Bangel wrote:
dracir512 wrote:
At my school, it's common lunch-time-fun to prank ambulances... I don't (I have no phone
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) but there's a good fair few that do. So... but no one
actually dies in Australia, they just get severly injured. So it's not that big a deal.
It's a huge deal. It's people like the idiots you just described that are truly responsible for the death of this woman, because if there weren't so many of them in the world, then the child's call might have been taken seriously.
Personally, judging from what I read from that article, there's a chance that the woman would have died with or without the ambulance's help, which is probably why the sentencing is not very harsh at all.
Especially because an ambulance that is tasked to a prank is unable to help someone else - remember, there isn't an unlimited supply of ambulances in the world, or in any given neighborhood. Actually, there's usually a shortage when compared to what public safety officials think is necessary.
That's why it's a crime - because an ambulance pranked to one place could result in a person dying elsewhere due to lack of an ambulance. In many places, if that happens, the person who did the pranking can be charged with manslaughter. Same if the ambulance rushing to the scene of the non-emergency gets into an accident and someone dies or is severly injured in that accident - it never would have happened if someone hadn't called 911 (or 999 or whatever) as a joke.