Smoking is more provable, controllable, and doesn't involve a highly invasive seizure and search, the results of which are questionable anyway.
We get all up in arms about relatively small numbers of needless deaths and ignore any of many elephants in the room, one of which is the fact that tobacco is a huge, profitable industry that has a vast lobby and kills nearly a half-million people per year.
All I'd like to see is a sense of scale to our outrage. Both distracted driving and smoking involve personal, silly choices, both of which can kill others. One is 141x more likely to kill; let's fight that first instead of yet further eroding privacy.
I'm sorry I presented them as mutually exclusive, you're correct that they are not.
The difference is that one is already illegal - stopped, as it were. I postulate that this law will not significantly reduce distracted driving, but that it will primarily serve to perpetuate our government's apparent war on privacy. To be clear: I'm perfectly fine with a warrant-based search, particularly of carrier records. All this law does is grant individual law enforcement officers yet more authority to judge and immediately punish.
We get all up in arms about relatively small numbers of needless deaths and ignore any of many elephants in the room, one of which is the fact that tobacco is a huge, profitable industry that has a vast lobby and kills nearly a half-million people per year.
All I'd like to see is a sense of scale to our outrage. Both distracted driving and smoking involve personal, silly choices, both of which can kill others. One is 141x more likely to kill; let's fight that first instead of yet further eroding privacy.