I just don’t understand drinking and driving

But you've said, in this thread, you want the legal limit increased to .16 BAC.

Nonsense please post where I stated that the limit should be at 1.6!!!!!!!!!!!...Footnote some states do used the 1.6...

Why You Should Never Drink and Drive
Impairment Begins Long Before You Are Legally Drunk
By Buddy T
June 23, 2011

It's not a question of whether you are legally intoxicated, it's a question of whether or not it is safe to drive when you have consumed any amount of alcohol. Research shows that impairment begins long before a person reaches the blood alcohol concentration level necessary to be guilty of drunken driving.

The Legal Limit
In all 50 states, the legal limit for drunk driving is a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of .08. A 120-pound woman can reach a .08 BAC level after only two drinks and a 180-pound man can be at .08 after only four drinks.
A "drink" is either one shot of liquor, a five-ounce glass of wine or one beer, all of which contain the same amount of alcohol.

At a .08 BAC level, drivers are so impaired that they are 11 times more likely to have a single-vehicle crash than drivers with no alcohol in their system. But 25 years of research has shown that some impairment begins for both males and females even after one drink.

.02 BAC Level
At the .02 blood alcohol concentration level, experiments have demostrated that people exhibit some loss of judgment, begin to relax and feel good. But tests have also shown that drivers at the .02 level experience a decline in visual functions, affecting their ability to track a moving object, and experience a decline in the ability to perform two tasks at the same

These changes may be very subtle and barely noticable to the person who has had only one drink, but in an emergency situation while behind the wheel of a vehicle, they could cause the driver to react (or not react) as they would without having had a drink.

.05 BAC Level
At the .05 BAC level, people begin to exhibit exaggerated behavior, experience loss of small-muscle control -- such as being able to focus their eyes quickly -- have impaired judgment, lowered alertness and a release of inhibition.
If someone with a BAC level of .05 gets behind the wheel, they would be operating the vehicle with reduce coordination, a futher deminished ability to track moving objects, more difficulty in steering and a markedly reduced response in emergency situations.

.08 BAC Level
When someone drinking is approaching the borderline of legal intoxication, studies show that he or she has poor muscle coordination -- affecting their balance, speech, vision, reaction time and hearing -- find it more difficult to detect danger, and exhibit impaired judgement, self-control, reasoning ability and memory.
A driver with a BAC of .08 will find it more difficult to concentrate, judge the speed of the vehicle, experience reduced information processing capability and exhibit impaired perception.


Slower Reaction Time
For the person who is drinking, the above impairments may be hardly noticeable at the time, but the slow reaction times that they can produce could prove fatal in a emergency driving situation. That's why it is not a good idea to drive no matter how much or how little that you have had to drink.
There is another consideration: Alcohol affects people differently. Some people have a higher response to drinking alcohol than others. In other words, people with a high response to alcohol can experience signs of impairment at the .02 BAC level that others do not experience until the .05 level.

The Safe Limit
For this reason, in some states drivers can be arrested for driving while impaired even if their blood alcohol concentration is lower than the legal limit, if the law enforcement officer believes he has probable cause based on the behavior and reactions of the driver.
It's simply not a wise choice to get behind the wheel no matter how much you have had to drink. The only safe driving limit is .00 percent
http://alcoholism.about.com/od/dui/a/impaired.htm

At a BAC of 1.6 you'd be dead, asshole.

You advocated for a legal BAC of .15-- .16 earlier in this thread, based on your erroneous belief that the number of serious accidents and fatalies involving lower BAC levels was insignificant.

It's not a question of whether you are legally intoxicated, it's a question of whether or not it is safe to drive when you have consumed any amount of alcohol.

based on your erroneous belief that the number of serious accidents and fatalies involving lower BAC levels was insignificant.

LOL so no more using mouthwash with alcohol in it before driving off to work!!!

JASON KIDD’S late-night DWI crash turned his Cadillac SUV into a full-court mess.

Photos of the crumpled car showed how lucky the 39-year-old point guard was to escape alive from the scary late-night wreck in the Hamptons.

The hood was peeled back from the 2010 Escalade’s frame, with the vehicle’s windshield shattered and a driver’s side mirror dangling limply.

