I don’t think either gets treated as a crisis
Both are accepted as the price daddy willing to pay
As a Non-American I seriously wonder which one is which. I don’t have the feeling that either of them is treated with any seriousness in the US.
Just looked up some “penalties” in Canada for murdering people with your car.
If you use a car to drive aggressively and cause death, you only get a maximum of 2 years in jail. That’s it. Take a life for maybe up to 2 years in jail.
It’s not taken seriously at all.
You are using loaded language here. The penalties for provable murder with a car are the same as for murder by any other method. Murder and homicide are not synonyms. Aggressive driving that results in death is not murder, which is an intentional, pre-planned action, not something that happens incidentally or even negligently.
I understand the differences in language, but none of that matters at all to the victim or their family.
The fact is, you can kill someone with a car while being reckless, and it’s a very minor offence.
It’s only under the most extreme circumstances that someone killing a person by car is taken seriously.
I understand the differences in language, but none of that matters at all to the victim or their family.
Okay? Not to take the bait, but so? Whether or not it is murder is a legal matter, which would be completely unchanged if there was no grieving family.
If you accidentally lock your coworker in the walk-in oven at work and they die, you probably never see the inside of a prison. (A jail, maybe.) What is your basis for comparison? Oh, right, “murder.”
It’s only under the most extreme circumstances that someone killing a person by car is taken seriously.
Right, and actual murder is always one of those.
You can’t use loaded language and then be all, “well I don’t want to get into a semantic argument.” Your argument would be meaningful if it wasn’t hyperbolic. Drivers do get breaks and you don’t have to exaggerate.
Fair points, for sure.
Whether or not it is murder is a legal matter, which would be completely unchanged if there was no grieving family.
The only major difference between manslaughter, 1st degree or 2nd degree murder is intent.
I would argue that if you are driving recklessly or dangerously (two different legal definitions), especially at high speed or while drunk/high, there’s a reasonable expectation that your actions can and will kill someone.
Manslaughter isn’t good enough. To me, it’s as equal to murder as firing a gun into a crowd (even if you claim you didn’t intend to kill people).
If you accidentally lock your coworker in the walk-in oven at work and they die, you probably never see the inside of a prison.
Completely different from being reckless and/or dangerous in a vehicle.
Dangerous driving causing death would not, and should not, ever be considered an “accident”.
If you dropped bricks from a building, anyone would agree that those actions will probably kill someone. It’s not good enough to say “three people died because you decided to throw bricks off a building, we’ll give you six months probation for being reckless.”. That’s not justice for anyone.
If “murder” doesn’t fit in the context of death by car, let’s come up with another legal charge that’s more appropriate than manslaughter.
We constantly read stories like this one, where three people were killed by a DUI driver who was also speeding, yet served no time and only 1 year driving suspension.
Or a trucker who killed four and was only given six years in prison, despite being given the “harsher” charge of dangerous driving.
Or this guy, who was racing and killed a woman in a hit-and-run, only got two years. And the only reason why he got a slap on the wrist, is because it wasn’t proven that he wanted to kill the cyclist.
The moment your actions behind the wheel are deliberately dangerous, the context changes, IMO.
I don’t doubt that deaths by cars aren’t taken seriously. I doubt that deaths by guns are.
Btw. if you’re willing to prevent deaths in either of these cases, you should actually work on preventive measures instead of penalizing after the killing. As the diagram above clearly shows, even harsh punishments don’t prevent gun crimes, so what makes you think it would work for car crimes?
What you could do instead is:
- Separate gun owners/drivers from other people (don’t allow carrying guns through the town/protected bike lanes)
- Reduce the number of people who feel the need to own a gun/car (build strong and safe communities/build fast and safe public transit)
- Disallow owning extremely dangerous weapons (automatic rifles/pickup trucks)
- Require intensive training and background checks before allowing people to own a gun/car
- Take away the gun license/drivers license from offenders
- If you really have to put people in prison make sure they’ll get re-socialized in prison instead of breeding even worse criminals
- …
you should actually work on preventive measures instead of penalizing after the killing.
100% prevention is the best way to do things. But you also have to make sure that you don’t devalue a victim’s life by giving their killer “up to 2 years” in prison. I don’t know how I’d react if a loved one were killed by a reckless driver, only to get 4 months in jail (or none, as is usually the case).
