It’s been a while since we’ve taken a stroll through that terrifying territory in the grip of autoAmerican anarchy. And an awful lot of carnage has ensued in the interim.
So let’s take a look, shall we?
Guns and cars
Listen, we like our guns, we like our cars, and we like to carry our guns in our cars. So here’s the most unsurprising autoAmerican news flash of all.
According to the New York Times: A report issued in May by the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety analyzed FBI crime data in 271 American cities, large and small, from 2020 and found that guns stolen from vehicles have become the nation’s largest source of stolen firearms — with an estimated 40,000 guns stolen from cars in those cities alone.
But to be fair, a lot of folks are forced to get their guns from car burglaries simply because our rabidly anti-2nd Amendment government refuses to put gun vending machines that we can break into on every autoAmerican corner.
More cars and guns
Still, we need our guns in our cars so people in other cars with other guns don’t get the drop on us. Right?
This just in: Two Florida Jug Heads possessed of mutual road rage got into a running gun battle in Florida (where else?). In the course of exchanging volley for volley, little girls in both cars (yes, both Jug Heads had their daughters with them) were shot and wounded.
Initially prosecutors were going to charge both JHs with attempted murder. But charges against one JH were withdrawn when he was deemed justifiably “standing his ground.”
It seems that JH#1 threw a water bottle at JH#2’s car (this prior to the mutual throwing of lead, one presumes.)
Prosecutors determined that JH#2 “reasonably believe[d] that using or threatening to use deadly force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm” (i.e. death by water bottle).
“Some people would say ‘well, water bottles shouldn’t be more aggravated than a gun,’ but under the case law that the state cited a water bottle is considered a deadly missile.” This from JH#2’s defense lawyer.
Be careful out there folks. Some nut with a water bottle could take you out tomorrow.
When buildings stand their ground
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into your home again comes this unsettling news. Drivers in the U.S. crash their cars into buildings about 100 times per day on average.
Oh, and an estimated 2,500 people die in car-building collisions each year.
Reports Slate: “Maybe the broader lesson is simply to marvel at the fact that we don’t even know how many times a day a car smashes into a building in the United States. It’s just one of those things about car culture that goes uncounted, unthought of, until you’re the one waiting for the register when an SUV comes careening through the front window.”
Best to just use the drive-through window folks.
Mitt on the ‘height of stupidity”
A little good news to report. Legislation before Congress would step up federal funding for cities that want to enhance safety for bicyclists and pedestrians.
The bill has been, ironically, dubbed the Sarah Langencamp Act. The irony being that she was an American diplomat evacuated from Ukraine for her own safety….only to be killed while riding her bike on an American street.
The bad news? U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney says that “Removing automobile lanes to put in bike lanes is, in my opinion, the height of stupidity.”
Funny, I thought the “height of stupidity” was that time Mitt set off on a family vacation with the family dog strapped to the top of his station wagon.
And the bodies pile up and up and…
Now this from the LA Times:
“Highway fatalities are on the rise again — 46,000 in the U.S. in 2022, up 22%, according to numbers released last week. How many of those deaths involved distracted driving?
“It’s much bigger than the data show,” Bruce Landsberg, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board told The Times. Data collection methods are so riddled with problems, he said, that reliable estimates are difficult if not impossible.
Landsberg added: “This is an epidemic. Everybody talks about fatalities, but there are hundreds of thousands or more life-altering injuries — broken limbs, brain injuries, horrible burns. This doesn’t have to happen. These crashes are not accidents. They are completely preventable.”
Listen, we don’t call it autoAmerican Anarchy for nothing!
SUV trauma syndrome
And we like our cars the way we like our guns: The bigger and deadlier they are the more we love ‘em.
This from Streetsblog: According to the Abbreviated Injury Scale — a medical coding system that grades the severity of harm caused to the body after a trauma — cyclists hit by SUVs sustained injuries that were 55 percent worse than those struck by smaller vehicles.
Those unlucky cyclists also endured 63 percent worse head traumas, which the researchers attributed to the fact that SUVs crashes were more than twice as likely to cause “ground impact” injuries — or, in plain language, to knock cyclists off their bikes completely and onto the pavement, causing a second impact that can be even more damaging than the initial contact with the car itself.
But to be fair, a lot of people buy SUVs because they feel safer being inside them. Listen, if cyclists want to avoid being mauled they ought to do their riding in SUVs!
Walk at your own risk
Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything. But it’s pretty apparent that pedestrians would be a lot safer if they did their walking inside roomy SUVs as well. Because there is this:
Pedestrian deaths are continuing to skyrocket even as the pandemic wanes — and since 2019, the death rate for walkers has eclipsed the rate of population growth by a factor of at least nine, analysts say.
U.S. drivers killed 3,434 people on foot in the first six months of 2022, an increase of 5 percent over the same period the prior year — and a staggering 18 percent increase over the number of walkers who died in early 2019, the last year before the pandemic, according to the latest fatality estimates from the Governors Highway Safety Association.
That’s quite enough autoAmerican Anarchy for one post. Just be careful out there. It’s an autoAmerican jungle!
FreeGNV 