After the Pandemic, Let’s Fix Our Deadly Traffic Problem
The U.S. is worse than a lot of developed countries at a lot of public-health issues, but cutting this low-hanging fruit by a quarter would be like eliminating all gun homicides.
A few days ago, the state of Oklahoma granted immunity “to motorists who unintentionally cause injury or death while ‘fleeing from a riot,’” one of five in which such a bill was introduced. Critics, who call such legislation “hit and kill” laws, argue that they threaten to go beyond criminalizing dissent, permitting vigilante justice against dissent. In The New Republic, Alex Pareene writes:
There’s something very telling about how the car (or police cruiser, or truck, or SUV) has been enshrined into law as an instrument of state-sanctioned violence. American conservatives are creating, really, a sort of Second Amendment for cars…. The legal framework conservative politicians and jurists spent years crafting and refining to facilitate politicized and racialized gun violence in this country is now expanding to another of America’s omnipresent and deadly institutions.
Perhaps. But we’ve also kind of been there for awhile. Injury and death from cars has always shadowed America’s other failings with public…
