Misplaced Worries
If you’re really worried about your teen’s safety, worry about cars, not madmen with guns
The recent, tragic events at Virginia Tech have brought all of the usual suspects out of the woodwork—anti-gun activists, NRA supporters, mental health advocates, concerned parents and many, many more. All are rightly concerned about their child’s safety. But all are, I think, sadly misguided in their focus.
If you really want to save the lives and health of teens, stop worrying about madmen with guns and start worrying about cars.
According to Allstate, more than 5,000 to 6,000 teens die each year in auto accidents; three hundred thousand are injured. More than half of those are single car accidents—meaning that the accident was the result of a misjudgment on the part of the driver, not the fault of another. Of the total, 77 percent are due to an error on the part of the teen driver.
Five thousand plus deaths a year averages to twelve- to fifteen teen deaths a day. Put in another, more brutal way, every three days, more teens die in auto accidents than died in the Virginia Tech shootings. And yet there is no public hue and cry against teen driving.
The student parking lot of the high school where I work is jammed with cars. Each of those cars belongs to a teen whose parents allow him to drive. Many of those parents have purchased the car and pay the insurance.
Would those same parents buy their kids guns? Of course not; guns are dangerous and scary.
So are cars. And far more so. If 5,000 teens annually were killed by guns and another 300,000 injured, a Constitutional amendment would be passed to revoke the second amendment.
I wonder as I watch the anti-gun and teen safety advocates rant and rave on television how many let their teens drive. If they have teens, I’d guess that the answer is “most.”
That makes them ignorant at best; perhaps even hypocrites.
Allstate bluntly points out the root causes of the teen death and injury rate:
• The first of these root causes is social: simple peer pressure nudges teens towards risky driving habits. Research shows that the presence of other teens in a car being driven by a teen significantly increases the chances of a crash – whether or not the passengers are explicitly urging the driver to make unsafe traffic maneuvers.
• The second cause is biological, an issue of brain development. Recent advances in neuroscience tell us that key parts of the brain’s decision-making circuitry do not fully develop until the mid-20s. So, in actual driving situations, teens may weigh the consequences of unsafe driving quite differently than adults do. This, combined with the increased appetite for novelty and sensation that most teens experience at the onset of puberty, makes teens more disposed to risk-taking behind the wheel – often with deadly results.
Allstate makes it pretty clear. The problem is not training. It’s that they’re teens. They simply are biologically incapable of making the sound judgments required for good driving.
That also makes the solution clear. Raise the driving age to 21.
So let’s put the Virginia Tech shootings in perspective. Gun deaths are sensational, but a silent epidemic is killing out kids – and no one is doing anything about it. No one is even talking about it.
Posted by The Editor on 04/19 at 01:25 PM
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