There are quite a few things that can kill you. Take guns, for example. They kill 33,000 people in the United States each year. Traffic accidents can kill you too. They kill 35,000 people each year and permanently disable many more.
About 200 people survive gunshot wounds each day while twice that many survive car crashes, often with serious and life-changing injuries.
Politicians and their handlers talk endlessly about guns. Some are for them, some against. They don't have much to say about traffic deaths though, and highway safety advocates think that's -- as the FBI recently said about one Presidential candidate -- careless though not quite criminal.
"Like all dads, I worry about my girls’ safety all the time," President Obama said at in his weekly radio address on Father's Day. "Especially when we see preventable violence in places our sons and daughters go every day – their schools and houses of worship, movie theaters, nightclubs, as they get older."
This puzzles safety advocates like Louis V. Lombardo, an auto safety researcher and retired government scientist.
Platforms are silent
- Universal Health Care;
- Community Health Centers;
- Prescription Drug Costs;
- Medical Research;
- Drug and Alcohol Addiction;
- Mental Health;
- Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice;
- Public Health;
- Violence Against Women and Sexual Assault; and
- Gun Violence Prevention.
Worthy though these topics may be, depending on your point of view, Lombardo is puzzled about why the rising tide of what we might called traffic violence isn't mentioned.
The government's very own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently noted a 9.3 % increase in fatalities in early 2015. Smaller increases over the last several years have ended a lengthy period during which the death toll declined or remained relatively stable.
Vision Zero
NHTSA blames driver behavior for the carnage, but Lombardo and others say the Obama Administration and its predecessors haven't put enough time and money into reversing the trend despite the pleas of safety advocates who have been calling for a Vision Zero policy that would be dedicated to reducing traffic deaths to zero.
“It’s time to drive behavioral changes in traffic safety and that means taking on new initiatives and addressing persistent issues like drunk driving and failure to wear seat belts,” said Dr. Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
But groups like AnnaLeaha and Mary for Truck Safety say there's a lot more to it than that. The organization is named for two sisters killed when their car was hit by a tractor-trailer truck during a freeway slowdown. The truck driver had been on the road for too many hours and the truck did not have adequate "underride" protection -- both factors that NHTSA can and should regulate more tightly, the group argues.
So, Lombardo wonders, why are both parties so silent on the issue of traffic safety -- something that nearly everyone surely would support?
Could it be money? Automotive interests contribute about $15 million to candidates from both parties, according to OpenSecrets.org. Democrats picked up about $1.7 million from groups pushing for gun control while Republicans got about $11 million from gun rights groups, again according to OpenSecrets.