Lebanon’s Bully-Wagons: Most School Bullies Drive Four-by-Fours
There is an arms race on today in Lebanon and it has nothing to do with Katyushas, Raad or Zilzal rockets, unless arms manufacturers have started churning out four wheel drive vehicles. The race is on for who can drive the biggest, meanest, widest, tallest, fattest, street-legal bully-wagon on the roads today. The choices out there can be dizzying, American, Japanese, Chinese, German, British, a GMC, a Hummer, a Range Rover, or Land Cruiser; the only thing they have in common is often the buyer’s motives.
While the rest of the civilized world is shifting away from driving big-n-tall, gas guzzling ‘Earth killers’, if only because gasoline is so expensive; the Lebanese, whose country is a net importer of fuel, are abandoning their sane sedans in favor of insanely gaudy trucks more suited for Wadi-bashing and the desert sands than Beirut’s narrow streets and alley ways.
The four-by-four maniac in Lebanon is an audacious, daring and fool hardy adventurer on the loose on our roads. Like armor, he (or indeed she) wears his/her extra-large steel coffin each day and goes out to joust with every stranger that crosses his/her path. Like a bull seeing red, the anger he/she has kept bottled up for years is released in one burst and the results can be deadly.
Now some may ask why I single out the 4x4 to rave and rant about, well, the reason is simple: I have personally narrowly escaped countless times being run off the road or smashed against a median divider by reckless and inconsiderate drivers and most of them where driving 4x4s. They think because the rest of us are physically ‘beneath them’ that we actually are. They think because they drive a 4x4 everyone else should scatter and move out of their way out of fear, and when we don’t they get angry and they show it.
I call on the present government to restrict the ownership of 4x4s the same way it restricts the sale and registration of hand guns, because much like a hand gun a 4x4 kills, the only difference is the law assumes a car crash is an accident not murder, unlike firing a gun. That is another thing that needs to change. Once people who show reckless disregard for the lives of other people on the roads commit certain actions which any sane person should know would lead to someone’s death than any death that results from those actions cannot be deemed accidental but intentional and premeditated.
The internet is littered with discussion forums on this subject. One comment on bikeradar.com said of 4x4s: “…their presence can be quite intimidating to other road users and give one the feeling of being 'bullied', a fact that most 4x4 drivers are no doubt acutely aware of and in many cases, take full advantage of.”
Another comment on the same discussion forum said: “…all the people I've known to be bullies when they were at school now drive 4x4s.”
Yet another comment on the forum quotes figures from the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: “… Because big 4x4s are higher and heavier, the occupants of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times more likely to be killed than the occupants of a vehicle hit by a normal car. For the same reasons they kill between two and three times as many of the pedestrians and cyclists they hit as smaller cars.”
While the rest of the civilized world is shifting away from driving big-n-tall, gas guzzling ‘Earth killers’, if only because gasoline is so expensive; the Lebanese, whose country is a net importer of fuel, are abandoning their sane sedans in favor of insanely gaudy trucks more suited for Wadi-bashing and the desert sands than Beirut’s narrow streets and alley ways.
The four-by-four maniac in Lebanon is an audacious, daring and fool hardy adventurer on the loose on our roads. Like armor, he (or indeed she) wears his/her extra-large steel coffin each day and goes out to joust with every stranger that crosses his/her path. Like a bull seeing red, the anger he/she has kept bottled up for years is released in one burst and the results can be deadly.
Now some may ask why I single out the 4x4 to rave and rant about, well, the reason is simple: I have personally narrowly escaped countless times being run off the road or smashed against a median divider by reckless and inconsiderate drivers and most of them where driving 4x4s. They think because the rest of us are physically ‘beneath them’ that we actually are. They think because they drive a 4x4 everyone else should scatter and move out of their way out of fear, and when we don’t they get angry and they show it.
I call on the present government to restrict the ownership of 4x4s the same way it restricts the sale and registration of hand guns, because much like a hand gun a 4x4 kills, the only difference is the law assumes a car crash is an accident not murder, unlike firing a gun. That is another thing that needs to change. Once people who show reckless disregard for the lives of other people on the roads commit certain actions which any sane person should know would lead to someone’s death than any death that results from those actions cannot be deemed accidental but intentional and premeditated.
The internet is littered with discussion forums on this subject. One comment on bikeradar.com said of 4x4s: “…their presence can be quite intimidating to other road users and give one the feeling of being 'bullied', a fact that most 4x4 drivers are no doubt acutely aware of and in many cases, take full advantage of.”
Another comment on the same discussion forum said: “…all the people I've known to be bullies when they were at school now drive 4x4s.”
Yet another comment on the forum quotes figures from the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: “… Because big 4x4s are higher and heavier, the occupants of a vehicle hit by one are 27 times more likely to be killed than the occupants of a vehicle hit by a normal car. For the same reasons they kill between two and three times as many of the pedestrians and cyclists they hit as smaller cars.”
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