It's a good question, and the answer is simple: They (the gun ban crowd) are disingenuous; i.e. perpetrating a fraud. Their actual goal is NOT reduction of violent crimes occurring with the use of guns, unlike MADD whose goal IS to reduce drunk driving injuries and fatalities. Their goal is to ban all guns, without regard to the effects on society (which will of course be a net negative). They STATE that their goal is to reduce violent crime and suicides, AND their FOLLOWERS (most of them) actually (erroneously) believe that the policy pursued (banning guns) will have that effect, but the leaders of the gun ban crowd know better, and they are just manipulating their followers to accomplish their own end - to ban guns for the sake of banning guns, and taking power out of the hands of the people and concentrating the power in the hands of the government.
Thus illustrated, the difference between a corporate entity, and a grassroots movement.
MADD isn't quite that "noble," though. A lot of the laws they support are the ridiculous, AWB-esque ones. And a lot of the laws already on the books are pretty ridiculous.
Like someone has pointed out elsewhere, maximum blood alcohol level to drive a motor vehicle. How much more ridiculous does it get? Who here can drink some booze, then tell me their BAC minute by minute?
Funny how laws about headlights are usually that they have to illuminate the ground for a distance of so many feet (easily measurable with a tape measure), not how many lumens they output (requiring specialized equipment). Laws for noise pollution / car stereo volume state that the stereo must not be audible past a certain distance (tape measure) rather than that it must not exceed a certain number of decibals (special equipment).
Yet with alcohol, it's some purely arbitrary number, which no one has any clue how to measure unless they have their own breathalyzer.
Obviously, the intent of the law is to discourage people from drinking anything alcoholic (or using mouthwash, Bianca, etc.) before driving, and/or to discourage drinking
period (after all, you never know if some emergency may pop up, forcing you to drive somewhere), not to discourage actual "drunk driving."
I'd bet that if you had 100 people drive around with a BAC of 0.081%, and another 100 people drive around yammering on their cell phone, the cell phone people would cause more accidents. Actually, I bet if the drunk people had BACs of 0.20%, they'd
still cause fewer accidents. Most vaguely responsible people, if they get
that drunk, but still feel the need to drive home, will pull over to the curb and creep along at 5 mph. That's even the #1 sign for police that someone's driving drunk.
If the goal was to reduce auto fatalities caused by incompetence (whether inborn, taught, or consumed in a liquid form), the BAC garbage would go right out the window, and every single traffic stop would involve a 30 second quiz on traffic laws, and something similar to a field sobriety test that tests motor skills and reaction time.
For both, I'd probably have questions/activities go from least difficult to most, and if someone gets one wrong, the test stops and they're penalized based on how far they got. The law quiz would start with "what color are stop signs?", and the activity portion with "pick up a pencil without dropping it 8 times." And the physical part should be simple enough that anyone can try it themselves before attempting to drive.
That'd probably nail a lot more people who shouldn't be driving, than walking in a straight line and breathing into a thing.
And of course, if the gun grabbers actually cared about reducing the suffering of their fellow Men (idiotic definitions of "crime" be damned), then
all inchoate laws would be stricken from the books, and the few remaining laws about what you can and can't do to people without their consent, would be enforced as strictly as possible.