Big Brother's Further Encroachment in our Lives - Cell Phone Scramblers for all Cars

Ray LaHood, Transportation Secretary, has come up with a great idea.  He wants all new vehicles sold in the United States to be mandated to carry a cell phone scrambler.  This is to be done for safety reasons. 

The problem with his statement is that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently released a report saying that the number who die due to distracted drivers is about 5,000 per year.  No one is trying to diminish the tragedy of the deaths of those 5,000 people but do we really have pass yet another over-reaching law due to this?  How will someone call the police if they are in a car accident or a flat tire on less travelled road? 

On average 90 people die a year due to lightening strikes.  Are we going to outlaw leaving your home during storms? 

On average 20,000 people die a year due to complications of the common flu.  Are we going to force people to get flu shots? 

Also, lets ask another question.  I realize that this may seem far fetched, but what if someone is abducted and shoved into a van?  Should we really outlaw cell phone usage in these situations?  Again, that is not really all that common but neither is the amount of deaths due to cell phone usage in cars.  It ends up being less than one tenth of one percent of the American population. 

The government needs to learn that there are such things such as personal responsibility and common sense. 

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has some thougths on this as well:

•The scrambler would also affect the passengers in a car that want to use their cell phones, which doesn’t do anything to improve public safety.



•The presence of multitudinous scramblers in autos driving in a city will likely render cell phones used by pedestrians useless as well, or at least unreliable.


•Adding more required equipment to cars will make them more expensive, and increase the value of used cars without the scramblers.


•People who want to make calls from their cars or allow their passengers to do so will likely hold onto current vehicles longer.


•Anything installed in a car can be disabled by the owner, especially electronics. Will car owners have to submit to random searches, or annual verification of scrambler functionality? Will the federal government make that yet another unfunded mandate on the states?


•People also get distracted by eating, reading printed material, and applying make-up. Shall we ban drive-through restaurants, newspapers, and cosmetics, too?



Did these people learn nothing by this last election?  People do not want this type of intrusion into our personal lives.  Stop trying to control everything that I do!!!!