Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong

On Mar 19, 2025 at 2:49:13 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:

On 2025-03-19 3:28 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

 On Mar 19, 2025 at 8:45:20 AM PDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com>
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.

 
 The year I joined the USSS, they announced a policy change with regard to
 firearms. All mentions of 'accidental discharge' of a firearm were replaced
 with 'negligent discharge'. Because there's no way a gun can just go off
 accidentally. It's physically impossible. The only way a gun goes off
 unintended is through negligence. It puts the responsibility for the
discharge
 squarely on the person holding the gun.
 

What about the situation where you drop your gun through circumstances
beyond your control - like stepping on a banana peel - the gun hits the
ground and discharges?

It can't. We didn't use Alec Baldwin guns. It's physically impossible for the
SIG-Sauer P-229 to fire unless the trigger is pulled.

 I understand that most (modern) guns are designed
to be "drop safe" but that not all of them actually are. At least that's
what I was told when I asked my friend who was a career soldier in the
Canadian Forces about that once. Of course that situation might be
nearly as improbable as the meteor strike you proposed earlier....
 
 

 Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
 pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.
 
 There are unintended consequences of changing statutory language because
 "feelings". Here's an example:
 
 In Honolulu, Five-Oh was chasing another motorist without lights and
 sirens. The driver of the vehicle being chased flipped the vehicle.
 People inside the vehicle were seriously injured.
 
 The cop driving was charged with a felony based on colliding with the
 vehicle being chased, because language in the statute had been changed
 from "accident" to "collision". Now, the state may have been able to
 prove that the cop was at fault for causing an accident because of the
 unsafe manner of pursuit and that conduct during pursuit was criminally
 negligent or reckless. But was the cop at fault for causing a collision?
 
 If in fact the vehicles had not collided, then the change in statutory
 language prevents charges in which an accident occurred that was not the
 result of a collision.
 
 Oops.
 
 Here's the video:
 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FATTJtvXbeU