The New Zealand Truth

NZ Truth, Issue 1148, 1 December 1927, Page 6

The New Zealand Truth

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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1927.

The Motor-driver Goes Gunning

THE Crimes Act makes it a penalty for most people to carry a revolver. This is wise, even though bullets are small, space illimitable and nearly all of us rotten shots. But any maniao may drive a motor-car, even though streets are narrow, pedestrians naturally slow-moving, and the target impossible to miss. Day after day killings and manglings are recorded on the part of these four and six-cylinder "gunmen." Put a wheel between their hands, and they become more dangerous than a baby with a bomb.

In another age they would have gone out with a blunderbus and blown sparrows to smithereens — just to celebrate a fine day. In this, the machine age, they ex* pend their energy by filling the cemeteries and the hospitals with low-powered pedestrians and timid cyclists.

Petrol is going to be the oil m the joints of the world. To cripple motoring is to jar progress. Useless to insist that hooftraffic should learn to leap and leap quickly. The peak m human leaping has been nearly reached. Besides, you need nine heels, nineteen eyes and forty-nine ears to get away with it for long. And people have something else to do apart from spending most of their time m the air.

The need of the age is a sanitytest for drivers. Call it a, test of social conscience. If a man sheds his civilization when he steps into a car, he should be warned off cars, as spielers and welshers are warned off race-courses. Motorists instinctively respect a "silent cop" because that dumb protuberance connotes almost certain injury. But a pedestrian is as cheese to a mouse. He is the ever open door, the world's oyster. Where it is proved that a driver deliberately or negligently ironed out a pedestrian, he should no more be granted a license than the known "gunman" should be granted a pistol registration. He should for ever be placed outside the petrol pale. If again caught at the wheel of a car, he should be treated as is the man caught with an automatic weighing down his hip pocket — and branded as a potential killer.

Incidentally, the party who comes within the scope of the "gunman motorist" might turn his attention towards advocating compulsory third party insurance .It's about the only balm to outraged- feelings — and hurts.