Picture this: you walk out of 6th period on Friday excited for the weekend, and as you’re walking to your car chatting with friends, someone asks if you want to hang out later; you say yes and they say they will text you. Once you get to your car, you wait for the text and start driving home and once you are halfway home on 82nd, you get a text—you pick up your phone for one second and… the next thing you know you are in the hospital. Doctors say you swerved off the road and had a head on crash with a semi. This is a potential consequence of texting and driving.

Crashes from distracted driving are one of the biggest killers in America. At least 1 out of 4 car accidents in America are caused by this addiction to being on a phone or other inattentive driving. Just in 2015 alone, there were a reported 3,477 deaths related to distracted driving. In Oregon, texting and driving has been explicitly against the law for several years now.

Even with these laws, distracted driving continues to be one of the nation’s leading causes of crashes. Distracted driving must be put to an end due to the large amount of deaths and crashes being caused by this in our nation alone.

Almost everyone owns a phone and using one has become something we are always doing. Many people spend their whole day on their phone and it has become a necessity. We all know it is wrong and bad to be using a phone while driving—we know the potential consequences, but we continue to do it. The reality is that when texting and driving, you are twenty-three times more likely to crash.

The main thing we can do to solve this issue is to just stop using our phones in the car. We should also increase the penalties for anyone caught texting and driving. Another thing that could be done is to give law enforcement agencies more funding to help catch these people more often.

If you find yourself tempted to check your phone or text, you could just put you phone on silent and in your pocket so the sound of a text won’t bother you . Another thing to do is to put your phone in the back seat of your car or in a glove box so you can’t grab it. If it is urgent to pick up the phone, one could just pull to the side of the road to answer the call.

And just on Monday, Apple announced that iOS 11, to be released this fall, will have an optional feature to prevent texting and driving. But this feature has to be turned on, and so, like the other ways of preventing the temptation of texting, some personal responsibility is required.

We as a nation need to work harder to stop this from happening. America is losing too many lives because of such a stupid thing. If it means we need to completely turn our phones off in the car or place our phones out of reach, these are steps that we should take. A life is worth more than a text.

Creative Commons photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jhaymesisvip/6497720753