DWI and Devastated
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This was supposed to be a slam-dunk column, one of those easy bits of punditry ripped from the headlines. It was a good time for it, given last week’s big announcement from General Motors Corp. that it reached an employee buyout agreement — one of the most expensive in U.S. corporate history — to pare thousands of workers from its U.S. assembly plants and its largest parts supplier, the bankrupt Delphi Corp. Virginia law enforcement and traffic safety officials are extremely unhappy with those numbers, as are their peers in the District of Columbia, where 11 people died in “0.08 percent or higher” drunk-driving crashes in 2004, down 56 percent from the 25 people who died that way in 2003, but who died tragically and unnecessarily nonetheless. In Maryland, 209 people died in legally-drunk-and-above crashes in 2004, up 12 percent from 187 in 2003. (Hint: If you are caught drinking and driving in Maryland, don’t expect any sympathy from police or anyone else in the law enforcement and judicial systems.) Nationally, the numbers were just as grim — 12,879 people dying in drunk-driving crashes in 2004, down a scant 2 percent from the 13,096 people who perished in unfortunate meetings with drunken motorists in 2003. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. Source : pqasb.pqarchiver.com |