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 people 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.
There is nothing. Absolutely nothing the biden .gov is doing except enriching the biden crime family and attempting to destroy America. Nothing.
We need and will have a Nuremberg 2.0.
Not with the current levels of will power in the majority of POTG. As well as the rest of society.
The minute this actually comes to fruition there will be hackers and crackers coming out with devices and software patches to override it.
True…still does not return the $$$ the bastards extorted from me purchasing the vehicle!
Only one remedy: just say NO and don;t buy the jimmied cars.
Didn’t this recently pass through a majority repub congress, attached as a rider to the continuing resolution for Govt. funding?
That was remote kill switches by 2026, if memory serves.
NO is was in the demtard’s so called “Deficit Reduction” bill a year ago.
Well he wont be speeding no more.
Cocaine, the choice of presidents sons.
Dont chew on your snort straws, you’ll get pcb’s.
Driving fast reduces the time your on the road where most veehickle accidents happen.
Faster is better.
Airplanes rarely collided , if airplanes only went 30mph there would be a lot more airplane crashes.
Accidents happen, even on low speed bicycles, right Joe?
Cmon you rascally rodent you know aeroplains can’t float that slow!
Spot on. These tyrant wannabes have a nasty habit of implementing policies that result in the creation of an out of control criminal class and then, rather than change their policies or punish or control the criminals, they limit the rights and liberties of the vast majority of ordinary, law-abiding people. Two problems: 1) The elites excuse the actions of these criminals because they misguidedly attribute their criminality to racism or social status and they have more sympathy for them than for their victims, and 2) They think ordinary people are just criminals who have yet to commit a crime and therefore need to have their liberties curtailed as a preventive measure.
Our elitist overlords fear and despise ordinary people. They think we have to be coerced, “nudged”, and forced to do what these elites think is best for us…because we’re incapable of doing so for ourselves.
Welcome to the fundamentally transformed America.
“They think ordinary people are just criminals who have yet to commit a crime and therefore need to have their liberties curtailed as a preventive measure.”
^^^This! So much this!
Be aware, everyone, there are a whole boatload of people out there who think they are simply better, smarter and more worthy than you and if they need to constrain you, even before you have done anything they consider to be “harmful”, they will. If, as the law currently stands, you are not yet a criminal, they will tighten the noose with more and more restrictive laws until your very existence is illegal – then they can either imprison you, eliminate you or compel your acquiescence to their demands.
Right now, we are in an era in which there are, quite literally, people in power who are trying to dictate what you can and cannot SAY before you even say it. They think you are so stupid or so dangerous or so worthless that they don’t want to allow you to SPEAK. No wonder they don’t think you should be allowed to drive or (gasp) have a gun.
Yep
Hmmm Seems I”ve seen this sickflick before. What was that director’s name anyway? Oh oh oh, I think ‘ve got it.. yessss..here it is:
Alex.. maybe Aleksander. Back name… something loke Solshineitzin…. close to that. He knew somewhat of ssome gulag somewhere. wrote a book on it…..
https://youtu.be/WuVG8SnxxCM?si=8if31PhdZA9N7x_E
Let’s see what we might make of this car accelerator interlock idea. And then apply it to guns.
Instead of making 100% of cars have the interlock, let’s make only those drivers who defy the speed limits confine themselves to using cars with the interlock programmed to their driver ID. If the scofflaw only drives his own car then he only pays for one interlock. If he drives his own and his wife’s car, they both get an interlock and they each enter their respective IDs where he is restricted while she is not.
Someone traveling 30 mph or more over the speed limit could be ordered to confine himself to driving only a car with an interlock. That will inhibit most drivers to limiting their speeding to less-than 30 mph. Judges won’t be inhibited from imposing the interlock penalty on a driver who needs to drive to work. Only the most serious speeders are punished, not those who occasionally drive a little over the speed limit. The latter just get fined.
How might this apply to guns?
