Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong

On Mar 19, 2025 at 10:03:23 AM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:

On 2025-03-19 11:45 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

 The law is entirely semantics. Perhaps ordinary people (who don't watch
 fictional lawyers on tv and become legal experts like me) don't
 appreciate this, but a state legislature that employs professionals who
 are specifically experts in legal language and statutory construction
 fail to grasp the consequence of a semantic change?
 
 In this video, Steve Lehto discusses the unintended consequence of
 substituting "collision" for "accident" when Hawaii amended a law. Years
 ago, I was one of those people who stopped using the word "accident",
 influenced by others who wanted newspaper reporters and others in the
 media to stop reporting such incidents as "accidents" because the reader
 or listener would assume that the incident was unavoidable.
 
 But that's not what "accident" means. Neither in dictionary definitions
 nor statutory language has it meant "unavoidable" in which there is no
 fault to find. Instead, it means that the party at fault for the
 incident had not committed an intentional act.
 
 "Accident", therefore, means "without intent" not "without fault".
 
 To the uninformed reader or listener, as "crash" or "collision" is just
 a factual statement without finding of fault and without proving intent,
 "unavoidable" isn't incorrectly assumed.
 
 Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
 pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.

 
When I was driving school buses, I found that my employers never used
the word "accident". If someone hit something while driving their bus,
even if it was the merest scratch, it was never an accident: it was
*always* a collision. (I'm sure this would have been true if a person
were hit, although I don't recall anyone ever hitting a person while I
worked there.) I feel sure this was their way of making us take
responsibility for what had happened. We didn't get to say anything that
implied that whatever happened couldn't be helped in some way. Even if
we weren't at fault, I think they expected that we could have done
something to prevent or minimize the event. Drivers were always taken
off the road for a day or two and made to have a retraining session with
another driver after a collision.

Even if a meteor fell out of the sky and hit the bus? You still have to go
through retraining?

I absolutely hate bureaucratic nonsense like that.

When I was a super-secret government agent, the absolute worst thing that
could happen was for you to have a car collision. You could walk down the
street and shoot someone at random and have less paperwork and bureaucratic
hoops to jump through than there was with a minor fender-bender.

In the aftermath of 9-11, I was assigned as the detail leader for Lauren Bush
(George W's niece) who was a high school student at the time. It was a very
loose detail and we didn't go into the school with her. We sat out in the
parking lot in a car, parked near hers and would pick her up when she left
school each afternoon. She had a panic button that she could push if anything
happened inside the school that would bring us running in.

So over the course of several months, as I was sitting in my parked car, I was
backed into by high school kids not one, not two, but three different times.
Each bump came with reams of paperwork and repair estimates (even when no
repairs were necessary) and as a bonus on my third incident, I was told I had
take a mandatory driver's education safety course.

Even though my car was parked in each instance and the engine wasn't even
running. They told me if I'd been standing nearby and the car was empty, it
wouldn't have counted, but because I was inside the car each time when it
happened, then according to the bureaucratic rules, I was presumed to need
re-education.

Whoever thought forcing people who carry loaded firearms to deal with such
inscrutable and intractable bureaucracy wasn't thinking very clearly.