The 4-Ls series of blog articles ended on May 30, but this post harks back to the first L. It is about the unnecessary and preventable loss of life of many thousands of people each year in the U.S.
Do you know who Candy
Lightner is? I didn’t until this past March when I heard a church woman talk
about her in a worship service at First Baptist Church of Kansas City (Mo.).
Ms. Lightner, whose name
was Candace Doddridge when she was born in May 1946, had the devastating
experience of having her 13-year-old daughter Cari killed by a drunk driver in
May 1980. Just four months later, she founded MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving.)
By 1985, MADD had grown into an
international organization with over two million members in more than 400
chapters worldwide and an annual budget exceeding $12,000,000.
Amid allegations of financial
mismanagement, in 1985 Candy left the organization she founded, but MADD has
continued to be a strong organization to the present day.
While writing
this article, for the first time I made a contribution to MADD and became a
supporter. (Click here if you’d like to do the same.) The
receipt I received notes,
Gifts from friends like you have helped cut deaths from drunk driving in half over the last four decades. More than 450,000 lives have been saved, and we’ve been able to compassionately serve more than 900,000 victims [bolding added].
In 2011, Lightner started a new
organization. It is called We Save Lives and focuses on reducing drugged,
drunk, and distracted driving. It is still active, but it seems to be less
effective than MADD.
Surprisingly, Lightner said in a 2002 newspaper article (see here) that MADD had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever
wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD
to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”
In that
article, she also said that she disassociated herself from MADD because she
believed the organization was headed in the wrong direction, that is, putting
too much emphasis on not drinking.
Accordingly,
she doesn’t encourage people not to drink; rather, she wants people to “drink
responsibly”—and that is the same appeal made in beer advertisements I hear while
listening to baseball or basketball games on the radio.
Candy seems to think
that it is not alcohol that causes so many traffic fatalities, it is drunk
drivers who cause those deaths. That sounds to me very similar to those who
oppose gun control when they say it is not guns that kill people, it is those
who do not use guns responsibly. Aren’t both technically correct?
Most people who drink
alcohol do not drive drunk, and most gun owners do not misuse their firearms
and shoot other people. But are we OK with the number of people who die each
year both as a result of gun violence and drunk driving?
Despite all the good
work that MADD has done, a large number of people die in drunk-driving crashes every week.
According to this
website, the U.S. Department of Transportation states that over 13,500
people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths in 2022. Then they say,
“These deaths were all preventable.”
If there were
a U.S. airplane crash that killed more than 200 people, it would be considered
a major tragedy and would long be in the national news. Except for the
terrorist-caused crashes in 2001, the last U.S. airplane crash with 200+
fatalities was TWA flight 800 off the coast of New York in July 1996.
But think
about it: there is now an average of about 260 deaths caused by drunk driving in
the U.S. every week of the year! But these deaths don’t make more than the
local news.
If MADD has, indeed, saved more than 450,000
lives in the last four decades, and I have no reason to dispute that claim, I
am truly grateful and plan to continue supporting their work.
Doesn’t more need to be done, though? Will
we just ignore the likelihood that far more than 260 people will be killed by
drunk drivers during the first week of July? Or is that something that causes
us to be/support MADD?
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