A strong but older example of this is driving crimes. For a while killing someone while driving was just prosecuted as manslaughter (accidental killing), cuz that’s what it is. But juries weren’t convicting very often.
Someone realised that people didn’t like the idea that you could commit manslaughter, a very serious crime, just be driving your car and making a mistake. And so a new crime was created called reckless driving or something similar. It had a similar jail time but different terminology. And it got juries convicting more.
Clearly people have for a long time preferred to not think about just how absurdly violent or dangerous the act of driving is, to the point that killing with a car just didn’t count as a normal killing crime.
this will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction of course.
Ah is that why there seemed to be this thing called Vehicular Manslaughter in American TV shows? I don’t know if we have that here in Australia but I always wondered why such a thing existed since surely it was just… manslaughter whether a vehicle was involved or not.
I’ve talked to multiple people who refuse to take an Amtrak to travel because they were delayed one time, but they’ll sit in gridlock for an hour each way on the interstate daily without blinking an eye.
What? First of all, Amtrak is often more comparable to air travel as far as alternatives go.
Second, those Amtrak delays are genuinely upwards of 5 hours. I had a trip leaving at 9 pm, and they had me waiting at that seedy train stop until 1am.
Not their fault though, it was Union Pacific’s fault.
Tailgating comes to mind. It’s not that different than pointing a gun at someone, and people do it constantly.
Good point. That hasn’t happened to me yet. But it’s in the news every day.
There are a lot of things people do while driving that are dangerous but very common. Things like driving with the high beam, speeding, tailgating, using a phone while driving etc.
The problem is that enforcing the rules is hard. You would either need a large percentage of the population to be police officers, or to put traffic cameras on every street.
I do find myself caught in that. Particularly if I’m stuck in traffic for no readily apparent reason.
“All I’m saying is ‘it better be an accident’ and ‘somebody better be dead!’”
I wouldn’t think that outside being stuck in traffic.
I would love to drive less but it would take me 8X longer to ride a bus to work. I also can’t ride my bike due to fear of death by car.