| | (Dissenting, not Bantering)The Follies of Car Control
When it comes to restricting private individuals’ Ninth Amendment rights, it seems that the world must turn upside down to justify car control. Criminals need to obey the law, limited human beings need to be present everywhere and respond to anything, inanimate objects need to assume a volition of their own, and parents all of a sudden need to become totally oblivious to what their children are doing. Yes, all of these astounding assumptions are behind the common case for car control. And, as logic dictates, either the assumptions themselves must be true, or the arguments made on their basis must be discarded as illegitimate.
Will restricting private car ownership reduce car-related crimes? Car control advocates think it will. They presume that it is possible to simply legislate away an undesirable behavior if the electorate or the politicians wish it. If the law says that no private citizen may operate certain vehicles without a license from the state, then no private citizen will operate these vehicles without such a license. True? No; it is absurd.
To be fair, laws against operating an automobile without a license will reduce said operation among the people who respect the law and do not wish to violate it. But among people who are already outside the law or who hold no scruples about evading it, prohibiting car operation will have no effect. Indeed, some of these people are already thieves and murderers. It is astonishing that anyone thinks that such criminals will balk at committing a far more minor offense – such as driving without a license.
Hence, car control would – in reality – shift the balance of power greatly in favor of the criminal elements of society. Good people who obey the law will have demobilzed themselves; evil people who ignore the law will continue to operate vehicles. Evil people will thus have more of an opportunity to conduct crimes, while good people will have a reduced ability to enjoy private transportation. Can anything but increased crime be the outcome?
In response, those who advocate car control might assert that cars are a form of mind control. This is indeed behind the presumption that good people, by the sheer fact of owning a car, will suddenly transform into evil people with a maniacal, uncontrollable desire to run over everybody and everything. By extension, we need to watch all of our society’s kitchen chefs in training. After all, each of them is a budding Jack the Ripper – since he has such extensive exposure to and practice in the use of knives!
If this particular argument goes nowhere in the discussion, car control proponents will shift to another claim. Unlicensed citizens cannot be allow to drive, they argue, because protecting the public roads from unsafe vehicle operation is the job of the police and other government law enforcement agencies. This theory has several necessary corollaries: 1) that damage accidents including vehicular manslaughter and even vehicular homicide do not happen at all, because the work of the police and other government agencies suffices to protect the public against it, and 2) that it is possible to instantaneously notify the proper authorities and receive an instantaneous response from them whenever any unsafe operation attempted. The truth or falsity of both of the above predictions can be easily verified empirically.
But, seriously, the police forces – no matter how well equipped or competent – are comprised of limited human beings with limited abilities. They cannot, contrary to car control advocates’ fancy, be everywhere, see everything, and act immediately to prevent any criminal conduct. But if the police cannot successfully address all crime, then something else needs to supplement their work. Indeed, private car ownership has prevented many a loss of life before the EMTs could get to the victims of accidents. In many cases of obvious aggression ("road rage" or "car jacking"), the evasive or even retaliatory use of cars by private citizens sufficed to prevent a tragedy and to enable EMT and law enforcement resources to be directed toward dealing with still other crimes.
Digging deeper into their repertoire of justifications, car control advocates will pull out a favorite claim – that cars are responsible for a vast number of deaths -- 38,588 in 2006; about 38,000 per year for the last ten years. Indeed, some might even cite dubious statistics claiming that there exist about the same number of car-related deaths as death by firearm -- and about twice the number of intended homicides. But this argument, too, has its assumptions. One such assumption is that, aside from cars, there exist no deadly objects within anybody’s life – such that if someone was careless another, he or she would simply be out of luck for a lack of means. This, of course, implies that the five drowned children of Andrea Yates are still alive and well, that all food is eaten solely using spoons and spatulas, and that human beings are all limbless torsos who have no arms or legs to ride bicycles.
Finally, we come to yet another interpretation of the way the world works from the perspective of a car control proponent. Namely, cars are responsible for thousands of accidental child deaths because children find them, experiment with them, and kill or maim themselves in the process. In fact, the National Highway Safety Council reports that "traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people under 21 years old. " Note that, under this view, car seat belts, airbags and child seats do not exist, most parents keep their cars running all the time, and virtually no parents look out for what their kids are doing. Indeed, it requires an appalling degree of negligence on the part of a parent to fail to prevent a child from getting to a car. Car control advocates must be assuming that all parents are chronically drunk or have the IQ of a car.
But if a parent lacks the care to protect his or her child from the possibility of accidentally abusing a vehicle or as the victim of a vehicle abuser, then much more is wrong with that parent than the fact that he or she owns a car. That is, unless car control advocates also want to claim that owning a car makes people negligent, just as it makes them inclined to go out and indiscriminately crash into things. It is as if cars have more volition than people. No matter how much parents love their children or how hard they work for their safety, if their car decides it, the child will find it fueled up, running and easy to abuse. People’s prudence and foresight have absolutely no input in the matter!
Indeed, the theory underlying car control is truly a theory of car control: cars control people, and only government officials (who, strangely enough, must not be people under this view) can effectively control cars. Forget hypnotism and demagoguery: this is the way to truly reach into people’s minds – either turning them into serial killers by giving them vehicles or making them angels by simply saying that they may not have those vehicles.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, car control has always and everywhere resulted in increased crime and suffering for the most innocent among people.
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