed 3 kids and their grandfather while drunk driving is getting day parole.  I read this on a conservative candidate's post, so of course the comments were all "piece of shit" and "mandatory minimum" statements.  Vitriol filled with vengeance undertones.

So here's what I think about drunk driving:  

• We all know it's wrong.  It's an endless message stream of it being bad and why it's bad and the risk it puts on society.  

• But people do it.  People drive drunk. They either don't think they are drunk, or they don't think they are THAT drunk, or they think they can mitigate the risks by driving slow or using back roads or whatever.

•  It kills people, but not all the time.  Enough that there's a societal outrage, but not enough that there's a sense of that being a reasonable outcome.

• Society is way more angry about drunk driving when it kills people, especially children.  And our anger is exponential, depending on the number of people, especially children, killed.

• If we don't hold mentally ill people criminally responsible, how do we hold drunk or high people criminally responsible?  Are they even capable of making "reasonable man" standard decisions?

I don't think mandatory minimums work.  They might work for pre-meditated crimes.  But no one thinks they're a drunk driver who will kill kids.  Education hasn't worked, because no one actually believes they'll be so stupid as to make that mistake.  Decision making in the moment doesn't work.  

It's complicated.  And we really haven't thought enough about this.  Do we take decision making out of someone's control, so that you cannot operate a vehicle after drinking?  Do we design cars to do this for us?  Do we stop making drugs and alcohol so readily available when we know it alters our decision making and clarity?  

Interesting.