Questing for Atlantis

I just sent the following e-mail out to the Seton Hall University Students for Individual Liberty mailing list today and wanted to share it here:

Sorry to be sending this over break, but I felt it was important enough to bring to your attention.

A bill, called Kyleigh’s Law, was recently passed by the NJ State Senate and is now before the Assembly. It proposes to heavily increase the restrictions on teen drivers and the penalties if those restrictions are violated. Most egregious though is the requirement of large, highly visible, orange decals, to be placed on both license plates, indicating the driver is under 21 years of age.

This is obviously an egregious assault on individual rights. It unjustly targets a small minority, teen drivers, punishing them because of the reckless actions of only a portion of that group. And the decals serve only to ease in identifying such drivers to police, making it easier to pull them over for DWY – Driving While Young.

Luckily there is still time to try and kill this bill. I strongly encourage everyone to call their representatives in the Assembly. For all Seton Hall students this is:

Mila M. Jacey
15 Village Plaza, Suite 1B, South Orange, NJ 07079
(973) 762-1886

If you live in New Jersey you should also call your local representative, if you don’t know who that is, you can look them up here, http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/districts/municipalities.asp

Apart from that I also recommend talking to all your friends about this and encourage them to voice their opposition as well. Maybe even consider writing letters to the editor of your local paper (or even see if you can get an op-ed printed on it).

If you want to learn more about this horrible bill, here is the story where I learned about it,

http://www.nj.com/morris/index.ssf/2008/1/bill_seeks_to_improve_safety_f.html

as well as the text of the version currently before the Assembly,

http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2008/Bills/A3500/3069_I1.PDF

With a strong effort, and some luck, we might be able to win out yet.

That pretty much conveys the main point I wanted to get across, but I have to reiterate again. This bill, while well-intentioned, proposes a set of regulations that will do extremely little to combat teen driving accidents, but that will encourage the targeting of a select group, in this case young drivers, for heavier police scrutiny.

There is nothing to justify this, the only true explanation for its easy passage in the Senate is that young people have no voice. Think about it. Yes, young people get into proportionally more car accidents. But so do the elderly and Native Americans. No one is proposing measures to identify their vehicles, or put more restrictions on them, nor would anyone dare propose such a thing. This burden of oppression is solely being born by young drivers.

And in fact, it is not solely being born by young drivers. New Jersey has a fairly large population of students from other states in its many colleges. A great number of these are under the age of 21, but they have no obligation to identify themselves (nor am I suggesting they should, just to be clear). Why then should young New Jersey drivers be punished for their unhappy accident of state residency?

It’s obvious this is a bad law. So please, if you live in New Jersey, call your Assembly member and ask them to vote against A3069, Kyleigh’s Law.

And here’s an added bonus, the votes on the Senate version:

Adler, John H. – Yes
Allen, Diane B. – Yes
Baroni, Bill – Yes
Bateman, Christopher – Yes
Beck, Jennifer – Yes
Bucco, Anthony R. – Yes
Buono, Barbara – Yes
Cardinale, Gerald – Yes
Ciesla, Andrew R. – Not Voting
Codey, Richard J. – Yes
Connors, Christopher J. – Yes
Cunningham, Sandra B. – Yes
Girgenti, John A. – Yes
Gordon, Robert M. – Yes
Gill, Nia H. – Yes
Haines, Philip E. – Yes
Kean, Sean T. – Yes
Kean, Thomas H., Jr. – Yes
Kyrillos, Joseph M., Jr. – Yes
Lance, Leonard – Yes
Lesniak, Raymond J. – No
Madden, Fred H., Jr. – Yes
O’Toole, Kevin J. – Yes
Oroho, Steven V. – Yes
Pennacchio, Joseph – Yes
Redd, Dana L. – Yes
Rice, Ronald L. – Yes
Ruiz, M. Teresa – Yes
Sacco, Nicholas J. – Yes
Sarlo, Paul A. – Yes
Scutari, Nicholas P. – No
Singer, Robert W. – Yes
Smith, Bob – Yes
Stack, Brian P. – Yes
Sweeney, Stephen M. – Yes
Turner, Shirley K. – Yes
Van Drew, Jeff – Yes
Vitale, Joseph F. – Yes
Weinberg, Loretta – Yes
Whelan, Jim – No

Feel free to call them and voice your displeasure with votes in favor of this problematic bill.