Texas Gov. Rick Perry has vetoed a new bill the Texas Legislature passed to add Texas to the ranks of 32 other states making it illegal to read or send text messages while driving. Perry says government shouldn’t “micromanage” adults’ behavior, and instead education should be emphasized to steer people from the dangerous habit.

It’s been said by scientists that distracted driving is as bad as drunk driving, and statistics would seem to bear this out. As driving distractions continue to mushroom, so do traffic deaths and injuries due to distracted drivers, who could kill up to 6,000 persons on America’s roads and highways this year. The rate of distracted driving deaths, in fact, has doubled in recent years.

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“WHERE U AT.”

That’s a text message — a fatal text message sent by Mariah West, 18, of Missouri, just before she veered off a road, smashed into a bridge and died.

Her story and other sad ones like it are told in The Last Text, a sobering, disturbing and tragic 10-minute documentary produced by AT&T and hosted on its website.

The documentary has interviews with a teen driver who killed a bicyclist while he was texting at the wheel; a teen who was devastatingly injured as a passenger in a texting while driving crash; and friends and relatives of teens who perished in such accidents.

It’s perhaps fitting that the focus is on teens, since they tend to text more than others — sometimes thousands of times per month. Such obsession even has been called an addiction.

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Beverly Hills, CA plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan loved to send and receive messages via texts. But apparently he didn’t get one message until too late: Texting while driving kills.

Body reshaper of reality TV’s Heidi Montag, rock music’s Gene Simmons and Vince Neil and modeling’s Janice Dickinson, Ryan, 50, died Monday. It seems the Jeep he was driving veered off the Pacific Coast Highway and crashed upside-down at the bottom of a 200-foot embankment.

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Death. Taxes. Curbs on drivers texting.

Add the last to life’s inevitabilities, because the times they are a-changing. Thirty states now ban texting while driving, and more technology is arising to take that foolish distracted driving habit out of drivers’ hands.

The latest, reported by USA Today, is software designed to stop texting, emailing or web-browsing via wireless devices while a car is in motion. It’s being developed by an Irving, TX company called . and a Georgia company called Manage Mobility.

Their technology is being offered to government agencies and corporations, which are trying to  squelch the texting tide that’s causing thousands of traffic accident fatalities and injuries and billions of dollars in losses.

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“How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s humanistic sentiments when he wrote 1962′s Blowin’ in the Wind could be reworded to fit Americans’ driving-while-texting tragedies today. How many such distracted driving deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died, and embrace our responsibility behind the wheel? And how many deaths will it take till Texas bans texting while driving — as 23 states already have?

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Talk about failing to see the forest for the trees. A news report by Houston’s KHOU TV Channel 11 on its website today has the headline “Cell phone fines mean big bucks for some Texas school districts.” The story concerns fines students must pay when they text or otherwise use cell phones in class, which is against school rules.

As the headline and the article’s content make clear, KHOU’s author considers the problem to be this: “Some schools are cashing in.” She goes on to question how the money collected when students break the rules and text in class is administered. Though there’s no evidence given of impropriety, the author’s conspiracy-theory attitude seems to be, “Those mean ol’ sneaky school districts!”

Of course, the real problem here with far broader implications and concerns is this: Too many of today’s students are disengaged from teachers, class, learning and their immediate environment because they are addicted to cell phones, texting and other avenues of needlessly incessant and exceedingly trivial communication.

These same students, when they drive a car or do a job for which others depend on them, are far more likely to continue such addictive behavior, thereby failing at their responsibilities and, in worst cases, killing themselves or someone else by being a distracted driver.

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You know cell phones are a menace to society when they even start steering TV plots — sometimes twice in the same episode. That was the case with this week’s Desperate Housewives on ABC, when two major events were badly derailed simply because a person unwisely if not recklessly used a cell phone.

One such cell phone accident occurred at episode’s end when Edie (Nicollette Sheridan) was fleeing her maniacal husband. She’d escaped his clutches and was in her car, which she frantically raced down Wisteria Lane while — perhaps by force of habit — she looked down to dial a number on her cell phone.

Now, as smart drivers know, taking your eyes off the road even momentarily can be dangerous, if not deadly. Edie learned this lesson — too late. When a pedestrian appeared whom she belatedly noticed, she swerved her rushing car into a light pole, and at episode’s end it was suggested she was dead.

Now, how important was it to make a phone call while driving? Important enough to kill someone, including yourself?

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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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