Happy Thanksgiving from the Bullet Boy.
Holiday’s are supposed to be filled with joy and family time. Don’t mess that up with Druck Driving. Here in Alabama every holiday season the State Troopers run a Take Back our Highways campaign. If you are drinking then you should know the risk involved with driving. It isn’t about your safety as much as it is the people around you. So do me a favor don’t drink and drive. Though most states have a low blood alcohol tolerance having a concealed weapon with traces of alcohol in your system is not tolerated. So if you do decide to drive you don’t carry your gun as you will be illegally in possession of a concealed firearm.
“Take Back Our Highways campaign” from the Birmingham News
Alabama Department of Public Safety launches its fourth Take Back Our Highways campaign today.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
THE ISSUE: The Alabama Department of Public Safety launches the fourth Take Back Our Highways campaign today.
There’s nothing wrong with Alabama’s drunken-driving laws. They’re tough.
We were among the first states to lower the blood-alcohol content level to 0.08 percent. A first drunken-driving offense can result in a 90-day suspended driver license, a fine between $600 and $2,100 and up to a year in a county or municipal jail. Subsequent offenses have harsher penalties, including almost certain jail time.
There’s no mystery why Alabama’s laws are so tough: to discourage people from driving under the influence. The state has a good reason to compel motorists not to drink and drive. Impaired drivers are involved in a high percentage of the traffic deaths and injuries on state roads. Innocent motorists are hit by drunken drivers and killed, maimed for life or seriously injured. That can cause everybody’s insurance premiums to go up, but that’s not all. When people can’t take care of their own medical bills because they don’t have insurance (or the drunken driver had none or very little), the government has to pay. The government is us, the taxpayers.
Still, the most stringent law is worthless if it’s not aggressively enforced. Over the years, enforcement of Alabama DUI laws has been spotty at best. One reason is the lack of state troopers patrolling highways and roads. The Alabama Department of Public Safety is far short of the troopers it needs to adequately patrol the thousands of miles of state roadways.
A strategy DPS has been using to get around the chronic trooper shortage is periodical traffic blitzes. The fourth Take Back Our Highways campaign starts today and goes through Nov. 26, the day before Thanksgiving. The blitz goes 24 hours a day for the whole week.
The focus of this blitz, which will include sheriffs, police departments and every available state trooper, is drunken drivers. One of the tools troopers will use this week is sobriety checkpoints at different locations around the state. The state’s mobile DUI labs will be nearby so that blood-alcohol tests can be given on the spot.
While drunken driving is the focus, traffic stops aren’t limited to impaired drivers. Anybody violating a traffic law is subject to ticketing or arrest.
Past blitzes have been successful. The most recent, at the end of August, saw law officers write more than 21,700 tickets, about 40 percent of them for speeding and 203 for DUI. With troopers and sheriffs concentrating on impaired driving this week, expect more DUI arrests.
Smart drivers understand the odds of getting caught go up dramatically during these blitzes. The others – and there are plenty of them – are likely to get a ticket or spend some time in jail.