Suppose you are convicted of improperly casing your MSR and ammo on the way to the range. For this minor victimless offense, you are limited to 30-round magazines. Carrying an MSR into a guns-free zone limits you to a 10-round magazine. Installing a full-auto switch on a Glock gets you a 6-round (one in the chamber) magazine limit.
Anyone with three strikes gets further restrictions. The 30 or 10-round magazine limitation violated thrice gets you restricted to a 5-round magazine. Three Glock switches gets you restricted to one-in-the-chamber. Just enough to kill your rival if you have practiced your markswomanship.
Judges and prosecutors are loath to imprison – or lengthen the sentences of – those guilty of felon-in-possession. My proposal satisfies the criminal justice system’s goal of keeping violent gun offenders on the streets so that there is jail space for political prisoners.
Putting forth such a proposal would be a response to the controllers’ claims that we PotG won’t compromise. This is a common-sense, obvious solution to the serious mass-shooting crisis. We PotG can acknowledge that something simply must be done!
Fck compromise. No compromise. My observations indicate just about everyone speeds regularly. Relatively few accidents happen compared to the number if vehicles out there, and the majority of them are minor and speed is not a factor. Speed does not increase the number of accidents, it increases the severity if an accident happens.
This just proves that it isn’t only guns that these Karen’s hate. it is any freedom. refuse to be a robot. refuse to be a cog in a machine.
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHERDOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHERDOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
So, here’s the thing, (well, a slight oversimplification of the thing but, bear with me) there are two types of people in this world vis-a-vis the law.
There are those who think that laws compel behavior and those that think that laws provide a framework for responding to behavior.
Those who think laws compel behavior are completely convinced that there is some combination of laws that can be imposed that will result in everyone behaving “correctly” all the time. (Not being able to identify who defines “correctly” is a fatal, and often unaddressed flaw of this viewpoint.)
Those who think laws provide a framework for society recognize that laws will be broken but are necessary for several reasons. One is to set a standard, a norm, a set of acceptable and unacceptable actions that everyone should be aware of. Another is to provide for a means of punishment and/or corrective action in the case that some individual(s) fail(s) to meet the standard. Another is to deter those who consciously consider violating the law by means of making the potential punishment well understood. Those who view the “law” in this fashion tend to advocate for a minimum set of near universally accepted and well defined principles to be the governing architecture for those laws. (i.e. murder is bad, therefore, illegal and you will be punished for committing murder.)
I expect that most people reading this fall into the latter camp. This is for good reason as, there is little evidence that the proliferation of ever more and ever more constrictive laws compel behavior and, there may, in fact, be the opposite effect. The old adage about squeezing a handful of sand comes to mind. How and why there are so many apparently in the former group, I must admit that I cannot easily comprehend. Even if I simply ascribe it to them being ldiots, I must try to comprehend how there can be so many.
Unfortunately, the simple truth is, arguments about cars and guns and people and the laws that govern them do not take place under an umbrella of logical, honest and empirical debate but under a cloud of ideology in which one camp is irrevocably convinced that maximum control will yield societal perfection and the other is convinced that maximum freedom will allow the best bulwark against the inevitable failures in the system or the failures of individuals within that system. I don’t see how these two endpoints can ever meet.
The mindset that contends a criminal act can be spun around and used to restrict law abiding citizens belongs in a toilet.
“They think ordinary people are just criminals who have yet to commit a crime and therefore need to have their liberties curtailed as a preventive measure.”
I witnessed a state representative(dem) say that almost verbatim in a committee hearing relative to CC in Baton Rouge 2 years ago.
And the pathetic part is, legislators are nothing more than “ordinary” people who have won a popularity contest. They are no better than We the People.
Take clue from the left. It’s all about labeling. One is a traffic offense. No harm there. The other is an assault rifle. The horror.
I can totally see municipalities coming out against this. Speeding tickets are big, easy money.
Unfortunately you are probably 100% correct. When traffic light cameras came in lots of cities reduced the yellow light time to increase revenue. Which is exactly the opposite of what you need to reduce accidents.
