A strong but older example of this is driving crimes. For a while killing someone while driving was just prosecuted as manslaughter (accidental killing), cuz that’s what it is. But juries weren’t convicting very often.
Someone realised that people didn’t like the idea that you could commit manslaughter, a very serious crime, just be driving your car and making a mistake. And so a new crime was created called reckless driving or something similar. It had a similar jail time but different terminology. And it got juries convicting more.
Clearly people have for a long time preferred to not think about just how absurdly violent or dangerous the act of driving is, to the point that killing with a car just didn’t count as a normal killing crime.
this will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction of course.
Ah is that why there seemed to be this thing called Vehicular Manslaughter in American TV shows? I don’t know if we have that here in Australia but I always wondered why such a thing existed since surely it was just… manslaughter whether a vehicle was involved or not.
yep! I’m not sure how much it’s common knowledge, but I heard it from a lawyer/legal-academic in a non-public forum, so I trust it. It wouldn’t be too hard to dig into the history of it though.
Tailgating comes to mind. It’s not that different than pointing a gun at someone, and people do it constantly.
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Good point. That hasn’t happened to me yet. But it’s in the news every day.
I do find myself caught in that. Particularly if I’m stuck in traffic for no readily apparent reason.
“All I’m saying is ‘it better be an accident’ and ‘somebody better be dead!’”
I wouldn’t think that outside being stuck in traffic.
I would love to drive less but it would take me 8X longer to ride a bus to work. I also can’t ride my bike due to fear of death by car.
Yup, that’s why we all need to continue advocating for transit and safe streets.
The study seems a little bs.
They ask questions like, should a person smoke in public? And then ask if car fumes are a problem to the public.
Well they are not really comparable, like you don’t need to smoke and you can smoke elsewhere. I literally need to drive to work and can’t just drive through a forest.
They also ask about personal property being left in the street and stolen. People said that if someone leaves their stuff in the street and it’s stolen, then it’s their fault. But when it switched to cars, it was suddenly not their fault.
Well where else can I leave my car? If I leave my iPhone in the street, that’s a bit different.
I’m in the boat of people who wish that we did not need cars, but sadly my city is nowhere close to having a decent public transport.
I love my bike. I’ll miss it. 🚲
