Your life for a cell phone message

Text messaging. Texting. Texters. It's one of the things cells phones have brought us.

Students are not allowed to have cell phones on during school, for fear of distractions as well as the chance one may text message another with an answer. We called it cheating in my day, but we had to use pen and paper.

Now we have fatal accidents in the news because of text messaging:

• Today a Cincinnati news station reported: "Texting man avoids one train, gets hit by another."

• This past week a Chino Valley woman, 40-year-old Stacey Stubbs, died while driving in Peoria when a text-messaging teen, Ashley Miller of Glendale, swerved. Miller died too.

• A man involved in a three-car accident in Utah that killed two men in 2006 is now facing charges of negligent homicide - for driving while texting.

While prosecutors grapple with these cases - actually, they're not that hard to prove, based on phone records - lawmakers best get busy.

I admit that my cell phones ring many times a day - and even while driving. I don't text, but I have answered those calls. However, I have started to pull over to speak to the person because I don't want to drop the call AND I do not have hands-free devices.

Driving while ability impaired is against the law, so why isn't driving distracted?

Consider the case several years ago on Willow Creek Road; a girl going to school dropped something while driving, reached for it, and died after her car swerved into a cement truck.

Distractions equal death, folks.