P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Political Asylum
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Political Asylum Publicly Debate Politics, War, Media.

 
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
Old 06-10-17, 04:00 PM   #1
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
Mazer's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
Default Public Safety: Guns and Driverless Cars

How do we balance the right to own a gun with public safety? Let's take a dispassionate look at this question by thinking about it in terms of driverless cars:

Car crashes kill an average of 37,000 Americans a year and injure or disable around 2,350,000 people. The annual cost of those crashes is $230 billion. For the most part these are preventable crashes with human factors at their root, and if the aviation industry is any indication then we can easily save most of those lives using autopilot.

There are about half a dozen major corporations already building or retrofitting self-driving cars, and that number will double in the next year or two. You can already buy a driverless car, and next year you'll be able to ride a driverless taxi around in certain cities.

The technology works. It’s complex and expensive, but it’s already saving lives. Last year we heard the story of a man who had a heart attack on the highway whose car saved his life by driving him most of the way to the hospital. And there are already dozens of stories of driverless cars that saved their occupants by predicting and preventing collisions. As more stories like these accumulate over time, soon a generation of Americans will come to trust the autopilot more than they trust their own driving ability.

What does any of this have to do with guns? Well, we all make mistakes and do dangerous, unpredictable things when we drive, so in much the same way that certain places are designated gun-free zones, eventually people will implore the government to establish driverless roads for safety and convenience. Driverless cars could be even safer, faster, and cheaper to design for roads where people are simply not allowed to drive. The cars could talk to each other via radio to coordinate their movements, making it possible to speed through intersections without stopping and without colliding. Already many people argue that when the technology is ready people should be banned from driving altogether.

But being able to drive your own car is one of the greatest freedoms we have as Americans. This unique mobility provides us with job opportunities, it lets us go anywhere anytime we wish, and it allows us cross the country at our own pace. Driving is fun and rewarding in itself for many of us, and getting your driver's licence when you turn 16 is a right of passage. We’ll be hard pressed to give up that freedom, even as the younger generation inevitably demands that elderly Millennials put aside their freedoms and let the autopilots have the road.

In time, that younger generation may prevail and a limited network of driverless roads will be established in one or a few major cities to test the idea. The government will enact a law that restricts people from using those roads without autopilot, and road signs will be posted that read “This Is a Driverless Road: No Driving Beyond This Point.” The experiment will be successful, perhaps for many years, until some suicidal psychopath–probably a man in his late 60’s–decides to break the law and take his own truck on the highway. The driverless cars, programmed to avoid obstacles, will tolerate and adapt to his presence right up until the moment he caroms into an intersection, colliding with a dozen self-driving cars and causing a hundred more to pile up at high speed.

To ensure that never happens, future driverless cars will have to be designed to share the road with human drivers. Allowing people to drive themselves will always be risky and managing that risk will be costly, but to ban drivers would breed complacency among carmakers. The above scenario seems unlikely until you remember that engineers have to design cars as cheaply as possible. If the law banned drivers then engineers would happily omit the complex safety systems that make driverless cars so expensive today, leaving their passengers wide open to attack.

Keep in mind that the law exists not to prevent crime but to punish crime. There are 253 million cars in America and the government can’t confiscate them all. Somebody is going to break the law someday and drive on a driverless road, that’s a guarantee. So in the interest of preserving personal freedom and preventing lone-wolf massacres, it only makes sense to preserve the right to drive.

This will be a contentious issue in the decades to come for the same reasons that gun owner’s rights are so contentious today. Whether some like it or not, we will live in a future where driverless cars will mingle with people driving on the same roads just as today we must all coexist in a nation where personally owned firearms number in the hundreds of millions. But unlike with firearms, no Constitutional protection exists to guarantee the right to drive.

The 2nd Amendment is sacrosanct for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, and abolition is neither enforceable nor desirable since disarming the public will leave so many exposed to the threat of mass shootings. To those who study such things, it comes as no surprise that nine out of ten mass shooting occur in gun-free zones; shooters may be psychopaths but they aren’t stupid. It also comes as little surprise that violent crime rates are so low in towns and neighborhoods where gun ownership is prevalent; burglars and rapists aren’t stupid either. Criminals who don’t want to be shot will select unarmed victims every time.

Nevertheless, there are many who think it's time to repeal the 2nd Amendment and, sadly, they forget that abolition has failed every time has been tried and it always leads to unintended consequences. Not even a Constitutional amendment could stop people from using alcohol, and instead it gave rise to organized crime rings to fulfill the public demand. The War on Drugs has certainly put lots of people in prison but has done nothing to address rampant drug addiction. And many States are tacitly nullifying the federal ban on marijuana either by allowing medical prescriptions or by legalizing possession outright. A gun ban, too, would lead to organized crime, widespread incarceration, and sedition among the States. It is guaranteed make life worse.

So if a gun ban won’t work then what will? As with all complex problems, that depends. Most gun deaths are suicides. Taking their guns won’t give them a reason to live. To save them requires a different solution. Other than suicide, most gun deaths are gang-related. Taking their guns won’t put an end gang rivalry nor will it prevent gangs from recruiting. To help them requires a different solution. After gang violence, the next most gun deaths occur in domestic disputes. Taking their guns won’t remove murder from their hearts, and kitchen knives and baseball bats kill just as effectively as bullets. To help them requires a different solution.

But for some reason, suicides and gang shootings and domestic violence are not the problems that make us question the value and necessity of the 2nd Amendment. This topic never comes up until a mass shooting occurs. Such a shocking event galvanizes our passions as no other form of violence could, but when you think about it, mass shootings appall us not because they are so common but because they are so very rare.

Here’s a test: do you ever give a second thought to the high number of gun crimes that occur in the city of Chicago each and every day? A Chicago citizen dies from gunshot wounds every 12 hours. Does it surprise you the same way the Las Vegas Strip shooting surprised us all? To be fair, Chicago’s per capita rate of gun violence isn’t particularly high compared with other large cities, but it’s population is so large that the equivalent of one Las Vegas Strip Shooting occurs in Chicago every single month. Try to imagine, if mass shootings were as common as Chicago shootings, we would take them for granted. We’d ignore them while the media focused our attention on other problems. It’s sad but true.

So in the interest of looking at the problem of gun violence dispassionately, we must appreciate mass shootings for the rarity they are and be thankful for that fact. And though we must never ignore mass shootings, with the proper perspective we can get down to the business of solving the far worse problems of domestic violence, gang shootings, and suicide. The only obvious link between these problems is the weapon of choice, a gun, but take that away and those problems will still remain. Abolition is no solution. As with every issue which balances public safety with the rights of individuals, be they questions of firearms or of self-driving cars, there are no shortcuts.
Mazer is offline   Reply With Quote
 


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 31st, '15 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 28-01-15 08:41 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 10th, '13 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 07-08-13 07:51 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 13th, '13 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 10-07-13 07:46 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 24th, '12 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 21-03-12 07:45 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-10-10 06:41 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 04:45 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)