Car crashes have killed and seriously injured roughly the same number of people as shootings in Chicago this year. Only one of these things is treated as a safety crisis.
As a Non-American I seriously wonder which one is which. I don't have the feeling that either of them is treated with any seriousness in the US.
Just looked up some “penalties” in Canada for murdering people with your car.
If you use a car to drive aggressively and cause death, you only get a maximum of 2 years in jail. That's it. Take a life for maybe up to 2 years in jail.
It's not taken seriously at all.
I don't doubt that deaths by cars aren't taken seriously. I doubt that deaths by guns are.
Btw. if you're willing to prevent deaths in either of these cases, you should actually work on preventive measures instead of penalizing after the killing. As the diagram above clearly shows, even harsh punishments don't prevent gun crimes, so what makes you think it would work for car crimes?
What you could do instead is:
You are using loaded language here. The penalties for provable murder with a car are the same as for murder by any other method. Murder and homicide are not synonyms. Aggressive driving that results in death is not murder, which is an intentional, pre-planned action, not something that happens incidentally or even negligently.
I agree both are a public safety issue, but there aren't many similarities beyond that. For one, most people guilty killing or seriously injuring someone with a gun intends to so cause that result while people who are guilty of killing or seriously injuring someone with a car are unaware of the danger they pose or aren't able to estimate how to react in a certain situation. Yes both need to be taken very serious, yes both are a big problem but their solution is very different. Although one more similarity which blows my mind is how unwilling American politicians are to keep more people alive.
Obviously they’re different in many ways but as a society we can’t really call things an accident when they’re eminently predictable from the systems we’ve built. So while they may be accidental from the point of the individual perpetrator, both of these things are equally intentional from a public policy standpoint.
The problem with cars is more that because of the SUVification, pedestrians are significantly more likely to die from getting hit. The cars are (mostly) safe for the person driving it, but the higher ride height and massively high hoods are a recipe for disaster if you collide into a smaller car or a pedestrian.
Right. Which is not shown with this data. And in response to OP there ARE other similarities to gun deaths; as one encounters a victim of a shooting as not a participant in the crime but a bystander. Those pedestrian deaths should create more liability on the manufac.... Oh what the fuck am I saying. see comments above
As long as car companies get higher profit margins the regime whores in DC see no issue.
The law has significant nuance whenever someone is killed. Each state uses different terms, but it generally runs along the lines of:
Each one carries a progressively lighter punishment. You can be found guilty of manslaughter and get off with a fine, probation, or even time-served. The courts will adjust punishment according to each crime's circumstances.
What ticks this community off is a special type of murder: Vehicular Manslaughter. It has all the hallmarks of regular manslaughter, except it's much harder to prosecute and often with zero consequences. It's, quite literally, a whole different section of law to reduce the consequences of driving. The exception-to-the-exception is intent! If someone intentionally kills with a gun or a vehicle, then they get charged first or second degree murder. But the consequences are different if someone with a gun negligibly kills (it does happen) and a driver negligibly kills. It's not justice when a boss who didn't maintain a ladder which killed his painter faces more consequences than the driver who didn't maintain their brakes and ran over a child.
The research is in (it has been for decades now): our roads are designed to be dangerous because we focus on speed of cars, not balancing safety in our considerations:
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/06/05/exposing-pseudoscience-traffic-engineering
https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer
It's almost hard to read the whole book. Each section is only a few pages, but they just keep hitting you with data about how badly our traffic systems are designed. The mixture of bad policy, bad modeling, bad engineer training, and bad community perceptions about solutions makes it very hard to get change done quickly, but at this point all new roads and any rebuilds should follow drastically different approaches than we used 80 years ago. To do otherwise is just open negligence on the part of the road designers.
More than 600 car-related injuries in Chicago!? I mean, I'm not as surprised by the shooting victims since I heard gang violence was bad there. But 600 car crashes seems a lot for half a year (don't get me wrong, a lot of work should be done about gun violence too).
Car accidents are a skill issue. Gun murders are intentional.
USA doesn't teach driving anywhere near like other nations do that are serious about motor vehicle operations.
Our roads are also designed incredibly poorly. They encourage speeding by being too wide, straight, and flat. They don't have intersections that require people to pay attention (like roundabouts do). They have high quantities of conflict points among people turning, crossing roads, walking, and riding bikes. Add in vehicles that have terrible lines of sight because they're oversized and it's a recipe for failure, regardless of the training provided.
Car accidents are A) not called "accidents" and B) not universally a result of insufficient driver skill; certainly not a lack of pedestrian skill.
Deaths due to firearms are very frequently unintentional!! The leading cause of death of children in some cities in the USA is fucking unintentional shootings!!!
Even if those things were true I don't know what your point was meant to be. This isn't a driver training issue.
I don't think either gets treated as a crisis
Both are accepted as the price daddy willing to pay