Originally Posted by Seerah
A car is a deadly weapon, while your home is not. There's even a term for when you kill someone with your car - "vehicular manslaughter".
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This actually gets to my point.
There is a law on the books that says when you negligently hit someone with your car, you're probably going to jail.
If the threat of jail time if something happens isn't going to stop someone from engaging in risky behavior, such as texting while actively moving on an urban street populated with all its wheeled and non-wheeled denizens, why would 2 pts on their license and a $125 fine suddenly have a deterrent effect?
In the meantime, the laws are generally written to be black-and-white, so that the people who can use stuff responsibly and were never going to hit anyone get punished, with no overall impact to public safety.
If anything, I would support these laws being tack-ons to existing offenses.. e.g. if you were performing one of these behaviors (texting, changing CD, rosy palming) while involved in an accident it's a double penalty or something. But to just blanket ban little niches of activity seems draconian for what it achieves.