Why should we get mad about drunk drivers, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)? Why should we have zero tolerance toward drunk drivers, pushing for more and stronger laws? Why are drunk driving car wreck accidents like a war against America? And why should anything change?

The answer to each question is simple: Drunk drivers are slaughtering us. They’ve been doing so virtually since autos were born, and though death numbers have risen and fallen, they’ve never disappeared. Put simply: Drunks kill — and isn’t that reason enough to do something about it?

Yet for many, news of another drunk driving fatality seems routine and, unless a loved one was killed, acceptable. Drunk drivers seem to be just a fact of life. But not all facts are unalterable.

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How often do you avoid car wrecks almost caused by drivers on cell phones? Or perhaps you’ve been injured already by such distracted drivers. In either case, the phone industry doesn’t care. Wireless service providers made $148 billion last year, and the thousands of Americans killed and hurt by distracted drivers using their product are treated as collateral damage.

Indeed, a recent study by the New York Times shows that cell providers have known for decades about the obvious risks of distracted drivers, but were reluctant to do anything about it other than giving token warnings about their product — while paying heavily in ads to pitch them to drivers.

In experimental stages as early as the 1940s, through costly status-symbol models of the 1980s, through the cell phone explosion of the 1990s, cell phones were pointedly marketed as portable, use-them-anywhere “car phones” — and that hasn’t changed. The cell industry has been determined to reap huge profits by turning drivers into callers, even if that meant many people would die or be injured in cell phone car accidents.

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The world is dangerous enough beyond our control, yet many of us also need protection from ourselves. That includes the millions of Americans who blithely chat on cell phones, send and receive texts and otherwise disengage from their primary — and life-protecting — task of driving a car.

With thousands dead and hundreds of thousands injured as a result of cell phone accidents, a national summit on distracted driving addressed the issue this week. Now a new gadget also responds to the car carnage. It’s called CellControl.

Introduced at the distracted driving summit in Washington, D.C., CellControl is a tiny device that can be attached to a car’s on board computer, a part of almost all vehicles built since 1996. After downloading CellControl’s software to a cell phone, the phone will cease functioning whenever the vehicle is in motion, though it will function when the vehicle is stopped.

That’s right: No texting. No emails. No calling. No receiving calls. In short, no potentially fatal driving distractions.

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With a national summit on distracted drivers set for this week, studies due today from the journal Pediatrics show that parents can have a huge effect on how effective — or distracted — their teen drivers become.

Conducted by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, PA and given funding by State Farm Insurance Co., the studies show that parents who set specific driving boundaries and urge caution in their kids are a lot more likely to have kids who survive into adulthood. (more…)

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America is at war — not with another country, but with its own drunk drivers. You may not sense that your country is at war with them, but drunk drivers — by default if not design — are definitely at war with America, inflicting far more deaths, injuries and damages that many military conflicts.

Each year, the car carnage caused by drunk driving totals around 16,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries and many billions of dollars in damages.

For far too long, enough has been enough. Yet the plague continues. Each day, law-abiding people die in horrific accidents, and all because drunks were loose on our roads and highways. Despite decades of effort and outstanding crusaders such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the terrible toll persists.

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