If this comes in will it stop you using maximum acceleration? I almost dry bogged 40 miles out of town on a forest road last week. Came around a corner and there was over a foot of dust / loose sand over the road after a wind storm. Yes I have shovel, winch etc but using power and momentum worked better.
I have mixed feelings about all this BS. Lunatics race up & down my local main thoroughfares many times endangering children getting off school buses. Once I spotted a pos who actually went up on a sidewalk to go around a school bus! Forget about the Illinois expressways. 100mph is common and the roads are a nightmare although I performed admirably well post cataract surgery going to Wisconsin Dells. I’m not the target of the feds🙄
Wouldn’t bet your life on that.
The jump in logic was inevitable.
Fine article, Jennifer. It is easy to see how great it is by the number of replies it has spurned. The bottom line: Do not vote for those people again! I am embarrassed for my country, the wonderful USA, that see that lame duck politician dummy enter into any discussion with foreign leaders on important issues, when he is only reading a teleprompter. And doing a bad job at it at that. Everybody knows that he doesn’t know what he is reading. There is only one solution:
DON’T VOTE HIM BACK IN!!!
Another blast of nonsensical propaganda and outright lies from the Far Right charlatans. In reality the U.S. has more people in prison than Russia, China, and North Korea and it has not stopped the out of control drug problems and the out of control mass killings, in fact they continue to get worse, much worse.
The gangster Criminal Republicans have done everything possible to prevent a National Health Care Program from being passed that would make mental health treatments affordable as they are prostitutes of the Drug and Insurance Companies that pay them millions to prevent any meaningful Socialist Health Care from being implemented that the entire rest of the civilized world has had for decades.
T Tag of course is now implementing the same suppression of news as Joseph Goebbels did during the Hitler years. On this side of the Atlantic the Far Right ignore the fact that both Nixon and Trump called the Free Press “The Enemy” and T Tag fully agrees.
Decriminalized Drugs, Drug Treatment programs and an outlawing of Assault Rifles and sales of second hand guns with no paperwork have been blocked by the prostitutes of the NRA the gangster criminal Republican Jackbooted Stormtroopers.
As if having Animal Farm and 1984 ending up as prophecy isn’t bad enough now it’s Harrison Bergeron’s turn…
An interestin pointbwas brought up by my girlfiend ” What if your trying to hurry to the hospital in an emergency.”
“…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.”
‘Red Barchetta’
“My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law…”
“As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream
I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime…”
“Suddenly ahead of me
Across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car
Shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires
To run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley
As another joins the chase
Drive like the wind
Straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope
I’ve got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded at the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle at the fireside…”
Friend of mine used to own 1953 Jaguar D Type roadster. That very car had set the then.record lap time at the Daytona Speedway at above 160 mph. That was back in the mid01960’s if I recall. He drove it on the road once in a while just for grins and giggles. He;d have sold it me for the then astronomical sum of $10K. Fool! I should have bought it. Could have sold it a few years back for some Mn$2+ and be retired by now. Talk about fast… and it handled too. That
“It all started…in Las Vegas”
I’m beginning to think that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” line is BS.
The left doesn’t want you to be able to drive at all. In fact they believe that the only future that wouldn’t endanger the world is if everyone was required to walk, bicycle or use transit. They color this under the banner of ‘choice’ today but the slippery slope is already required reduction targets for vehicle miles traveled in California, Oregon, Washington, New York etc. They are also extending this to freight as well, trying to mandate that trucks not carry goods or provide services to meet these goals which apply not just to average people but to trucking companies and delivery companies as well.
Jennifer the last four words of the article says it all.
Between the speed limiters, the breathalyzers, and the kill switches the Feds propose putting in new vehicles, no sane person is going to give up their old vehicle.
Yeppers. I’m a gonna keep driving my trusty Mercedes 126 Turbo diesel built in 1983. No way can they put any of that stuff on that car. It just won’t connect.
