Drunk Driving Essay

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Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving had her life greatly affected due to other people driving while intoxicated. It started when her daughter Serena was 18 months old and Candy’s car was hit from the rear by a drunken driver causing slight injury to Serena. Only six years later her son Travis was run over and very seriously injured yet again by a driver under the influence and over the legal limit. Later on Lightner's 13-year-old daughter Cari was walking to a church carnival when she was struck from behind by a drunken driver who briefly passed out. Cari was hit and thrown over 125 feet and left on the side of the road dead. To add insult to the tragedy, the driver of the vehicle had been charged with several previous counts of impaired driving, had been convicted 3 times, and was just released on bail two days earlier. That may just sound like a surplus of bad luck for this one family, but drunk driver related fatalities are much more common than some people may realize. The National Transportation Safety Board reports at least 10,000 fatalities each year due to drunken driving (Wald). The problems associated with drunk driving include; repeat offenders and alcohol related fatalities, however, we could all help to solve this problem by getting involved, enforcing strict laws and punishments, and utilizing new technology.
Determining the sobriety of a driver is all about the amount of alcohol in a person’s system. We measure the amount of alcohol a person has by a percentage of alcohol to blood, this is called the blood alcohol content or BAC. Driving while under the influence of alcohol at just a blood-alcohol content of .008% makes you 163% more likely to get into an accident (Wald). The amount of alco...

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...ms touching the steering wheel (Wald).
With thousands of reported deaths each year and countless injuries due to drivers who operate vehicles under the influence of alcohol it’s about time that we step in as a society and help with the problem. Education is the leading probable solution and with our help drivers can learn the dangers of operating a vehicle after consuming alcoholic beverages. Driving while intoxicated is a complicated matter with many negative results. The problems with drunk driving include repeat offenders and the amount of number of fatalities. With that being said, we could help solve this problem by personally getting involved, voting for those who want to force strict laws and punishments on drunk drivers, and utilizing new technology in society that will prevent those who frequently drive under the influence from endangering us on the roads.

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