Texting and Driving Should be Illegal

Since Con has already decided to give his argument as to why "texting and driving should be illegal", I will move forward with my own arguments as to why it should remain legal and not be something that is punishable by law. -Statistics- The vast majority of people who text while driving do not get in car accidents. " In fact, at any given time throughout the day, approximately 660,000 drivers are attempting to use their phones while behind the wheel of an automobile".... "The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year" [1]. Using this data we can extrapolate a percentage of the number of people who get into car crashes in regards to sending each text at any given moment. It is important to note that my source uses the phrase "any given time throughout the day" This source is talking about literally just a moment, but I will pretend they are really only 660,000 text attempts while driving a day. If in a given day there are 660,000 text attempts, we can multiply this by 365 to see the number of text attempts each year. This results in around 241,000,000 attempted text messages while driving. If 1,600,000 accidents are caused by texting, that means only 0.6% of attempted text messages result in a crash. Additionally this source has used the term "cellular phone use" so it doesn't actually give a specific number regarding texting related accidents. This reduces the number of accidents caused by texting even further. -Irresponsibility- Texting and driving is only irresponsible when it isn't an appropriate time for it. I see no harm in texting on an open road or at a stop light. Con' disgust of people who text and drive is misdirected, he should focus on the people who are simply irresponsible to begin with. I have no doubt seeing someone eating, or changing their pants, or doing make-up in their car would infuriate him no less. On the same token, I would also argue that it would be unreasonable to punish people for also attempting to do this while driving. There are a myriad of reasons for people doing these things that could very well outweigh the 0.6% chance of crashing. -Privilege vs Responsibility- Con states that driving is not a privilege, but is actually a responsibility. There are a few reasons why I disagree with this. 1.If the government believed that driving was a citizens responsibility in order to achieve some goal, everyone capable of driving, would be driving. This is not the case. 2.It must be a privilege, only people who are capable of a certain degree of hand-eye coordination, depth perception, and other host of abilities are allowed to drive. Proof of this is the exclusion of elderly and young people. 3. Driving itself is not your responsibility, it is a privilege used to achieve what-ever your responsibility might be . Con may be trying to say that people who drive should drive responsibly, and that's a given, but that isn't what he's actually arguing based on what he stated. -Benefits vs Risk- The sheer number of texts that have saved lived or delivered urgent information to an important individual while driving must be staggering. Considering the numerous amounts of texts being transmitted, it is far more likely than not that at-least a couple thousand of them were indeed important. Just imagine, your child dies in an accident and your wife sends you a text to inform you what happened. Since your driving when you receive this text you are not allow to respond, in fact, you wont even get to read it, without risking some sort of penalty. [1]https://www.edgarsnyder.com...