Should the teenage driving age be raised to 18? Disputes over whether to raise the driving age have been a rising hot topic of discussion. Over the past few years, teen driving habits have been closely studied and driving fatalities among adolescents have been rising more and more every year. In fact, the largest proportion of adolescent injuries and fatalities are due to motor vehicle accidents, most are due to the influence of peers, drugs, and/or alcohol. (Digest, 2008) More than 5,000 teenagers die in car accidents every year.
When you see younger people starting to drink and they combine that with driving they can cause deaths to a lot of people. The national highway traffic safety administration estimates that raising the drinking age to 21 saves about 800 lives a year (James C. Fell). Underage drinking for 10th and 12th graders has been steadily going down since the drinking age was raised to 21, in 2009 it was at an all time low for 12th graders, many of whom are 18. “Keeping the drinking age at 21has saved lives, and there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken”. Every place has their own drinking age, In Europe the legal drinking age is 16 and in Italy it is 17.
If you consider driving then the problem gets even worse. Drinking and driving is a one of the biggest problems when it comes to driving and it is against the law. Every injury and death caused by drunk driving is totally preventable. Although the percentage of crashes that are alcohol-related has dropped dramatically in recent years, there are still way too many preventable accidents. Unfortunately, in spite of great progress, alcohol-impaired driving remains a serious national problem that tragically affects many victims on a yearly basis.
Although we have educated and preached to our children about drinking and driving, the statistics in 2001 showed an estimated 2.8 million college students drove under the influence. That’s half a million more than in 1998. An alarming statistic from Mothers Against Drunk Driving is that more college under-graduates will die from alcohol related causes than will receive a masters or doctorate degree. Another statistic, one I found sickening and very upsetting was,” During a typical weekend, an average of one teenager dies each hour in a car crash. Nearly fifty percent of those crashes involved alcohol” (MADD).
This amounts to one death every 48 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $51 billion. In 2010, 10,228 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (31%) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States [1]. It is not morally correct to drive a vehicle after having consumed excess amounts of alcohol. Social drinking may be one of the only responsible ways to consume alcohol.
Drunk Driving Dear Tom Corbett, Did you know over half of American population are kilt in alcohol related crashes ? A lot of people die from driving with and intoxicated driver or by other drunk drivers. Last year in 2010 Pennsylvania had 444 alcohol related deaths from car accidents. The count for alcohol related deaths go up every year it's to a point it's out of control. Drunk driving affects more than just the people driving drunk, it affects innocent pedestrians or sober drivers who die while the drink drivers lives a normal life like nothing happened.
Correspondingly, driving has had its share of causing deaths in the U.S. as well as drinking. In 2012, the NHTSA created a study showing that 33,561 people died in car crashes. All things considered, these three laws are the most essential and crucial laws that need to be
2). The mission of M.A.D.D is to prevent drinking and driving, emerge in research to educate and inform the public of the use of alcohol in the youth. M.A.D.D is a non- profit organization that was founded by a mother whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver. It is the nation’s largest organization working to protect from drunk driving and underage drinking. M.A.D.D offers victim services, programs for parents to teach their child about underage drinking, and campaigns to eliminate drunk driving.
About 1,900 people under 21 die every year from car crashes involving underage drinking. i) Young people are more susceptible to alcohol-induced impairment of their driving skills. ii) Drinking drivers aged 16 to 20 are twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash as drinking drivers who are 21 or older. iii) For every 100,000 Americans under the age of 21, 1.4 people were killed in drunk driving fatalities in 2010 iv) The rate of fewer than 21 drunk driving fatalities per 100,000 populations has declined 48% over the past decade. v) In 2009, 11 percent of all drivers involved in fatal crashes were young drivers 15- to 20- years old.
In various cases binging victims have caused bodily harm to many innocent people that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is safe to say that the fatality rate of college students due to binging has risen since the turn of the 19th century; this information should be taken into account for the lives of our youth. There are other factors that should be taken into reason when considering the extent of binge drinking, which are the cognizant status of the individual and the threat they pose to