Harpethriver,
The DUI laws are enforced with the utmost fanatical zeal in the "dry" counties around where I live. This region is dominated by real, live , hardcore anti-alcohol zealots and cracking down hard on drinkers in every way possible is *very* politically popular here.
Laws against *public intoxication* are also zealously enforced, and "public" is *very* broadly defined.
Even in those rare cases where an actually sober designated driver can be arranged, it doesn't necessarily put the inebriated passenger in the clear legally. Very often the passenger will be arrested for public intoxication.
People have been arrested for public intoxication as soon as they stepped out onto their own porches to speak to police responding to loud music complaints. In some cases people who never even crossed their own threshholds, but who merely opened the doors a crack to speak to the police were arrested for public intoxication.
Altogether it's a lot like living in Iran or Saudi Arabia here.
I may be a beer drinker, and some people might even call me a drunk, but I'm not a drunk driver. I no longer drink and drive. Not for thirteen (13) years now. Really. I could just be lying, but I'm not.
I do all my drinking at home, alone, behind multiply locked, reinforced, braced doors and blacked-out windows. I was careful to select an apartment far above ground level, specifically to make it that much harder to peep into.
A couple of years ago a woman here, a single mother, was sitting in her easy chair in her own living room drinking a beer in front of her TV. A cop peeped in through her open drapes, saw her drinking the beer, and, having been previously informed by a snitch that she (otherwise legally) possessed a .38 revolver, demanded entry, and when she let him in, he charged her with "wanton endangerment" (or "reckless endangerment," I forget the difference) of her own child, because she was drinking and there was a gun on the premises (locked in a cabinet somewhere -- I mean she wasn't sitting there twirling it or dry-firing it at the TV; the cop never even saw it until they'd turned the house upside down looking for it).
Her revolver was confiscated/forfeited , she was taken to jail, and her child was put into the custody of the Child Protective Service or whatever that's called. For drinking a beer in her own living room, while being a gun owner. So I keep the blinds drawn, and black vinyl sheeting stapled over the inside of them; I keep the doors locked and I don't answer knocks at them; I don't even answer the door buzzer or use the intercom, rare features in my region, and big selling points at first, until I realized that to even respond to the buzzer with the intercom was to give away the fact that I'm at home. *Sometimes* I'll answer the phone.
As for my December 27, 1990 D.U.I. arrest, after I saw that I could not afford to fight it and pled ("pleaded"?) guilty (though I did not and do not believe I was guilty, technically) I paid the fines and court costs, and did the days in jail, and went for the year-plus without driving that were the legal penalties in place at the time.
Nobody then ever said anything about waiting until 13 or 20 or however many years later and then saying,"Well, because of that long-ago *misdemeanor* charge you pled guilty to, we are now going to reach back into the past and heap *new* penalties and legal disabilities on you, that were no part of the law at the time of the offense, and that you were never cautioned about; specifically, because you long ago pled guilty to a charge that involved the irresponsible use of alcohol and a car, from now on you will be forbidden to possess any sort of firearm or ammunition whatever, for life."
I've heard tell that the courts have rejected challenges to the Lautenberg Amendment, challenges based on the fact that it's an ex post facto law specifically and unambiguously forbidden by Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.
The courts get around that by just *saying* it's *not* an ex post facto law (though it sure does match *my* encyclopedia's definition of one) or punishment because, in their view, being retroactively stripped for life of the right to keep and bear arms is *not a punishment*, because it only prohibits someone from doing or having something *from now on*.
I wonder if they'd say that a lawyer being disbarred was not a punishment, because it only prevented him from doing something (practicing law) from now on? Or that a doctor being stripped of his license to practice medicine, or an artist being blinded, or a once-virile man being castrated, or a once-beautiful woman having her face disfigured and her beauty destroyed was not a punishment?
"No Bill of Attainder of ex post facto Law shall be passed." -- United States Constitution, Article I, Section 9
"Misrule breeds rebellion."
Maimaktes
Sitting in a vehicle is not a violent crime unless you live in a police state. 
