Something must be done about the CARNAGE!

SHOCKING figures have revealed that children as young as 15 have been caught driving on East Lancashire’s roads while over the alcohol limit.

Oh My God. Underage children getting pissed and driving cars. Erm, how many exactly?

Four 15-year-olds are among 1,634 drivers who failed roadside tests for drink-driving in East Lancashire since the start of 2009.

Four? In nearly three years? It's an epidemic!

Dozens of those who failed tests were at least three times over the limit, which is 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

Road safety charities have called for the legal drink-drive limit to be reduced while police say they are continuing to plough resources into tackling the problem.
Ellen Booth, senior campaigns officer at road safety charity Brake, said: “Drink-driving is a serious crime that kills and seriously injures people every day.

Indeed it is serious when people are killed or injured. If however, people are being arrested with three times the legal limit of alcohol in their blood, what is lowering the limit going to do? (Apart from change the story to ".....were four times over the limit")

“While drinking a large amount before getting behind the wheel is clear-ly abhorrent, research shows that even small amounts of alcohol impair safe driving.

Research shows does it? Notice how this so called 'research' is never made available in these articles? I wonder what other things affect driving as much as a small amount of alcohol.

Crappy drive-time radio?
Noisy children?
Bad weather?
Pedestrians with large breasts?

Let's just ban everything that might impair judgement and then we can have roads that are 100% safe. But we will never get there no matter what we ban. The best we can hope for is a response measured to the problem. Kind of like what we have now. Not this:

"That’s why Brake is calling on all drivers not to touch even a drop of alcohol before driving.

Oh do shut up.

“Brake is calling on the Government to lower the limit and to introduce random breath testing, in order to stop the needless carnage on our roads.”

In other words, penalise the many in order to stop the few. Lower limits will nor deter people who are happy to indulge in criminal behaviour, all it will do is place a lot more people into the category of criminal.

Random breath testing is not permitted in England, though you wouldn't know it. The police regularly have anti drink driving campaigns where they randomly test hundreds of thousands of motorists and then bleat about how they have caught a few hundred.

This is just like randomly stopping people in the street and checking them for concealed weapons. The police should need a reasonable suspicion before stopping you.

But if it saves just one life.....

Interestingly enough, I was late for work this morning because of all the carnage. Something needs to be done.