| Subject: |
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Our Good American Outlaw Willie Sutton Robbed Banks, not Liquor Stores with Empty Cash Registers. |
| Name: |
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M-a-d-d Ray |
| Date Posted: |
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Apr 9, 07 - 10:39 PM |
| Email: |
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RarelyL84ad8@aol.com |
| Website: |
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http://www.motorcyclists-against-dumb-drivers.com |
| Message: |
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God Bless you Eric,
I am very very sorry for the loss of your friends, and respect you for your concern for the lives of the other riders in your beautiful and free riding state of Arizona. I have ridden through your state, taking my helmet off at your border, thankful for the commitment of your state's good and effective biker rights advocates.
Every biker's life is valuable. I've received literally hundreds of calls and e-mails from injured bikers and grieving families. I can't recall one in which the auto driver was identified as an illegal alien, but I'm sure there must have been some.
Arizona, like California, has a greater percentage of its population who are Mexican illegal immigrants, and so statistically, even if Mexican illegal immigrants are no worse in their driving than Americans or legalized Mexican immigrants, we can expect a greater percentage of deaths to be caused by them. There are reasons which you have identified above, which might lead one to conclude that it is possible that illegal Mexican immigrants and legal Mexican immigrants may be worse drivers than born Americans and legal and illegal immigrants from other countries, by virtue of their having grown up in Mexico with its Demolition Derby driving, but that would not be an illegal immigrant issue, that would be an issue that would apply to legal as well as illegal immigrants from Mexico, and indeed other countries in which driving is worse than here. Furthermore, one could just as well argue other hypotheses, such as that illegal immigrants from any country should want to be more careful when driving to the extent that they value their ability to stay here and enjoy the better life that they have sought for themselves and their families. Your hypothesis may be better than mine, I don't know, but the point is that they are just hypotheses.
Taking the emotion out of this just for one quick moment, the same applies to the information we see in our newspapers occasionally describing that an American biker or auto driver was killed in an accident by an illegal immigrant. Please consider that the fact that the auto driver was here illegally may be the only reason why the story appeared in the newspaper, all those accidents in which bikers and other auto drivers killed by Americans and legal immigrants deemed unnewsworthy. If all we here about is the accidents caused by illegal immigrants, then naturally we will come to the impression that they must be lousy drivers, but the accidents reported in the papers are not a statistical sampling, and so our conclusions would be incorrect.
In science, individual incidents or associations are described as "anecdotal data," which is considered reasonable information upon which to frame a "hypothesis" but never as proof of a hypothesis. In order to come to an honest and reasonable conclusion that illegal immigrants are more dangerous drivers than American drivers or legal immigrant drivers one would have to conduct a study comparing the three groups. Scientists are always surprised when they go to test a hypothesis generated by anecdotal data to find that the hypothesis is not borne out. Our FDA collects "adverse reaction reports" and "drug experience reports" from physicians who have observed what they are concerned might be an adverse side effect associated with a drug. If there are large numbers of drug experience reports, studies are performed and sometimes an association between the exposure and the adverse effect will be documented statistically, but most often, on careful study, there will be found no association.
In all fairness, and in the interests of not diverting our political capitol to unproductive endeavor, indeed endeavor that might prove costly in terms of our relationships with our legislators, I would urge all who are concerned with this issue not to draw conclusions from the type of unreliable information which would certainly be discounted by the scientific method. If you are going to make "statistics based" arguments, as we see above as the only basis urged for focusing on illegal immigrants, then we should first want to be sure of our statistics. As far as I am aware, and I would be pleased to be corrected, there is no reliable or meaningful statistical basis upon which to conclude that illegal immigrants are more dangerous drivers than Americans or legal immigrants.
In the population of calls and e-mails I receive, while I can't recall one describing the auto driver as an illegal immigrant, there were many, probably most of them, in which the rider or his family have expressed outrage that the auto driver had not been more seriously punished, and I think that this is certainly a failure of our criminal system. It should motivate us to seek ROW violation laws, and because bikers are more likely than the general population to have their rights of way intruded upon, and more likely to be killed as the result of ROW violations, we should urge severe penalty provisions specifically for motorists who injure or kill a biker. Such a motorcyclist injury/death penalty provision, to the extent that it became public knowledge, would also have the beneficial effect to improve auto driver "expectation" for bikers and would serve to enhance their sense of our "relevance" to them, two main strategies for altering auto driver inattentional blindness which we consider at the heart of our disproportionate victimization by ROW violation.
Finally, while the science demonstrating the contribution of immigrant legal status to accident rates is lacking, there is abundant, published, replicated, and uniformly consistent science demonstrating that driving under the influence of cell phones results in a DUI level driving impairment and 4 fold increased incidence of an accident. One in 10 of the cars we encounter while riding on our American highways now, at any given moment in time, is being driven by a motorist who is DUI level impaired and 4 times more likely to kill or seriously injure us. That translates to more than 1 in 5 of our motorcyclists deaths, and more than 20 percent of our serious injuries, quadriplegia, paraplegia, debilitating internal injuries, catastrophic orthopedic injuries and limb amputations.
Our good American outlaw Willie Sutton was once asked, "Hey Willie, why do you rob banks?" Willie responded, "Because that's where the money is." I have no clue whether there might be a slight increased incidence of accidents associated with Mexican national heritage or possibly even their immigration status as you hypothesize above. If there is, which I have no good scientific reason to believe, I bet it will be found slight, and from the motorcyclists safety perspective, a small town liquor store hardly worth robbing. Willie Sutton spits. The banks that Willie Sutton would rob are the cell phone depositories, and ROWV depositories. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm with Willie: robbing banks makes a hell of a lot more sense than robbing liquor stores, particularly liquor stores that more likely than not have empty cash registers.
"M-a-d-d Ray" Henke |
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