Lawmakers in Utah weigh the blood alcohol level limit at which a gun owner is ‘too drunk to carry’

OPINION:

One drink with dinner and you’re too drunk to drive.

It’s been the unfounded mantra of Utah’s lawmakers since the state became the first in the nation to lower its blood alcohol arrest level from the national standard of 0.08 BAC, to 0.05. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, proponents of the lower limit, including the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Norman Thurston, believe the public safety impacts of issuing DUIs at 0.05 are “so compelling,” they’re worth the consequences.

The buck, it seems, stops with Mr. Thurston. Which makes it all the more bewildering — and almost laughably hypocritical — that this same legislator recently introduced an amendment allowing Utahans to carry a firearm at 0.05 BAC, while still maintaining that the same person is a danger to society behind the wheel.

Utah ties its standards for safe firearm usage to the state’s drunk driving laws, and currently prohibits anyone from carrying a firearm if their BAC is high enough to warrant a DUI. But in many instances under Mr. Thurston’s amendment, there would be no BAC limit at which a gun owner is “too drunk to carry.

So which is it: Are people too drunk to drive at 0.05 BAC, or of sound enough mind to carry the responsibility of a firearm? Lawmakers can’t have it both ways.

If you dig into the data, the answer is clear.

When researchers with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) calculated the real-world crash risk of driving at 0.05 BAC, their conclusion placed impairment far below that of talking on a hands-free cellphone. In fact, driving at 0.05 BAC is statistically half as impairing as conversing via Bluetooth.

Distracted driving kills roughly 3,500 people every year, according to NHTSA. Yet in Utah, getting behind the wheel while talking on a hands-free cellphone is encouraged as a safe alternative to hand-held cellphone use, which holds a maximum penalty of $100 in the state. In reality, it doesn’t matter whether a call is taken hands-free or the old-fashioned way: it’s the conversation, not the device, which distracts drivers. When it comes to crash risk, the two are equally dangerous.

To put Utah’s drunk driving law into context, a 120-pound woman would be considered legally drunk, risking jail time, $10,000 in fines and penalties, and increased insurance rates for driving after consuming little more than a single drink. NHTSA, the same agency which calculated impairment risk, puts consumption at just two drinks in one hour for the average man.

That’s it. One or two drinks, and behavior considered moderate and responsible by any other standard has suddenly become criminal. Impairment at 0.05 BAC is so negligible, it follows that a Salt Lake Tribune analysis found that since 2001, only 34 of Utah’s more than 4,300 traffic fatalities involved drivers with a blood alcohol level between 0.05 and 0.08. And those fatalities likely occurred due to confounding factors.

Consider the 2016 death of an Orem man, whose SUV lost traction while traversing a steep section of Chimney Rock Pass in Utah County. The driver’s BAC measured 0.05. As Robert Gehrke posits in his analysis, “had his blood alcohol level been 0.04 would his truck still have rolled?” Poor road conditions exist whether or not someone has consumed alcohol.

Or consider the nine crashes where drivers also tested positive for methamphetamine, marijuana, or another drug in conjunction with a low BAC reading. In one such case, a 43-year-old meth user “ran off the roadway, hit a parked car and then a tree and died.” It’s disingenuous to attribute these fatalities to driving with a low BAC.

Drivers at 0.05 don’t introduce an unprecedented danger on our roadways, though the earnestness to appear “tough on drunk driving” makes it easy to accept the flawed argument that any degree of impairment introduces too much danger. We can readily acknowledge that driving on a hands-free cellphone shouldn’t be a blanket mandate for prohibiting someone from getting behind the wheel. On the firearm issue, even Mr. Thurston recognizes the need for discretion.

Drivers at 0.05 BAC are worthy of the same judgment.

• Richard Berman is the president of Berman and Company, a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.