July 4th weekend is a time to celebrate America’s liberty. Yet our liberties don’t include driving while impaired, a misjudgment which claims almost one third of all traffic deaths yearly, and an even higher 40 per cent of all traffic deaths on the mid-summer holiday.

Alcohol abuse by drivers crosses all geographic and socioeconomic lines. But motorcyclists have the highest proportion of alcohol abuse of any drivers on the road, and thus more motorcyclists die in traffic accidents on Independence Day than on any other day of the year.

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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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Beyond groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving — and individual victims of drunk drivers — America goes about its business each day with precious little regard for the national nightmare of drunk driving and the horrific toll it relentlessly carves from our society.

Every day new tragedies erupt and new statistics add up. Yet not enough is being done about it, which is one reason why MADD just severed its ties with the “Century Council,” an activist group — funded by the liquor industry itself — with which MADD had collaborated.

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Most parents are extremely protective of kids. But anytime they take them in a car or other vehicle they’re exposing them to the No. 1 killer of America’s children. Indeed, child safety advocate group Safe Kids USA reports that car accidents and other motor vehicle mishaps are the chief cause of child deaths between ages 3 and 14.

That’s confirmed by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, which says car accidents are the top cause of deaths in kids aged 2-14. The center also says car accidents injure 250,000 American kids yearly. With about 2,000 of them suffering fatal injury, children are the victims in 5 per cent of America’s fatal traffic accidents. And unlike adults, it’s safe to say that no such child has caused the car accident in which he or she died.

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How many wake-up calls does it take to drive home the point that driving is serious business — always? Driving requires your full attention, and that means keeping your hands on the wheel, your eyes on the road and your mind on operating a heavy vehicle at sometimes high speeds in complex traffic.

Apparently a woman in Illinois didn’t think driving required such focus. In fact, she thought driving was incidental to her primary task: painting her nails. And as a result, another woman is dead — an innocent woman who was stopped at a traffic light on her motorcycle and was wearing a helmet but nonetheless perished when a car driven by the nail-painter hit her from behind.

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Perhaps if Erin Leas had been the daughter of a phone company executive when she died in a car accident due to cell phone distractions, Texas laws might change. Instead, phone companies exert influence on your elected legislators to deny reform and maintain huge profits.

You may be saying to yourself, “I talk on my cell phone while driving, and I haven’t had a traffic accident yet, and I don’t want to quit.” But if Erin had been your daughter, you might sing a different tune.

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Again, an innocent human being — this time a 7-year-old boy — has died — lost a lifetime — due to momentary driver distractions or inattentiveness.

In this case the boy, Cameron Dumore, was walking to school in Lithonia, GA. He was crossing the street within a crosswalk. A crossing guard was present, waving a handheld stop sign and alerting vehicles to stop. And they were, of course, in a school zone.

No matter. Despite all these things, an SUV driven by a 40-year-old woman disregarded the cross walk, the school zone, the crossing guard, the handheld stop sign and every other indicator to stop — including the boy himself — and, without slowing down, struck the boy and killed him.

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