Vivek James Age: 13 Cloonan Middle School You Don’t Make New Laws for Nothing!
Kenneth Dorsey was on his usual morning jog in Norwalk to prepare for his upcoming marathon. It was a peaceful Saturday morning. Suddenly a burst of honking exploded out of the air. Some wild car was in the wrong lane and veering dangerously! Kenneth stopped and saw that there was a young teenager inside, about sixteenish, who was furiously typing away on some handheld device amid all the chaos. Kenneth ogled, dumbstruck, at the rapidly accelerating car as it sped toward him menacingly, threatening to run him over. After a blinding flash of pain, everything went black for Kenneth.
Unfortunately, this real life incident took place in 2012, years after texting while driving was made illegal by Connecticut and laws were created to prevent texting while driving. But no, that did not work as expected. Texting while driving deaths per year were still up in the thousands. People didn’t pay attention to the laws. For this reason, in my opinion, new laws should not be made because they will be as ineffective as the first laws we made. This is because people will not heed the new laws we make, so the new laws won’t make any difference. Also, it is nearly impossible to enforce laws about texting while driving, so making new laws won’t make a difference. Laws are mainly followed because most laws are enforced sufficiently which causes people to be easily caught. What we can do to make the laws we already have more effective is to educate people about the dangers of texting while driving, so they do not commit it. Now that I’ve told you why new laws should not be made, I will explain how nobody will pay attention to new laws.
To start off with, if we make new laws, people will not pay attention to them, so the new laws won’t make a difference. If people don’t listen to the laws we have today, which are already pretty critical and strict, they definitely won’t listen to any new laws they make. Despite the laws and fines that we have today that are consequences of texting while driving, people still do it. So you can definitely extrapolate that if new laws are made, people will probably not follow them either. I myself have observed that several people in their cars, whether on the roads or even the highways, are constantly tapping away on their phone. This also shows that people don’t listen to the laws we already have on texting while driving. This means if we made new laws, they most probably wouldn’t listen to those laws as well. As you can see, if we make new laws, most people will take no notice of them, so the laws will make no difference to the community.
Next, it is extremely difficult to enforce laws on texting while driving which renders any new laws on texting while driving useless. No matter how many policemen you station at every corner of the street, no matter how many cameras you put in place, not everybody will be caught. Even if we use radar, the results would be not accurate. These methods are advanced, but they won’t do much to catch people. People who are secretly texting won’t be caught and will get away with this unjust act. Not to mention, these forms of enforcement will be tremendously expensive and excessive. The after effect of texting while driving can only be determined by the driver, not any police officer or friend or family member. I personally
