So here’s the messed up thing, right? Back when Unsafe at any Speed was published, auto fatalities were at a high rate and climbing. And there’s a theory that says when fatalities-per-year reach a certain level, then a significant % of people have lost someone they knew.
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And a large part of the drivers towards auto regulation involved those fatalities reaching into middle class American life in a significant way. Similar patterns were shown with e.g. smoking.
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But we have all these mass shootings now reaching into that segment of American life and... nothing. Like, people are motivated, sure. And the gun lobby is strong. But the car lobby and tobacco lobbies were strong, too.
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Replying to @EmilyGorcenski
I'm not sure the fatalities-per-year rate is high enough for gun violence (and might suggest that the auto-fatalities-per-year rate didn't need to be as high as the threshold was for tobacco, because fatal or not, EVERYONE knows someone who's had a car crash)
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Replying to @maninbloom @EmilyGorcenski
To put some numbers on it, auto fatalities reached over 250 deaths per million people *every year* in the late '60s — one in every 4,000 people dying in a car crash, every single year. That's >80,000 deaths per year at the current US population level, out of 2.7m deaths. (Whoa.)pic.twitter.com/C5oYeOx9zL
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Jesus CHRIST, I had no idea it was that bad back then
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