Dennis - you are 100% wrong!

Texting and Driving should be banned.

If you are looking for something that will make you wonder how dumb someone can be, check out my Power Lunch report on efforts to ban texting and driving. My report by itself is fairly straight forward. It outlines why a growing number of states have outlawed texting while driving and why governors are now pushing for a nationwide ban. The part that will make most of you scratch your head is the discussion after the report with Power anchor Dennis Kneale.

Dennis thinks banning texting while driving is a waste of time because the law would be difficult to enforce and if you enact laws against texting while driving, you have to pass laws against reading newspapers while driving, or putting on make-up while driving.

But the most galling part of the Kneale rant is his belief the dangers of texting and driving have been "hyped up". At one point Dennis tried to assert a relatively few number of people have been killed in texting related accidents, as opposed to drinking and driving where thousands have been killed or injured.

Ordinarily, I don't take shots at co-workers. Call it quaint or old fashioned, I've long believed everyone has a right to voice their opinion and it's not my place to call them out when I disagree. But this time I have to say something. And frankly many of you feel the same way. We've been inundated by e-mails from viewers who think Dennis is among other things, an idiot.

Some, like Mario, wrote e-mails saying they have felt the pain of drivers being distracted by texting or talking on their phone. Mario wrote, "My brother was hit and killed while riding his bicycle by a car whose driver was talking on the phone while driving."

Others, like Steve in Wichita wrote, "Once again, Dennis proved how stupid he is. Did he play cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation?" Steve did make me chuckle by including a shot of cousin Eddie.

But there's nothing funny about the dangers of texting and driving, or talking on a cell phone while driving. There have been numerous stories of teens killed while texting. One of the most well known being the death of five teenage girls in upstate New York who died in 2007 when the driver of their car accidentally veered into on-coming traffic while texting.

Dennis can try and hide behind the argument that there are too many laws regulating too many things. Give me a break. In this case Dennis, you are plain wrong!

Lunacy!

That was the word brandished by my expansive and voluble colleague, Phil LeBeau, on Power Lunch this afternoon when I had the temerity to question the wisdom of passing a new law against texting while driving.

And today was my first day back from two weeks of vacation. Some welcome.

Okay so we all know it: Texting while driving is dangerous and stupid. So don't do it. But must we pass a law for EVERYTHING?

Let's pass a new law that says: "It is hereby illegal to fall asleep at the wheel." And if we're gonna outlaw texting across the land, how about making it illegal to switch channels on the radio while you're driving? Let's outlaw a driver having a map open on the front seat; or a newspaper, for that matter.

We don't have a law against any of those practices---and we don't need one. Same goes, I'd argue, for texting.

What's really going on here is what the new-media soothsayer Nicholas Negroponte called "the demonization of bits." It's the technology that has people fretting, so outlaw the technology.

My problem with all this is, simply, we diminish the gravitas and creditability of the law when we pass all manner of regulations that are utterly unenforceable and painfully obvious. It dilutes the power and importance of legitimate laws that truly are needed, when we get all up in arms and rush to establish new laws that dictate what otherwise should be common sense.


Better ways are available: public-service ads that advise the stupidest among us that, hey, um, you really shouldn't text while driving. Or a carmaker could offer a feature that electronically blocks any onboard cell phone from sending or receiving text messages while the car is in motion----and thereby tout a new ad claim as the safest car on the road.

Or the people riding with you could resort to enforcement of their own: Friends don't let friends text while driving.

But none of those solutions would serve the real purpose of this new anti-texting tirade: to provide a grandstanding platform for politicians who want to be seen as doing something.

Hyperbole always helps obscure facts, and proponents of this crackdown liken it to laws against drunk driving. Okay then: drunk driving killed 11,773 Americans on the roads last year. Total traffic deaths fell somewhat to just over 37,000.

We have like 270 million cell phone users in this country; we send out 2.5 billion text messages every single day. And how many traffic deaths have resulted from texting? A few?

Too much sugar for a dime, my friends. Overreaction disguised as action.