No double standard here

Drunken Blackwater guard who killed Iraqi is back in Iraq thanks to State Department.

Why not! Drunken drivers are allowed to drive our roadways everyday after being caught and given nothing more than a symbolic slap on the wrist.

This is just a simple case of naiveté in it’s purest form. Our ‘justice’ system believes that someone who is willing to go into public, drunk, with a deadly weapon, be it a rifle, a machine gun or a car, without any regard to the lives of innocent, unsuspecting citizens will not do it again just because the guilty person acts remorseful and says they won’t. This amounts to criminal enabling.

The fact that it has been proven many times over that these people have caused death, injury and untold millions of dollars in property damage, after saying they would not do it again, is not enough to get our law makers to put the safety of the rest of us first.

The fact that these people are willing to go back out into the public under the influence of a substance that has been proven to disrupt their thinking and common sense shows they cannot control themselves and therefore need to be more heavily monitored in order to keep the rest of us from paying for their diseased negligence.

Of course it is a disease. No one will argue that it is not. That doesn’t give them the right to be behind the steering wheel. It does not alleviate the responsibility of our justice system and lawmakers from doing more to keep these people off of the roads.

If money is the only thing lawmakers understand then look at the amount money spent every time an EMT and police officer is called to cleanup after these people. Add in the amount of money spent for hospital personnel to care for any survivors. Add in the amount of money spent by insurance companies to cover the cost of hospital stays, vehicle replacement costs, lost wages, etc. Look at the number of lives that are affected by this one persons irresponsible act of getting behind the wheel of an automobile while drunk.

Lawyers have work thrown their way, too, as a result of drunk drivers so maybe lawmakers are just looking after their ‘brothers’ welfare.

It is disgusting and unconscionable to repeatedly hear of a drunken driver killing another person after being arrested multiple times for drunk driving.

It is not unheard of to learn that people have been arrested 5, 6, 7, or even 10 times for drunk driving only to find them on the road again.

Yet our government, local, state and now federal, thinks its okay to subject law abiding citizens to these people’s behavior.

Why??? Why is this insanity allowed to continue?

We have MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions), RADD (Recording Artists Against Drunk Driving), and even BADD (Boaters Against Drunk Driving) as well as BADD (Bikers Against Drunk Drivers) and the problem is not lessening.

So many groups against drunk drivers and yet there are still so many drunk drivers on the road. What is wrong with this picture?

Thanks to the efforts of these advocacy groups, as well as others, and the list is long, the penalties and consequences of driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs have gotten much stiffer.

Stiffer penalties is obviously not a good enough deterrent. It certainly is not keeping the ‘hard core’ drunk driver off the roads, the people who have been arrested multiple times and will continue to drink and drive until they themselves are killed.

It seems to me that death is the only thing that will stop these people because these groups are not effective enough by themselves.

These groups are not even deterring the first time drunk drivers. Those people who drink and then drive for the first time make it home without incident and are then foolishly emboldened to believe that they are not affected by alcohol become convinced that it must only be a problem for other people.

These groups are only convincing those of us who don’t drink and drive. We congratulate ourselves that we are doing something to stop drunk driving, usually in the name of a loved one who was killed by a drunk driver, and the problem continues with no end in sight.

So, now, it does not surprise me to hear that the federal government believes that a person who got drunk and killed someone with a government issued weapon is not a sign that this person is not responsible enough to have a weapon.

Apparently, no one really takes the problem of alcohol abuse seriously enough.