“My life is flashing before my eyes but at least it was an environmentally conscious Rivian that took me out and not a gas-guzzling RAM. My life may be over but the Earth is in good hands. Nice color too, really like the yellow.”
I always think the same thing about federal gun restrictions in the US. I can't imagine someone getting shot and thinking "I'm so glad he didn't shoot me with a barrel shorter than 16 inches!!!"
Clearly the barrel-length restrictions were intended to be about how easy they are to conceal. There was an attempt to draw a distinction between long-guns and hand-guns.
The NFA ended up exempting pistols, which results in the strange situation where manufacturing a pistol to fire a .223 Remmington is legal, but shortening an AR-15 is not.
Perhaps if they only exempted revolvers it would make more sense.
That is false. The objective was to prevent the handgun ban from being circumvented. The handgun ban never became law but we're left with an oddball restriction around short barrels on rifles.
I mean this is obviously false. The heavier a vehicle is, the slower it needs to be going to cause a certain amount of damage, up to and including death. How many pedestrians are hit every year? If you can lower the average weight of vehicles on the road you're directly saving lives.
The couple drivers I'd have to avoid as a pedestrian explained to me that they were not looking in the direction of travel. So I can't see what height or visibility would matter.
An aerodynamic 3,001lb vehicle would be much preferable to me than a 2,999lb flat-front. The physics imply only a portion of the heavier vehicles energy is imparted to me.
I don't make the comment to argue that weight isn't meaningful, but to say that "lethality" of a vehicle has many factors.
Yes it does, because we're talking about regulations that would cap the size of vehicle classes. You're not going to turn a 6,000lb F-150 into a 2,999lb truck, but you can shave 50 or 60 pounds off a vehicle.
All else being equal, lighter = less deadly. That's all I'm saying.