I agree both are a public safety issue, but there aren’t many similarities beyond that. For one, most people guilty killing or seriously injuring someone with a gun intends to so cause that result while people who are guilty of killing or seriously injuring someone with a car are unaware of the danger they pose or aren’t able to estimate how to react in a certain situation. Yes both need to be taken very serious, yes both are a big problem but their solution is very different. Although one more similarity which blows my mind is how unwilling American politicians are to keep more people alive.
Obviously they’re different in many ways but as a society we can’t really call things an accident when they’re eminently predictable from the systems we’ve built. So while they may be accidental from the point of the individual perpetrator, both of these things are equally intentional from a public policy standpoint.
This is essentially what some leftists call “social murder”, which is when killing certain people becomes acceptable as long as you’re not directly responsible for it and those people just die as consequences of societal actions, or as a “cost of doing business”.
Great term, I hadn’t heard it. Thanks.
The problem with cars is more that because of the SUVification, pedestrians are significantly more likely to die from getting hit. The cars are (mostly) safe for the person driving it, but the higher ride height and massively high hoods are a recipe for disaster if you collide into a smaller car or a pedestrian.
Right. Which is not shown with this data. And in response to OP there ARE other similarities to gun deaths; as one encounters a victim of a shooting as not a participant in the crime but a bystander. Those pedestrian deaths should create more liability on the manufac… Oh what the fuck am I saying. see comments above
As long as car companies get higher profit margins the regime whores in DC see no issue.
The law has significant nuance whenever someone is killed. Each state uses different terms, but it generally runs along the lines of:
- First degree murder: intentful and planned.
- Second degree murder: intentful but unplanned.
- Third degree murder: not by intent but also not accidental. Fit of rage type of thing.
- Manslaughter: no intent, no rage, often negligence, and similar regrettable deaths.
Each one carries a progressively lighter punishment. You can be found guilty of manslaughter and get off with a fine, probation, or even time-served. The courts will adjust punishment according to each crime’s circumstances.
What ticks this community off is a special type of murder: Vehicular Manslaughter. It has all the hallmarks of regular manslaughter, except it’s much harder to prosecute and often with zero consequences. It’s, quite literally, a whole different section of law to reduce the consequences of driving. The exception-to-the-exception is intent! If someone intentionally kills with a gun or a vehicle, then they get charged first or second degree murder. But the consequences are different if someone with a gun negligibly kills (it does happen) and a driver negligibly kills. It’s not justice when a boss who didn’t maintain a ladder which killed his painter faces more consequences than the driver who didn’t maintain their brakes and ran over a child.
The research is in (it has been for decades now): our roads are designed to be dangerous because we focus on speed of cars, not balancing safety in our considerations:
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/06/05/exposing-pseudoscience-traffic-engineering
https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer
It’s almost hard to read the whole book. Each section is only a few pages, but they just keep hitting you with data about how badly our traffic systems are designed. The mixture of bad policy, bad modeling, bad engineer training, and bad community perceptions about solutions makes it very hard to get change done quickly, but at this point all new roads and any rebuilds should follow drastically different approaches than we used 80 years ago. To do otherwise is just open negligence on the part of the road designers.
More than 600 car-related injuries in Chicago!? I mean, I’m not as surprised by the shooting victims since I heard gang violence was bad there. But 600 car crashes seems a lot for half a year (don’t get me wrong, a lot of work should be done about gun violence too).
Car accidents are a skill issue. Gun murders are intentional.
USA doesn’t teach driving anywhere near like other nations do that are serious about motor vehicle operations.
Car accidents are A) not called “accidents” and B) not universally a result of insufficient driver skill; certainly not a lack of pedestrian skill.
Deaths due to firearms are very frequently unintentional!! The leading cause of death of children in some cities in the USA is fucking unintentional shootings!!!
Even if those things were true I don’t know what your point was meant to be. This isn’t a driver training issue.
Our roads are also designed incredibly poorly. They encourage speeding by being too wide, straight, and flat. They don’t have intersections that require people to pay attention (like roundabouts do). They have high quantities of conflict points among people turning, crossing roads, walking, and riding bikes. Add in vehicles that have terrible lines of sight because they’re oversized and it’s a recipe for failure, regardless of the training provided.
