Will Cell Phones Catch Cigarettes?

A couple of weeks ago as I was driving through town I had the life scared out of me as a car drifted over toward my truck. When I first noticed the car drifting I immediately looked over to my left to see if I could get over without running into someone I noticed the driver of the swaying car drifting over to the right hand lane. Now I'm a little aggravated because I see what is going on in the car. This "idiot", which is a title I gave this moron was trying to text on his cellphone and steer his car with his knee.

As we approached the red light at the intersection I lowered my passenger side window and asked him if he was aware that he had almost hit me at the last block. Oblivious to what I was asking him he rolled his window up and proceeded to take off. As he took off in his text utopia he failed to notice a car not yielding at a merge in the road and they collided side by side. Well to me this was kinda bitter sweet justice and I stopped to see if anyone was hurt and as I exited my truck both drivers were engaged in an argument of who was at fault. While they are arguing I noticed that both were as well engaged in what seemed to be the cause of the accident to begin with. They were both texting while they were arguing. As I watched this demonstration of technological stupidity I figured I would call the police because I was pretty sure neither gentleman was sending a text to 911.

I waited as the Police arrived and the officer walked over to the gentleman as both were still texting and demanded they both put the cellphones up.

This little experience lead me to thinking about some things. The first being, why haven't all states made it mandatory fines if you are caught texting or driving without hands-free on your cell phone? The second was if I drove by a Police Officer with a can of beer straight up he would waste no time pulling me over because it is the law that you will not drink and drive. If you drive by the same officer while texting or talking on your cell phone chances are they may be as well and not notice you. This bothers me for one reason. In 2008 there were 5870 people killed and 515,000 injured in "distracted driving accidents". Driver distraction was 16% of the fatal crashes in 2008 and this epidemic is growing by the week not year.

My final thought on all of this was that cigarettes kills hundreds of thousands of American's every year and yet we still purchase them and we still allow the production of them. We have though allowed them to be sued in death cases all over the United States involving cigarette related cancers. This is in spite of the fact that the Surgeon General has place warning labels on cartons and packs of cigarettes for years now to caution smokers of the end result of smoking. The same is relative with cell phones. The manufacturer's have provided hands free sets as well as blue-tooth or even jacks that allow you to converse through the speakers of your car radio without the use of yours hands and allows you to concentrate on your driving.

It all seems to me that things that kill the most citizens in the United States are things that all have a choice or alternate safe way of usage but we choose not to go the safe route we would rather endanger each other to fulfill our quest to do as we please.
My hope is that we stop and think before we get in our vehicles to what we are going to do to become safer drivers on the road and help our children to become safer as well.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is in conference this week to help find a solution to the "Distracted Driving" epidemic which is becoming a larger problem everyday. If you support the fact that stronger penalties should be imposed to help cut down the amount of fatalities for driving while distracted contact your local and state Representative and voice your concern. If not cllphones may catch cigarettes after passing drunk driving as the next big national killer.