Inanimate objects don’t kill people, stupidity does!

If there is one thing guaranteed to get my goat, it is the continuing tendency of people – often people employed in the media – to immediately blame the state of the road for fatalities. You know what people; highways don’t lurk about in the dark, plotting and scheming before cunningly setting about to “claim victims”. If the road DOES happen to be dodgy, show more bloody caution!

On this theme, it is about time we got rid of this word ‘accident’ from the reporting of car crashes. Someone falling asleep at the wheel and running headlong into another car is not an ‘accident’. Someone four times over the legal limit flying off a cliff because they can no longer see straight is not an ‘accident’. Someone doing 175 kilometres an hour in an 80 zone losing control and hitting a wall is not an ‘accident’.

To my mind, an ‘accident’ is a quite specific, identifiable, unexpected and unusual external event, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects. The person that drives 22 straight hours; the person that gets drunk and hops behind the wheel; or the person that guns it down the street hell for leather should not consider crashing an “unexpected and unusual external event”. It is a crash, not an accident.

That is why today’s report from the NSW coroner gladdens my heart. Hopefully the press are paying notice.

Rant over. Back to work.

Comments

Anonymous said…

This post was most interesting. I also liked the one yesterday about word clouds.

13 June 2008 at 20:59

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

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