Wisconsin needs to more assertively use its drunk driving laws to protect the innocent rather than enabling repeat offenders.

It has to treat repeat OWI offenders the same way it deals with people who discharge firearms in public without regard for other people's safety: Lock 'em up and don't give their gun back.

It's a three-step reform of OWI laws, tougher than what is proposed by some legislators:

1. Criminalize a first offense, making it a misdemeanor, and no longer a ticket. Treat that first offense seriously. And make it clear that when it comes to OWI, two strikes and you're out.

2. Turn a second offense into a felony and make vehicle confiscation mandatory. That's how you help a repeat offender see sobriety as desirable and also how you profoundly help deter others from a first or second offense.

3. Turn one or two vehicle confiscations every month or so into very public salvage yard crushings, then auction off the other seized vehicles and turn the proceeds over to law enforcement to help finance equipment purchases, or operating expenses of check points and other anti-OWN actions.

It's the least that the state can do to honor the memory of the three recent fatalities in Oconomowoc, allegedly by a thrice-convicted OWI offender who had been given undeserved several weeks of freedom by a Waukesha County Circuit Judge - - and no vehicle confiscation - - before the sentence for that third OWN was to begin.

A posted argument elsewhere is here.