Death In The Streets

The body count mounts on a weekly basis and politicians seem helpless to do anything about it. They talk about it; throw money into Royal Commissions; and even tighten the laws. They've even had some success, as the death toll each year is less and less, but lives are still being lost at an alarming rate.

They can talk all they want about social-economic conditions; the variety of reasons behind each occurrence; but nothing changes the fact that people are dying on a daily, if not more frequent, basis. This intolerable situation must be stopped.

The question of course is how? Everybody has their own answer: enforce existing laws to the maximum, change the laws to impose harsher penalties, and, of course, look at the social-economic climate that creates the circumstances that allow these deaths to occur. Some people say that if you took the means out of the hands of people, than the death rate could be eliminated, but, given current societal conditions, that's probably impractical as well as impossible.

Nobody who owns or drives a vehicle is very likely to surrender ownership, or give up their right to drive, just on the off chance that it might save some lives. The right to drive and own a car might as well be written into the constitution of North American culture. Vehicular ownership has become a modern inalienable right.

What did you think I was talking about, guns? Guns are penny ante in Canada when it comes to being a cause of death compared to the carnage caused by cars and trucks. As of 2004, according to Statistics Canada, vehicular deaths outnumber homicides by almost 5 to 1. Bill McCauley, spokesman for Statistics Canada, is quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying, "We don't call them accidents, we call them crashes or collisions. Most of them could have been avoided."

Drunk driving of course causes 40% of the fatalities among drivers, while nearly a third of the fatalities among passengers is caused by a refusal to wear a seat belt. In other words, what looks to be about 70% of all traffic deaths are preventable. That translates into roughly 1900 of the 2730 driving fatalities in 2004 in Canada were caused because someone had broken the law.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the recently published What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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