This is the kind of thinking car enthusiasts had to contend with back in the early 1970s. Boss 302 and 428 Cobra Jet Mustangs devolved into the Mustang II (a tarted up Pinto) in just a few years. Corvette enthusiasts would dread seeing how much heavier and slower their formerly great sports car would get with each no model. Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Challengers just disappeared. It wasn’t until the 1980s that new cars became interesting again!
Like Chevy X cars?
The actual intent is discouraging the use of evil gasoline by you proles. The wheels have fallen off their silly EV program so then need to further attack cars.
Forget discouraging the use, the ultimate goal is to force you out of your vehicle one way or the other. Big brother safety crap is just one more step, but making it so expensive that only the rich can afford it is another. One way or another they are damned determined to force us into modern day, 15 minute city gulags where vehicles will be outlawed. Along with guns, too, of course.
I don’t think high HP cars should be banned, but you should pay a hefty premium for the privilege of driving one AND need a higher tier of licensing. Just tax the shit out of anything bigger than 2 or 2.5L naturally aspirated. All these little !@#$s with 5 owner Mopars that they bought for cheap would be confronted with high registration costs. You’d need to do electrics differently, but should be easy enough. So, if you want 500HP you can get it, but it won’t be cheap. That should weed out the irresponsible somewhat.
I’m old enough to remember when we were free.
What kind of a National Socialist are you? The government needs to leave people alone.
I’m old enough to remember when the average fast car wasn’t pushing 500 f-ing horsepower.
“You’d need to do electrics differently, but should be easy enough. So, if you want 500HP you can get it, but it won’t be cheap.”
Hot-rodders will start re-winding their electric motors to get around the ban…
From the article:
“He also had a long history of previous speeding tickets that Nevada authorities hadn’t taken seriously enough to bother revoking his license.
Sometimes I think that revoking the driver’s license from a driver like that one is nothing more than virtue signalling. Drunks whose license have been revoked that kill people with their cars is too common.
Just last week, I was passed by a dump truck pulling a dump trailer that went up on the sidewalk to get around a car in the right lane who wasn’t going fast enough to suit him (the car was only doing 50 in a 45 zone)!
It’s one more charge to be pled down after the miscreant kills a whole family.
One of the difficulties is that the at fault person is often dead in these cases, and therefore very hard to incarcerate or to sue. So they (the proverbial ‘they’) start looking for someone to get hold of to fix it. Coupled with the human tendency to want to stop things before they’re a problem, and you have a powerful incentive to do something stupid that involves controlling others. especially if they can feel self-righteous about it.
perhaps the miscreant who blew through an intersection at over 100mph was simply a statistician. After all, since most accidents occur at intersections, it is statistically demonstrable that the safest approach to city driving is to spend as little time as possible in intersections. Speeding through as fast as you can go minimizes time spent in the danger zone.
This is at the bottom of a long list of comments, but I thought I’d make my own comment any way.
I’ve got a question about the caption on the photo of the minivan that was destroyed.
This caption: “A laser scan of the minivan was hit by a car at 103 MPH. (Image provided by NTSB)”
How did the laser scan get hit by a car doing 103 mph?
That’s as far as I got in the article before I decided I was done reading.
The Sleppy Joe Administration has no clue what they are even talking about.
IF YOUR CAR HAS satnav THE MTECH IS ALREADY IN PLace for SAT Controlled Speed limit and JAPAN already has it though it can be overridden AS you say the guy who shotthe LIGHTS at over 100mph is just the sort of situation that may justifiy SATNAV controlled speed limits I have a seven year old SATnav system and it’s accurate to with less that 25metres when entering or leaving speed limits andit pings’ me if I wish and I can set’ my own limits if I wish to, and by VOICE CONTROL -and it works So this is nothing new .
I’m old enough to remember exactly the same furore over SEAT BELTS, AIR BAGS and EMISSION CONTROLS and of course ever tighter DRINK and DRUG driving limits I don’t know abouitthe USA but here in the UK therfe are now far MORE DRUG Driving ofences than the are Drink driving ones.
It’s going to happen in time anyway!
Albert, that is a ration of crapolla. The real deal is that “gun control” have never save one person’s life.
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