Protecting People from Their Own Carelessness

KELO reports on a group of teenagers who were hospitalized after driving into Long Lake near Lily in Day County.

In light of the lawsuit against Rapid City for not protecting careless teenage drivers from themselves, I suppose Day County or perhaps the state of South Dakota is responsible for this accident. Look at the parallels:

From the Rapid City Journal, on the Canyon Lake incident:

The crash was caused by the inattentiveness of the driver, Charrisa Hitchcock, then 16, Nooney said. Her car slid off a sharp curve on a slippery road in Canyon Lake Park when she looked down to retrieve something from the floor of her car, the city's lawyer said.

Nooney also said Hitchcock had driven in the park many times before and was going much faster than the posted 10 mph speed limit.

And from the Long Lake incident:

The Highway Patrol, which estimates that the car was going about 100 miles an hour at the time, says it was racing another vehicle when the accident occurred.

Common sense says that if you have an accident where 99.9% of drivers have no problem--and you're breaking the law and driving inattentively to boot--then the fault is all yours, and you have no business suing the government (the taxpayers) for not protecting you from your own stupidity.

But then, it's not really about that, is it? It's about getting on the cash gravy train. And it's time the courts and the people brought an end to this kind of nonsense.