Not to minimize drunk driving deaths, but it's hardly "rampant." About 10,000 people are killed each year in drunk driving accidents in the US. 30,000 a year die from falls.
Well yes, millions of people die every year from causes we could pretty much summarize as old age. None of this has any meaning if you don't differentiate by age.
Thankfully, the CDC has done that, and here it is in an easy graphic:
Still, I think it is a valid point that drink driving is seen as a moral problem and therefore its practical impact as a cause of accidents and deaths is perceived as larger than it actually is. Yes, it's horrible when a drink driver kills a child, etc, but the risk of that happening per DUI incident is not actually very high.
I'm not from the US, but over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers, and these cases are particular tragedies, but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves by stupidity, or at least consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
Another thing I could bring up from analysis of traffic deaths is the large number of suicides we have -- about 20 % of traffic deaths; this is becoming a burden on truck drivers because they carry a lot of the emotional burden when someone decide to smash their car at high speed to an oncoming truck.
And yet another astonishing factor is deaths of "natural causes" (heart attack, stroke etc) while driving. These make up something around 10-15 % of traffic deaths here.
>Still, I think it is a valid point that drink driving is seen as a moral problem and therefore its practical impact as a cause of accidents and deaths is perceived as larger than it actually is...
> ...over here (Finland), drink drivers are generally most dangerous to themselves. Of course there are some innocent people who are killed and injured by drink drivers but most deaths resulting from drink driving are either people who kill themselves or consent to be in a vehicle where the driver is DUI.
You can't argue that problem is being overly focused on condemnation of the person who drinks and drives and then ignore our responsibility to keep them from hurting themselves either.
Umm, why couldn't I? If we don't think of suicides or drink driving as a moral wrong (we could call this idea "sin"), why couldn't we let people do whatever they want, up to allowing them to end their lives - as long as people are not hurting others? The externalities are a problem but not as big as we perceive.
> About 10,000 people are killed each year in drunk driving accidents in the US. 30,000 a year die from falls.
That number is highly biased towards the elderly. "Falls" are basically another kind of "died of old age". If you exclude people over 55, you get about:
- ~6,700 deaths from drunk driving
- 2,459 from falls
If you look at all driving fatalities (because we fleshy humans can be impaired by more than alcohol and often make mistakes), you have
30,000 is a pretty shocking number. There's a lot of work on falls prevention in UK health and social care. The prognosis for someone over 65 who falls over is not great, especially if they break a bone in the fall.
There's some interestin brain stuff going on for some of it. A person with failing vision (and dementia can cause some loss of vision even though the eyes and optic nerve work fine) will learn the layout of their home. A care worker comes in once a day and moves something? That person falls over.
Someone from my local MH trust realised that people with dementia in hospital could not see (because dementia) the zimmer frames and weren't using them. He painted them red. This means people can see them (red is one of the last colours to go) and thus they use them. This simple measure has reduced falls and the associated deaths and injuries.
The population of the US is roughly 310 million people. Using your figure for driving fatalities, 3.1x10^8 / 2.5x10^4 = 1/12400 chance of dying in a car accident. This tracks reasonably well with the admittedly outdated information in [1], which gives the odds of dying at home as 1/7875.
By your reasoning, then, my apartment is about 33% more deathtrap-y than my car, and I should probably consider living out of doors, as well as giving up my car and staying away from roads.
Except that, from the same data, my odds of dying at the hand of another person are about one in sixteen thousand. I live in a large city, so my options are starting to look pretty limited! Subsistence farming may be the only way. (Or perhaps hunting and gathering -- this is prime whitetail country, and there are few enough hunters for deer to've become a serious pest through overbreeding.)
All life is risk, and the outcome is known ahead of time - the probability of dying of something, given long enough, eventually reaches unity. Maintaining a healthy sense of perspective seems warranted.
10000?! The UK, with a population of approximately 1/4 that of the USA and more liberal alcohol laws, had ~260 deaths from drink driving in 2013. Rampant might not be the right word, but something isn't right.
The US has far more sprawl where people live in suburbs which are a significant distance from the closest restaurant, bar, etc. and public transportation ranges from unreliable to non-existent even during the workday. In most of the country, that's also be paired with high speed limits and road designs which encourage driving at or above the speed limit which increases the likelihood of a crash being fatal.
The default mindset is so heavily dominated by the assumption that you'll drive that the building codes in most of the country require bars to have significant parking available for customers, even if the bar is in a heavily urban neighborhood and the owner would prefer to use the space for seating.
Fair point - so taking the proportion of road deaths related to drink as the measure instead (which should control for your points to a great recent), 31% of US deaths are drink related, compared to 15.2% in the UK. (according to https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...).
Would you include getting behind the wheel if you are tired, sick, stressed, taking antihistamines, or impaired in any other non-illegal-drug related way as well? Because I'm pretty sure those can impair drivers to the same degree. It's just that driving while impaired due to drugs is seen as being a moral failure, while it's perfectly socially acceptable to drive in other circumstances.
What are the numbers of deaths related to these? You quoted 39% of auto deaths as being alcohol related elsewhere. If we determine there was a problem, we should seek to address it. At the moment, it sounds like you're just trying to sidetrack the conversation.
We can measure blood alcohol so we can estimate the degree of impairedness. Furthermore, it is already illegal.
http://responsibility.org/drunk-driving/drunk-driving-fatali... http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf