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At first I was going to focus on some angle of the Bronco play-off victory Sunday that everyone else had missed. But it appears that they nailed down everything, from sports-bar scenes and T-shirt sales to possible effects on Patrick Bowlen's campaign for a taxpayer subsidy.
So let's look at the latest purity campaign to emerge from Boulder. There, they might not catch you if you bludgeon and strangle a child, but they've got a state senator who wants to arrange matters so that they can catch you if you light up in an automobile occupied by a child under 16.
State Sen. Dorothy Rupert says this is necessary to protect the health and lives of children.
If she's serious about that, then forget the smoke, and ban children from riding in cars altogether.
Search as I might, through reference books at hand and the vast if unreliable resources of the Internet, I have found no mention of any child anywhere dying or suffering immediate severe injury from the presence of tobacco fumes in an automobile.
However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that in 1994, 40,700 Americans died in traffic accidents, and about 9 percent of them -- 3,700 or so -- were children under 16. Also, 289,000 children were injured in auto accidents.
Apply those rates to Colorado, and it works out to 52 childhood deaths and 4,150 injuries each year.
So a ban on the transport of children in private automobiles would save at least one precious young life each week, while it would prevent 79 injuries, many resulting in permanent impairment.
A total ban would also be easier to enforce than her
proposed smoking ban. Rupert wants to make adult
smoking in a car with children
a primary
offense, as opposed to a secondary
offense like not
wearing your seatbelt.
The difference between primary and secondary is that a cop can't pull you over just to see if your belt is buckled. He has to find a primary cause, like speeding or a dysfunctional turn signal. Then, if you're not strapped in when he looks into your car, you can also get a ticket for that as well as the primary offense.
If Rupert gets her way, city cops and county deputies and state troopers will be watching for smoking drivers. Then they'll look for other occupants, and since it's often hard to guess the age of passengers as they whiz by, the cops have to stop the car.
Since it can be difficult to estimate the age of adolescents, the state could simplify enforcement by requiring children to carry ID cards. After all, if a late-bloomer 17-year-old who didn't have a driver's license was a passenger, how's the cop supposed to know whether to issue a $56 ticket?
The cop would also have to endure to all manner of
excuses, ranging from that's not my kid, he's just some
hitchhiker I picked up, and how am I supposed to know his
age?
to It's a nice day and the windows are rolled
down, so how could the concentration of tobacco smoke be 23
times what it is in a house?
Do cops really need to hear more excuses? And wouldn't enforcement be much simpler if they could just stop any car with probable children in it? Not only smokers, but kidnappers, molesters, pornographers and other unsavory sorts transport children in automobiles, and a flat ban, unlike Rupert's selective prohibition, would go a long way toward eliminating these tragic crimes.
Further, when are child passengers safer? When Soccer Mom at the wheel can light up and relax in the afternoon gridlock, or when she can't smoke and gets edgy and tense and becomes susceptible to Road Rage? Both are dangerous situations, I gather, and again, a total ban would eliminate this dilemma.
Another benefit of prohibiting children in cars appears daily in front of my house. The old parochial school across the street has been leased by the school district for kindergarten and sixth-grade classes.
So upscale parents, eager to prevent their little Jasons and Jennifers from learning to use plebeian sidewalks, appear with their vehicles, causing traffic and safety hazards as they double- and triple-park, obscuring other drivers' vision as children are scrambling across the street. The screech of brakes is a frequent sound and a tragedy is just a matter of time -- unless we ban all transport of children in private automobiles.
Given all this, Rupert can't be concerned about childhood health and safety, or she'd want to keep them out of automobiles altogether. So what is her real motivation?
My guess is that California got ahead of Boulder in the protection racket on New Year's Day when it banned smoking in bars. Nobody is forced to enter a tavern, and if you cared about your health, you wouldn't go to saloons anyway -- saloons have a purpose, and it isn't the same purpose as a fitness center's.
So now Boulder is trying to regain the lead in stupid purity legislation. And if we want to be real progressive in the latest style of child protection, forget about smokers and keep kids out of cars altogether.
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