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Minimum Driving Age Essay

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Argument for the Minimum Driving Age On the subject of learning, Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn”. To teach a child to ride a bike, they are placed on, given simple instructions, and condemned to lessons of trial and error with the false sense of security of a parent’s hands under their seat. This ends with scraped palms, raw knees, and broken trust but also the ability to ride a bike—an ability that they will never lose. At the next stage of life, children must learn to drive cars, however trial and error at this point have more dire consequences than scraped palms and bloody knees. Despite the consequences being greater, the false sense of security provided by the hand …show more content…

The idea that higher driving ages would stop teenage crashes is flawed. Programs in place in most places today placing restrictions on 16-year-old drivers are preventing a considerable number of crashes, but Dr. Scott Masten disputed these statistics, “when you look at the bigger picture across 18-and 19-year-olds, it looks like we’re offsetting those crashes. In fact, 75 percent of the fatal crashes we thought we were saving actually just occurred two years later,” (O’Connor, 23-27). These strict laws that aimed to prevent deadly crashes in 16 only delayed the crashes by preventing learning until a later age. In the defense of 16 to 18-year-olds, this delaying of crashes phenomenon is not exclusive to adolescents, “New Jersey’s tough laws may have just shifted the effect to 21-year-olds, similar to the way tough restrictions on 16 and 17-year-olds were followed by a spike in deadly crashes among 18-year-olds,” (O’Connor, 71-74). The spike, caused by restrictions in 16 and 17-year-olds, was recreated by the same restrictions on 18 and 19-year-olds, causing the same spike of deaths in the age group a year older than the restricted parties. These deadly crashes are not caused by the age of driving students. The crashes are a biproduct of the inexperience of these new

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