Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 days ago
That doesn't actually work. The problem is people think they're not going to hit anyone and then it doesn't matter what the penalty is because they're discounting the risk of it happening to begin with. Nobody would be doing it who expected to receive the existing penalty for negligent homicide.
You don't need to convince them that the penalty is high, you need to convince them that the risk is high.
Which is why you have to “excessively” punish the behavior you want to stop - not killing people while filming while driving, but simply filming while driving.
That's still the same thing. What matters here is if people expect an actual penalty of any kind. Draconian penalties never help.
On top of that, people are less likely to know whether there is even a law against those things since it's much less intuitively obvious.
What you need to do is make them understand that it's dangerous, not to make them understand that it's illegal. People don't care about penalties unless they expect to be caught and this is one of the things where it's hard to consistently catch people in the act.