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From: Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:49:13 -0400
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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? 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
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Rhino