The right front tire sat flat on the ground beneath a snarl of twisted metal — twin reminders of Sunday’s 1:56 a.m. wreck in the Hamptons that snapped a wooden utility pole in two.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/holy-scrap-jason-kidd-suv-a-battered-hulk-new-knick-late-night-smashup-boozy-hamptons-benefit-article-1.1116550#ixzz20wOK9PINp

Jason Kidd is the latest athlete to miss the point when it comes to drinking and driving

A month after Giants lineman David Diehl is busted for DWI in Queens, Knicks newest guard arrested for drunken driving in the Hamptons

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
July 16, 2012,
Howard Simmons
New York Daily News

Nobody learns with drinking and driving until it’s too late.

People keep coming out of bars legally drunk, dumb enough to think they can drive a car. The latest, according to the Southampton police, is one of the smartest basketball players of all time. This time it was Jason Kidd who could have killed somebody else, or himself, coming home from a club in the Hamptons just before 2 a.m.

It happens 24 hours and 100 miles or so from where a guy named Richard Haberman killed a man named Juan Rivera-Quintana with his Honda CRV on the Grand Concourse. Haberman is not a famous basketball player, but was high on marijuana and alcohol — three times over the legal limit for booze.

Haberman is at 170th St. in the Bronx. Kidd is on his way to his new $6 million home after partying at a fancy club called SL East in East Hampton. Kidd’s Escalade only hits a telephone pole, breaking it in half. Haberman hits Juan Rivera-Quintana.

A month ago, it was David Diehl of the Super Bowl champion Giants, partying it up as he watched the soccer tournament Euro 2012 at a bar in Astoria. Diehl, with a blood-alcohol level reportedly twice the legal limit, eventually got behind the wheel of his BMW and ended up sideswiping parked cars on 35th Ave. and 31st St.

“If anyone understands the magnitude of the situation, it’s me,” Diehl said at the time.

Clearly Jason Kidd did not. Missed the story, missed the point. Famous point guard, one of the best to ever play the game, doing that. Missing the point entirely.

Now it was 2 o’clock in the morning, when hardly anything good ever happens. Kidd was driving that big Escalade after a day of charity events and a night of partying on the East End of Long Island, on Cobb Road, not so far from Route 27, the main road out there.

Ever since Kidd signed with the Knicks last week, we’ve been hearing about all the mentoring he was going to do for Jeremy Lin, before it came out that Lin may be on his way to Houston. Except now this reminds you of the great line from the movie “The Sting,” when Robert Redford’s character, Johnny Hooker, meets Paul Newman’s hungover Henry Gondorff. Hooker is a young con man, and has been telling Gondorff he’s been sent to him to learn more about running a con.

“I already know how to drink,” Hooker says.

Kidd thought he could make it home because just about all drivers in his situation think they can, until it turns out they can’t, until they hit somebody or something and end up getting charged with DWI. It’s true whether they are on the Grand Concourse or Cobb Road in Water Mill, N.Y.

It doesn’t just happen in sports. But it seems to keep happening in sports, which needs its own laws about driving drunk, where you ought to get the same suspension for a drunk-driving conviction that you get for a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs.

Because you ask the same question with Kidd you asked with Diehl:

Who’s more dangerous to the rest of us, a drunk behind the wheel or a juicer?

Mostly this year we’ve heard about football players getting picked up for drunken driving. This time it is somebody who really is in the conversation with the very best point guards to ever play the game. He’s lucky he only came away with minor injuries and lucky he didn’t run his Escalade right into another car or another person, even in the middle of the night. Luckily he only knocked out cable television service to a few nearby residents — some of them customers of his new boss, James Dolan, whose family owns Cablevision.

Of course this doesn’t make Kidd into John Dillinger. Does not wipe out the good works he has done, three trips to the NBA Finals, one championship. But if he’s guilty as charged, no game he’s ever won excuses behavior this stupid, reckless, dangerous.

Everybody knows what happened to Plaxico Burress because of a night when he had an unlicensed handgun in his pants and a drink in his hand at a crowded New York club. The gun accidentally discharged. Burress was lucky he was the only one wounded, extremely unlucky because it all happened in about the worst place on the planet to be carrying a gun without a license.

Burress went to jail, did real time. That won’t happen with Kidd. He didn’t kill himself, didn’t kill somebody else the way this Habermann did in the Bronx. But from the time it was announced Kidd was coming to the Knicks, this has been such a good story, a good basketball homecoming because he’d once played for the Nets.

