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Comment by throwaway316943 | Hacker News Reader

Every day 28 people die in the US from drunk driving crashes

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

261 per day from excessive alcohol use

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death...

Alcohol consumption directly affects people who do not consume it in a multitude of ways from the monetary cost of increased demand on the health care system, police, prisons and damage to public property to the emotional and psychological burden of interacting with the inebriated or dependent to the physical impact of abuse and accidents caused by intoxication.

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I for one fully support a complete ban on humans manually operating motor vehicles as soon as we can get to self driving cars.

A scarier argument that I saw yesterday was something called a welfare check or something in which a police officer and a jail doctor can just declare you something like insane and you no longer have any medical autonomy.

You don't have to reach for hypotheticals about how we will ban people from eating a second cookie or a full size candy bar. This is the law we have today. People with mental health issues apparently have effectively no rights. Imagine making the wrong people angry and you end up drugged up in a strait jacket... Or if you want to go conspiracy theorist, a specific set of photos appears in your iCloud account and you face prison time where you are very likely to face abuse from the guards and other prisoners alike. This is also the reality we already have, no need to reach for hypotheticals.

Drunk driving is very illegal. If we could identify unvaccinated people who infected others and punish that with jail time, would you be happy about that?

Would the people who were infected even want to press charges? Assuming they were vaccinated, they would probably have an extremely mild case, if they were unvaccinated then they would essentially be arguing a case against themselves.

Would you also jail the folks ho were vaccinated but still infected others?

No. I don't even have a strong opinion about punishing people for infecting others through negligence. But I think it is worth bringing up whenever anti-vaxxers bring up alcohol and drunk driving.

To be clear, I am not opposed to vaccines. I think the current vaccine is the best option for people at high risk of negative outcomes due to COVID. What I am opposed to is coercion by the state on something that is a personal choice. Calling this argument “antivaxx” is another example of the disingenuous way people are behaving. It’s a smear campaign that is being parroted without any critical thought.

Cool. But the argument "we let people drink alcohol despite harm caused to others" is a bad one.

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