Blamed At Any Speed

On every kind of thoroughfare from Interstate highways to dirt roads, drivers exceed the speed limit.  To be fair, it's easy to do on a deserted rural lane or when all of the drivers around you are over the limit.  I imagine that sometimes drivers think that 5 or 10 miles per hour over the speed limit isn't much, especially if that threshold is 40 MPH or greater.

What people often fail to realize, however, is how much more harm they can do by going "just over" the speed limit.  As an example, William Davies piloted his Ford Focus at 48 MPH on a road where the posted limit was 40 MPH.  Had he been a compliant driver, he would have been traveling three meters (about ten feet) slower per second when he approached an intersection in the Welsh town of Newport.

At an intersection, a few feet, let alone meters, can mean, literally, the difference between life and death--especially for someone crossing the juncture without the protection of 4000 pounds of metal. 

A report issued after the court's inquest said as much.  The excessive speed "more than minimally contributed" to Mr. Davies striking--and killing--16-year-old Joshua Fletcher.

Joshua Fletcher R.I.P.

The teenager, who was said to be a talented rugby player and was studying to be a mechanic, was riding his bike to school on 16 October 2020 when Mr. Davies struck him.  The impact fractured his skull and caused multiple brain injuries.  He was declared dead at the scene.

You may have noticed a key word in the paragraph before the previous one: "minimally."  I can't help but to think that the report's author was a lawyer or had one by his or her side:  It couldn't have been chosen more carefully or deliberately.  That word allowed them to say "but" without saying "but."

To wit:  According to that report, Fletcher crossed the intersection "carelessly" because he was distracted by the headphones he was wearing.  OK, that's fair enough:  I never have ridden with headphones.  Also, the report noted, he wasn't wearing a helmet. 

On the basis of those factors, the report, in essence, said that Joshua Fletcher--who rode his bike to school because he was late whenever he took the bus--was responsible for his own death.

Now, I am not a coroner or forensic scientist, and I have never had children (though I've taught and worked with them in other ways), so take what I am about to say for what it's worth:  Rare is the circumstance when a child, or even a teenager, should be blamed for his or her own death.  Even if we can agree that Fletcher "should have" worn a helmet and "shouldn't have" worn headphones while riding, he didn't deserve to die for making choices teenagers, left to their own devices, would make.

(I rode without a helmet as a teenager because the only ones available were the "leather hairnets"--like the old football helmets--or lids from other sports like hockey.  And I rode without headphones because, well, we didn't have them in those days.  But would I have gone bareheaded and with my ears plugged if helmets and phones were available?)

I am not saying that William Davies was some sort of homicidal maniac.  He, too, made a careless choice--arguably more careless, since he had those 4000 pounds of metal and, one assumes, more wisdom than a sixteen-year-old would have.  

Perhaps the point is not to assign blame but, rather, to look at what leads people to such tragedies.  Of course cyclists should be encouraged to wear helmets and not to wear headphones.  But drivers also need to be aware that they are, in essence, guiding a lethal weapon whose destructive force increases exponentially with incremental increases in speed.

They Had It Coming To Them: They Weren't Wearing Helmets

I can recall a time when, if a woman or girl were sexually assaulted, people would ask, "What was she wearing?" or "What was she doing out at that time?"  It didn't matter if the woman or girl in question was clad in combat fatigues or on her way to or from school or work in broad daylight. Somehow, she would be turned into the provacatress.

There are still people who think that way.  Sometimes I think they're the same people who ask what someone "was doing" to cause the police to stop them for driving/bike riding/running/walking/breathing while Black.  

Or believe that a cyclist who's run down by a motorist or whose bike is stolen must have done something "unsafe."  I can't begin to count how many times people told me I had to be "more careful" after I was doored:  Never mind I was right next to the car door when the driver opened it and had no way of anticipating or avoiding her carelessness.

Now, of course, if someone makes such a comment on road.cc, you can almost bet that it's a sarcasm.  The problem is that one person's sarcasm is another person's misperception. 

I am thinking now of  the response of "hawkinspeter"  to an article about two 13-year-olds who were "deliberately driven at" and verbally threatened by someone who stole the bikes they were riding.  "Were they wearing helmets?" he wondered. "If not they were almost asking to be robbed."

