Thursday, Sep. 04, 2008

When parents let kids ignore law

WE WERE REMINDED recently of one of those nice little commonsense laws that probably didn’t get the attention it deserved when the Legislature passed it earlier this year.

It’s named Tyler’s Law, in keeping with the annoying new habit of naming crime and safety bills after a victim. This supposedly makes legislators more likely to support them, which begs the question: Are they passed because they’re good ideas (as this one is) or because legislators don’t want to offend grieving relatives?

The law imposes a civil penalty against parents who “knowingly and willfully” permit their children to drive without a license or in violation of a conditional license or permit — up to $500 if a child is merely stopped for a driving violation, and up to $1,000 if the illegal driving results in death or serious injury.

We have no reason to believe that parents allowing their kids to violate driver’s license laws is one of the top problems facing our state, and we doubt many of the fines will be imposed. But it’s a good law because it reinforces several important principles that the Legislature would do well to reinforce more often:

• Parents are responsible for the actions of their minor children. We all understand that sometimes they can’t control their children, but when they don’t even try, or when their own irresponsibility encourages their children’s reckless behavior, there should be a price to pay.

• The primary purpose of criminal laws is to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. People aren’t always clear on where that line is, but the overwhelming majority of people do try to obey the law.

• Finally, some accidents happen because we think of them as accidents — unfortunate events that no one possibly could have predicted or avoided — rather than acknowledging that they’re entirely predictable and preventable, and taking action to prevent them. Allowing a child to flout the law is one such non-accident.