Now it changes, because he thought he could make it home early Sunday morning. They all think they can make it home. Nobody learns. Some mentor.

http://www.nydailynews.com/jason-kidd-latest-athlete-point-drinking-driving-article-1.1115423#ixzz20wLKZ5EQ

Editorial
Jason Kidd must face serious DWI charge the same as anyone else
Celebrity status shouldn’t hurt or help NBA all-star's cause
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
July 17, 2012

Raucously celebrating a semi triumphal return to New York basketball in the twilight of an all-star career, Jason Kidd became one of the roughly 50,000 people arrested in the state every year on drunken driving charges.

The Suffolk Country district attorney must now make Kidd the poster boy for the harsh consequences envisioned by the state law. His case must scream deterrence.

This is not a call for applying extra punishment to a celebrity for being a celebrity. If Kidd was even half as drunk as accounts indicate, he deserves maximum repercussions.

The courts will decide the provable outlines of Kidd’s condition. In the event he’s the victim of a big misunderstanding, he’ll go on his way. He hasn’t made such a claim, and the facts do not so indicate.

He started Saturday night at a fund-raiser for foster kids in East Hampton. Later, witnesses said, he hit the vodka hard at a club called SL East. The TMZ website published a picture of Kidd, propped up by a man, as he left about 1 a.m.

Shortly before 2 a.m., cops found Kidd in a wrecked Cadillac Escalade. He had hit a utility pole and skidded into the underbrush. Police described him as reeking of booze, unsteady on his feet, bleary-eyed, slurred of speech and unclear about what had happened. He refused to take a Breathalyzer test.

Taken to a hospital, he was treated for minor injuries, then booked for DWI and released on his own recognizance about 6 a.m. Later Sunday, he returned to the hospital, reportedly because of a bad reaction to a sleeping pill.

That Kidd survived and no one was injured or killed was purely fortunate happenstance. For as long as he was on the road, he was a danger to everyone around him. Such is the crime of drunken driving.

Kidd is charged with a misdemeanor. Let that category not suggest any lack of gravity. The maximum charge for a first-time drunken driver is a misdemeanor. You graduate to a felony only upon a second offense.

That said, the Legislature has toughened penalties — and the new standards may be having some effect. The 50,000 arrests last year were down from more than 58,000 in 2008, 57,500 in 2009 and 54,500 in 2010.

Call it a start, but only a start. The maximum punishment for misdemeanor DWI is a year in jail and a $2,500 fine, but too many get off with a mandatory license suspension and probation. The law also requires convicted drunken drivers to sell their car or to install an ignition interlock, a device that keeps a vehicle from starting until the owner blows into it to demonstrate sobriety.

This is not punishment. It’s a safety measure. Jail is punishment. Putting Kidd behind bars, should the proof be there, would send a powerful warning to others.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/jason-kidd-face-serious-dwi-charge-article-1.1115639#ixzz20wV9I4JQ

Putting Kidd behind bars, should the proof be there, would send a powerful warning to others.

Once again, we have a big sports star around here who should thank his lucky stars that he didn’t kill himself, make his beautiful second wife a widow, leave their little son and infant daughter without a father...

"The NBA, Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management (TEAM) Coalition, Budweiser and NBA teams across the country work together to “make fans aware of the designated-driver programs at NBA arenas, encourage responsible drinking, positive fan behavior and promote traffic safety.”

When, exactly, do players become aware?

They never learn, do they?

It is time to stop paying lip service to any zero-tolerance policy, time for the commissioners of every professional sport, ideally in concert with their respective players’ unions, to decree a policy of one strike and you’re out for at least one season when it comes to DWI. Enough is enough. And has been enough for enough time.

Hours before the DUI, Kidd tweeted a photo of himself standing alongside his model wife, Porschla Coleman, and wrote: “My beautiful wife.” His beautiful wife left the benefit honoring George Lucas before Kidd became just another reckless 39-year-old who didn’t belong behind the wheel of a car.

Of course, he better apologize to his new team, which just handed him a three-year, $9.5 million deal, and to his teammates, and to his new fans, and to his beautiful wife, and face the music. He better pledge to do a heaping helping of community service and be a sincere spokesman on the horrors of drunk driving.

Drinking and driving is life and death. It isn’t just Kidd’s stuff.

www.nypost.com/p/news/local/instead_of_linsanity_fans_get_ginsanity_yZrKF1R1jKMQCEfKDSspxH#ixzz20wptxc9y

Drinking and driving is life and death.

Russian roulette is safe 5 times out of six.

investigate that for us, and let us know how it works out for you...

this is a fine example of a negative emotional response brought on when an unsupportable cherished belief is challenged.

Except you haven't challenged anything.