Re:All Children Should Be Delinquents
by JoeAltmaier on Sunday July 13, 2014 @12:07PM
(#8027727)
Don't trivialize those 10,000 deaths. That's one in 11,000 drunk-driving episodes. Deaths, not some euphemistic small risk. Easily worth trying to mitigate. Absolutely makes it worth classifying out of the 'victimless crime' category.
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For one thing I'm not trivializing them, I'm saying that saying that "100% of the time you are endangering people" is disingenuous considering there's only a 0.01% that anyone actually dies if you drive under the influence. There's not a whole lot to offer in the "benefits" column of drunk driving, so it's probably not reasonable even for fairly small increases of risk anyway.
And no, it does not make it worth classifying "out of the victimless crime" category, because victimless is not a matter of degree, it's a question of whether or not there is an aggrieved party. Any time there's an accident as a result of drunk driving, then it's got a victim. Otherwise there are only "potential" victims.
Again, I think it's a behavior that needs to be discouraged, because it forces people not capturing any of the benefit (the drinking, the convenience of being able to take your own car afterwards) to assume some of the risk (the chance that a drunk driver will harm them or their property). I'm just saying that driving drunk by itself doesn't inherently have a victim.