EDITORIALS

lol, did u c my peeps?

They spy with their little eye . . .

THE SPY story of the month had to have been the one involving PETA, as in the name of the outfit more formally known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Folks in the “know” at PETA announced that they were going to launch a drone to check up on hunters.

After we picked ourselves up off the floor, we made a mental note to send PETA a card for giving us the best laugh in a while. Maybe somebody should tell PETA that 300,000 people bought deer hunting licenses last year. In Arkansas alone. And that doesn’t include the duck, goose, squirrel, turkey, elk, bear and rabbit hunters. Good luck with that drone. But if that’s what y’all want to do with your money, have at it. Maybe it’ll keep you too busy to churn out all those press releases the rest of us have to read.

Another spy story, and a much more welcome one, came out of Northwest Arkansas the other day: Textface has joined up with local law enforcement.

Never heard of Textface? Join the club. It’s a website devoted to taking pictures of folks who text while driving. Textface then posts the videos on the Internet. The other day, they took some deputies with them for a drive-around.

And even the deputies were surprised at what they saw: People driving with their knees. Minivans going 70 mph down the interstate while every person inside-including the driver-had their heads buried in some i-contraption. And the people at Textface duly recorded it all.

“I never realized how many people text and drive,” said Major Brandon Rogers with Benton County’s sheriff’s office. “Someone was literally texting or on Facebook every three or four cars. We saw one person actually reading the newspaper while driving.”

Well, uh, officer, that last one might be more of a temptation than most people can resist. But we do recommend waiting till you get to your destination to dive into our editorials.

Deputies gave out about 20 warnings while on the road trip with Textface. Maybe there are a lot of people who don’t realize that texting while driving is against the law in Arkansas. And it is. And has been ever since Act 181 passed the Ledge-in 2009. So only warnings may still be appropriate. For now. But once word gets out and more years go by, full-grown tickets may have to be used to wake folks up. Before it’s too late.

Almost every driver has watched this scene play out: You’re going down the road, and as you pass a car-or it passes you-you notice some fool driver looking down, holding a device with one hand and typing with the other. Or maybe he’s good enough to hold his i-thing and type with the same hand. But no matter how good his reflexes, they wouldn’t help much if he never saw the wreck coming.

Here’s a reminder: The folks who keep up with these things say 10 percent of all the people who die each year in car crashes are killed because somebody was driving distracted. And these days, distractions are everywhere.

The moral of the story: Put away the phone and Kindle and computers until you get home. Please. For your sake and everybody else’s on the road.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 04/22/2013

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