The Biden Administration is Now Applying its Failed Thinking on Gun Control To Cars
We don’t write about cars much here, but there are some striking parallels to gun control in some recent moves by the Biden administration. Tell me if this rings any bells. Rather than punishing people who do idiotic things with their cars that endanger the public, the National Transportation Safety Board instead wants to punish all drivers with speed-limiting devices.
When we take a closer look at a particular tragedy they’re using to justify the move, we can see that the regulatory authoritarians in the administration apply the same flawed collectivist thinking to virtually every aspect of modern life.
It all started at the beginning of last year in Las Vegas, when a driver ran a red light. That happens all the time, of course, but the feds want us to focus on the speed of the car that ran the light: 103 MPH. The offending Dodge Challenger slammed into a minivan and several other vehicles, killing everyone in the Challenger and the minivan.
One thing the regulators don’t want us to focus on, of course, is the fact that the driver of the vehicle was severely impaired. He had a potent mix of cocaine and PCP in his system, and therefore couldn’t have been anywhere near his right mind when he failed to stop. He also had a long history of previous speeding tickets that Nevada authorities hadn’t taken seriously enough to bother revoking his license.
The NTSB makes a number of recommendations here, but only one of them makes any sense: taking this kind of reckless speeding seriously.
You’d think that someone with a history of driving at those kinds of speeds in a city would be punished with the loss of their license or time behind bars. You’d be wrong. The jails are apparently already overcrowded with tax cheats, people who carried without permits, druggies, and other non-violent offenders that the state feels are greater threats to society.
Most sane people would agree that people who actually endanger the public should be the state’s first priority, but state bureaucracies don’t seem to be staffed by many sane people.
All of the other NTSB recommendations center around adding an Big Brother-type unwanted gadget to our cars: speed limiting devices. The NTSB says that everyone’s cars should, at minimum, make annoying noises when if we’re speeding, even just a few miles per hour over the posted limit.
But that’s the least intrusive of their proposals. What they’d really rather see is the installation of devices that prevents cars from speeding at all. For people who’ve been cited for low-level speeding offenses — think 10 mph over the limit — they recommend states force interlocks (like DWI interlocks) that actually shut a car down if the driver speeds too much.
If you think about this even a little bit, the logic simply doesn’t pan out. The vast, vast majority of drivers will never drive as fast in a city as the deceased Las Vegas scofflaw did. Even fewer people mess around with cocaine and PCP. Fewer still would ever do all of those things at the same time.
Just as it is with gun control, the government’s default solution isn’t to go after the crackheads and other lawbreakers who drive 100 MPH on city streets. Instead, they want to force everyone to spend thousands of dollars extra when buying a car that will prevent them speeding at all.
Authoritarians and collectivists are incapable of thinking in terms of individual freedoms, or how those who endanger the public — usually with long records of doing exactly that — should be the ones who are punished for it. They’re knee-jerk reaction is always to punish everyone for the stupidity of a few.
For those of us who dare to disagree with the Bidenbots’ approach, the NTSB recommends that we get more “education.” Instead of realizing that they work for the voting public and that we don’t want or need to buy expensive robo-nanny technology for our cars, they think we’re simply too stupid to realize what’s best for us and take our medicine. We’re just too ignorant and are in need of re-education on the benefits of imposing a top-down control system that wouldn’t have stopped the Las Vegas moron from taking coke and PCP before getting behind the wheel.
Tell us if this also rings any bells — the government also wants advertisers to stop telling us that fast cars are cool. A significant segment of the public may like fast cars, but in the eyes of regulators we’re just a bunch of brain-dead idiots who are at the mercy of evil advertisers. If they’d only tell more often that the Chevy Volt is totally cool, we’d be lining up at our local dealers clamoring for them and eagerly reducing our carbon footprint. Right?
As usual, government bureaucrats think there’s no freedom that’s too important to get rid of for the greater good, and that anybody who disagrees with them is too dumb or unsophisticated to know what’s good for them. Just as with guns, it’s not about reducing crimes or public safety, it’s all about control.
