In 2019, I met Bill Lewinski in a class. He's the guy behind the Force Science Institute. He was researching time-to-stop shooting, and he's also published in the past a number of articles on unintentional discharges:
https://www.forcescience.com/research/ A colleague of his, John O'neill, published a Functional Behavior Assessment of the Unintentional Discharge... in which he identified six distinct antecedent classes in which UD can be categorized: contact with objects, medical symptoms, muscle coactivations, routine tasks, startle stimuli, and unfamiliar tasks. I recall that Massad Ayoob had a UD in a class a few years ago which he detailed and described as a case of "Look But Fail To See." He describes opening the cylinder, looking down into the chambers, and yet he failed to see a cartridge in one chamber. For Mass, this incident would have fit O'neill's "routine task" class because clearing a gun and demonstrating something with dry-fire was a routine procedure in MAG-40. Drivers can make this same kind of error.
Jay Winsten is a health communications expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School whose work focuses on traffic safety. His work in the 1990s introduced the designated-driver concept into American culture through a collaboration with media companies. In a study of serious crashes, it was found that inattentive driving was a critical factor in 30 percent to 40 percent of such incidents. Inadequate surveillance — failing to actively monitor the road and surroundings — was shown to be the largest single factor. Winsten has described eye-tracking studies that show a driver's eyes stop scanning left and right when their mind is not primarily on driving. This isn't just about "distracted driving" due to texting or looking at phones. Winsten has described how getting lost in thought, "you can miss a lot of things in the periphery — a bicyclist you’re about to cut off, a child dashing into the street after a ball, or a driver running a red light and heading your way." “We get away with distraction most of the time. And
an uneventful trip reinforces our belief that we can handle it, that we’re not the problem, that we’re great at multitasking. But the truth is we’re playing a dangerous game of probabilities.”
Jeremy Wolfe is the director of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of ophthalmology and radiology at Harvard Medical School. Wolfe has said that although driving is routine for many of us, it is also a complex, dynamic activity that requires one to rapidly — sometimes instantaneously — make sense of many things at once: the vehicle’s position on the road, its speed, the speed and direction of other cars, roadway conditions, visibility, and the activities of pedestrians and cyclists on the shoulder and sidewalks. “Doing anything perceptual in the world requires a vast set of inferences. You’re continuously making your best guess about what’s going on in the world." “Part of being an expert at anything is learning what the right inferences are to make in this setting and making them quickly.”
Wolfe’s scientific interest is in what’s called “Look But Fail to See” errors, such as when one repeatedly proofreads a document but keeps missing a grammatical error someone else picks up their first time through. The term “look-but-fail-to-see” comes from auto accidents. Wolfe has used the example of when drivers tell police that they looked but didn’t see the red light, the other car, or the bicycle rider. “In many cases you can be pretty damn sure the cyclist was perfectly visible. But the driver isn’t lying, in the sense that the driver didn’t say, ‘Oh look, there’s a cyclist. Maybe I’ll hit him.’ In some meaningful way, they did not see the cyclist or the other victim of the accident.” “These sorts of errors are going to be influenced by — among other things — how good a set of inferences you’re making at the time, and those inferences are going to be influenced by distraction.”
Ray Bradbury was prescient when he wrote stories like The Pedestrian, where he described a culture that had progressed beyond pedestrianism and came to regard it as deviant and even unlawful. Ray had written about science fiction and other literature set in the future like that of George Orwell, that it doesn't attempt to
predict the future, so much as it examines what will be "if things continue the way they've been going." The Pedestrian preceded the world of Fahrenheit 451 where pedestrianism was also deviant behavior and drivers were maliciously callous toward them and would run them down in their jet beetles with impunity. Clarisse McClellan was different. She didn't watch the parlour walls (something like surround television that displayed content that had features of reality TV and social media), but she was a pedestrian and she thought drivers should slow down to appreciate the natural environment as it was originally intended to be viewed instead of looking at different colored blurs as they speed past. She thinks that drivers should take the time to notice the grass, flowers, cows, and houses they casually fly past on an everyday basis.
Nothing is more conformist in our culture today than driving a motor vehicle, and one of the most popular ways to do it is with callous indifference, distraction, and negligence while maintaining an expectation of entitlement to do so with impunity. I referred to the story of a young mother Beth Ann Huey and 1-year-old Paul Zebulun Huey earlier in this thread, but I'll mentioned them again. Just last week, they were mowed down by a driver of an Infiniti sedan who struck their bicycle and trailer. Also hit was Beth's husband Daniel and their daughter Faith who survived but were hospitalized. Several of the news stories emphasized how the roadway was blocked for 5.5 hours. There's no mention of the driver facing any charges. It was, evidently, an "unintentional discharge." Some people would say, "an accident."
