Quote:
Originally Posted by sammyg2
Hypothetically:
Suppose you were the father of a 17 year old girl who was minding her own business and was killed by a drunk driver with three convictions on his record yet was still driving. Drunk.
Would you still oppose random check points?
That happened to someone I work with.
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Yes, I would still oppose them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sammyg2
OK different hypothetical scenario:
suppose your wife was jogging along pacific coast highway in the middle of the day and was run over by a drunk driver who didn't have a license because of prior DUI's and had just been let out of a half-way house.
Your wife is now a quadriplegic and can't take care of herself, much less her two young kids. Her medical bills are into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and her in-home care will add up to about 70% of your take-home pay.
How would you think about random DUI checkpoints?
That actually happened to a friend of the family.
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I would still oppose them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sammyg2
People suck. Letting people get away with sucking because you don't want to be inconvenienced for 15 seconds sucks too.
I'd gladly give up 15 seconds of my time to help make sure some POS doesn't kill someone I care about.
If we could keep the sucky people off the road we wouldn't need check points. But it's against the law to shoot them, go figure.
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Living in a police state really sucks, too. One of my dearest friends grew up behind the Iron Curtain, actually having escaped Communist Czechlosavakia in 1972. At that time, the police could stop anyone at any time for any reason and make up anything. He risked his life to escape that. I'll never understand why folks are so eager to see it here.
The real answer is to demand meaningful sentences for those who break meaningful laws, not to pick away at essentially good people with and endless array of nuisance laws. We punish too many people for too little, and we do not punish those who need it nearly enough.
Our DUI laws, for example, as "tough" as they are, are badly in need of reform. We treat someone who blows an .08 the same way we treat someone who blows a .20 or .30. The latter belongs in jail for a good long time; the former, maybe a stiff fine and loss of priviledges for awhile.
What is the average time served for a murder one these days? Years ago it was about eight years. You've got to be farkin' kidding me. Guys have been behind bars for longer for non-violent crimes, like pot possesion for example.
This situation, in which honest citizens are regularly punished for totally innocuous "offenses" while hardened criminals walk free among us, has eroded public respect for law and order. We need to fix that.