"Steve B" wrote in message
...

"Tim" wrote in message
...
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/11...y.aspx?ref=rss


NY just passed a new law to protect kids. Now it is a felon, to drive
DWI/DUI with children 15 years of age or less on board.

That ought to help save lives!

Not sure if that last sentence is a statement or a snide comment.

Drunks don't care about anything, even passengers.

And if more laws reduced deaths and DUIs, we would have evidence of this
already, as we have increased the laws.

There is not correlation between increasing laws and people lessening
their criminal acts. Look at Prohibition.

Steve



I'm not sure what you mean by "lessening their criminal acts." If you mean
that laws don't reduce criminal activity, then that's true for some laws,
e.g., death penalty laws don't reduce homicides. But, I suspect it's not
true for others, and laws do prevent bad outcomes, e.g., seat belt laws.

I don't have access to the full article, but here's the abstract.

"This article reexamines the effectiveness of blood alcohol content (BAC)
laws in reducing traffic fatalities. Differences-in-differences estimators
of U.S. state-level data with standard errors corrected for autocorrelation
show no evidence that lowering the BAC limits to 0.08 g/dL reduced fatality
rates, either in total or in crashes likely to be alcohol related, or in
states that passed BAC 08 in laws either in advance of or in response to
federal pressure. Other legislations, including administrative license
revocation and primary seat belt laws, are found effective in reducing
fatalities in all specifications. Endogeneity tests using event analyses
confirm the differences-in-differences estimates."

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Nom=de=Plume