What exactly is the point of drunk driving laws? Is it to punish drinking or to keep drivers with diminished capacity off the road? Is it the drinking we punish or the irresponsibility of driving while impaired? How impaired is too impaired? We all know people who can hold their liquor and ones who can’t. Should motor skills, reaction times and driving judgment play a part, or just blood alcohol levels? If motor skills, reaction times and driving judgment are actually the concern shouldn’t a certain level of those things be required of all drivers? We’ve all seen drivers so deficient in them that they are a greater danger stone cold sober than other drivers with a six pack under their belt. Should naturally deficient drivers be legally allowed to endanger the rest of us while we throw drinking drivers in jail and ruin their lives despite the very real possibility that they might be safer on the road than the cell phone talker, the mom yelling at her kids, the aggressive A-hole, or the little old lady who can’t see over her steering wheel?
My point is not to diminish the danger of drunk driving but to point out that there are other dangers on the road that are at least as serious but nothing is being done to eliminate them. There are a lot of drivers out there who have no more business on the road than a seriously inebriated one. But since it’s considered “too hard†to do anything about them, and there is no serious demand that anything BE done about them, they will remain out there killing motorcyclists. We shouldn’t have to wait until they kill someone before we do anything. Actually, we do little or nothing to most of them even after they DO kill someone. Most impaired drivers involved in collisions express their remorse, get a ticket and then go right back out there to endanger others, unless of course the cause of the impairment is alcohol, then we hammer them with the full force of the law.
