Musings: Let's take action against bad drivers

Reports continue to come of people being hurt and killed by inattentive drivers or those under the influence of alcohol or drugs. As a society, we can continue to engage in placing broken bodies into plastic body bags or we can enact laws and prosecute violators, so that persistent offenders are prevented from having the ability to wreak such carnage.

We can and should use such tragic incidents as the recent death of a 9-year-old boy allegedly caused by his mother’s wrong-way driving to act with immediacy, to protect Long Islanders from the ravages of unsafe drivers.

Inventors have provided us with a range of tools that can serve as circuit breakers for those who lack responsibility, including in-car breathalyzers and devices that would prevent talking and texting while driving. But we don’t demand their implementation, either out of inertia, or because we don’t want to pay for the up-front costs of having them in our cars. And law enforcement is entirely lacking urgency in this matter, as well.

We need to come to terms with the fact that as a society, we would rather pay the price of our fellow humans’ broken bodies even though, and here’s an irony, we wind up spending way more money in insurance premiums and hospital stays than we would in prevention. Talk is cheap; apparently, we feel the same way about our fellow Long Islanders.

— Richard J. Brenner, Miller Place