Bark's Bites: The Ethics of Driving a Murder Machine

Here is who should have the right to get around in a giant hunk of metal traveling at speeds that will instantly kill a pedestrian, such that tens of thousands die every year and no one notices or cares: no one. No one deserves that right.

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 6, 2018

Oh, my friends. We knew this day was coming, didn’t we? In a society where all it takes for a cause to be popular is a tweetstorm, David Klion has decided that nobody should have the right to drive a car. Who’s David Klion, you may ask, and why should we care what he thinks? Well, he’s a freelance columnist (hey, so am I) and he lives in Brooklyn (I was born near there!) and he used to work for Al Jazeera America (okay, I would never do that) and he occasionally gets to write op-eds for the New York Times (like Ed Niedermeyer!). And, holy shit, I actually predicted this way back in 2016.

So while I may not particularly care what Mr. Klion thinks, it’s important to realize he represents the opinion of a significant number of people just like himself — people who are scraping by to make a living in ever-growing urban centers, who probably can’t afford a car and probably don’t have a driver’s license, and have seen how the power of a few malcontents on social media can affect significant social change in these United States of America.

In other words, they’re very, very dangerous. And in order to show you how dangerous they are, I’m gonna have to talk about the third rail of American politics at the moment: The Bill of Rights.

You see, there’s nowhere in the Bill of Rights that protects your or my right to drive an automobile. Nowhere. Of course, the automobile didn’t exist in 1791, so maybe if it had, the Founding Fathers might have seen fit to protect it. And maybe if we’d had keyboard warriors back in the days of Henry Ford, our legislators might have felt it appropriate to amend the Constitution to give citizens the right to own and operate an automobile freely in the manner of their choosing.

Alas, none of this happened, and so here we sit on the precipice of losing our rights to drive. You think I’m being hyperbolic? Perhaps overstating things? I don’t think so. All it will take is one incident that shocks the nation into action, one terrible school bus accident that produces a figurehead for a movement.

After all, we didn’t seem to care very much about the 3,457 shooting victims in one year in the City of Chicago last year (and that was actually down from the previous year). But when the media told us we needed to care about gun violence, we all of a sudden became very, very concerned. It took the Florida legislature about two weeks to pass significant gun laws after the Stoneman shooting.

So what would happen if a crazed driver started mowing down kids in front of a school? It’s not like we don’t have a script on how to do it. We had a failed attempt at the university level recently. Or what if a horrific school bus accident kills a few dozen elementary school kids? That’s happened before, too. What if, say, an Oprah Winfrey tweetstorm about “we need to look at how our addiction to cars is killing our children” starts to make people think that turning over their keys wouldn’t be such a bad idea?

It would never fly in the Midwest, you might think. Folks, I have news for you — people in New York and California don’t care much about what the Midwest thinks. They have developed their own sense of morality, their own secular religion. You can look to our superiors like Mr. Klion for proof of that.

How I envision avg US metro area in 20-30 years, if we do everything right:

-no private cars
-publicly owned fleets of driverless electric vans/buses/cars, handicap-accessible
-new, functioning rapid transit lines wherever possible
-parking lots become housing, parks, businesses

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 7, 2018

As our friend Alex Roy is constantly reminding us (God, I hate linking to The Drive), there is no proof that driverless cars are any safer than human drivers. There is no defined safety standard, no protocol for how a car should protect human life in the event that loss of life is unavoidable. There is no reason to think that we would be any safer, period. I can’t count on my Apple phone to not crash during a particularly heated arena battle in Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, so why would I think that my Apple Car would be any different?

Tfw two children are murdered and the pregnant mother of one of them is critically injured in your neighborhood at an intersection you walk through constantly because someone ran a red.

Tfw multiple people you know have lost loved ones in car accidents. https://t.co/Cf8ba9c709

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) March 7, 2018

It’s this sort of drivel that’s meant to appeal to the Feelsville society we’ve created. Yes, the automobile is probably the most important invention in the history of mankind, has probably given more freedom to more people than any other creation ever, but CHILDREN ARE BEING MURDERED OUT HERE.

So I agree with Mr. Roy when he says that a constitutional amendment is needed. I welcome the debate that would come from it. I want to see who lines up on what side of the aisle, which lawmakers want to defend my right to drive, and which ones want to make it impossible to live in Winchester, Kentucky. I want to see how people who live in their third-floor walk-ups that cost $2,500 a month and live miserable lives full of crime and inconvenience act condescending toward me and my Murder Machine. I want this to become a divisive political argument, and I want to stand on the “wrong side of history” with the Drivers.

Write your congressman and your senator and tell them that you support the right to drive. Join the Human Driving Association. You’ll see that I’m right when I tell you that your right to drive is going to be challenged much, much sooner than you ever imagined it would be.