Police surveillance image of the car used to threaten two 13-year-olds and steal their bikes.

To be fair, "hawkinspeter" had no monopoly on snark.  His comment followed one from "leipreichan" who suggested that the driver will incur no harsher a penalty than three points on his/her license because "the kids were wearing black."  

Hmm...That makes about as much sense as shooting a teenager because he was wearing a hoodie.   

Who--Or What--Is To Blame?

Be forewarned:  Part of today's post will be a continuation of yesterday's rant, in which I lamented the terror and seeming inevitability of the mass shootings in a Texas school and Buffalo supermarket.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that politicians and media pundits are blaming everything but guns.  I'm not talking about the "decay of moral values" or other talking points of the political and religious right.  Instead, I'm talking about flat-out lies spread by folks whose careers and reputations never could withstand the truth.

Paul Gosar, the Republican Congressional Representative from Arizona, is an example of who I mean. I must say, he has managed to concoct a non-reality not even the strongest drugs could induce and twist logic and reason in ways a pretzel-maker would envy.

To wit:  He tweeted that the shooter--18-year-old Salvador Ramos, born and raised in Texas--was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien."  Gosar's source for that bit of intelligence?  A social network called 4Chan, to which folks of his ilk are drawn like flies to, well, the stuff flies are drawn to.  That's bad enough, but I would really like to know where he got his thinking skills.  He followed up his out-and-out falsehood with this pearl of wisdom:  "Sandy Hook proved the need to enhance K-12 security."  OK. That's not too debatable. But then he made a leap into the (il)logical abyss:  "Congress armed Ukraine instead."

Now, as much as I sympathise with the people of Ukraine, I wonder about Congressional members' motives in voting to send even more weapons than President Biden demanded.  But talk about a false equivalency!  I mean, how can he link sending help to Ukraine with school safety, or a school shooting that happened nearly a decade ago?

Compounding the problem is that other voices in the media will amplify such nonsense--or other verbal bilge-- in the same way he was a loudspeaker for Trump's beloved "low-information voters."  Fox News, in following with a hallowed tradition, shifted the blame to parents.  

I have to hand it to the folks at Faux, I mean Fox:  They accomplished something I didn't think possible.  The excerable (even by their standards) Laura Ingraham interviewed someone even more vile than herself:  Andrew Pollack.  That I can unfavorably compare a man who lost his daughter in the Parkland shooting to a Fox host is really saying something. He, who has previously argued "guns didn't kill my daughter, Democratic principles did," in reference to the Texas shooting, declared, "It's the parents."

How he came to that conclusion took a turn of logic that rivals what brought Gosar to his blaming the shooting on helping Ukraine.  "It's your responsibility where you're sending your children to school," he explained.  "You need to check where your kids go to school."  He suggested that parents should take their kids "out of public school" and put them in "a private school, because a lot of these private schools, they take security way more serious."

Where to begin with that assessment?  Well, for one thing, private schools are not an option for most families. Most kids go to whatever public school is zoned for wherever they live and they (or, more precisely, their parents) have little or no choice in the matter.  Also, even if private school is an option, it might not meet some kids' needs.  And, finally, what does he mean by "security?"  Metal detectors?  Armed teachers?

Oh, and there are the usual diatribes about education and mental health treatment.  I would agree:  If someone were to ask me for an example of an oxymoron, I might say, "American mental health care system."  But that fixing that won't stop mass gun violence all by itself any more than better school security or any other action could.

Here's what I wonder: How the fuck did someone who couldn't even drink beer legally get his hands on a military-grade assault weapon?  Would Ingraham ask such a question?  Could--or would--Pollack or Gosar answer it?

So why am I taking up another post on a cycling blog with a discussion of a school shooting and its aftermath?  Well, what Gosar and his ilk do in these situation--blame everything but guns--reminds me of the ways law enforcement and some members of the public react, too often, when a driver maims or kills a cyclist.  Never mind that he or she was driving at double the speed limit, was distracted by a mobile device or impaired by drugs, alcohol or some other substance--or was simply driving agressively or carelessly.  The cyclist, especially if he or she is killed, is blamed.