"Stop the texts, stop the wrecks."
It's the new rally cry for groups looking to ban texting while driving in Oklahoma.
Governor Mary Fallin declared this entire week "Drive Aware Oklahoma Week" to bring attention to the issue before the state legislature goes back in session.
According to studies by AAA and Drive Aware Oklahoma, the average person looks down at their phone for five seconds for every text they send or receive while driving. If they driving 40 mph when they're texting, they're covering roughly the length of a football field, or 300 feet, in those five seconds they're not looking at the road or anything else happening around them.
The most recent statistics show more than 3,000 people were killed and close to half a million people injured nationwide in accidents caused by drivers distracted by their phones. Nine of those people died in Oklahoma in 2010.
And those numbers don't include all of the near-misses that are never reported.
"How many people have almost been hit, and then they look and that person has a cell phone in their hand," Danial Karnes, Triple-A Oklahoma, said.
Thirty-nine states currently have a texting while driving ban in some form. Yet Oklahoma still doesn't have a single law on the books. But it's not from lack of trying.
"Year after year it has a lot of support," Karnes said. "It looks like we're going to have that momentum. And then it gets there and it fails."
"About 94 percent of teens believe that texting and driving is bad, and they want a law for it," Cole Inhofe, high school student and member of Generation Text, said. "And 87 percent of adults think it's bad, and they want a law for it."
But for some reason, the proposed law never makes it through the legislature.
Triple-A Oklahoma has been pushing the law for years. But Karnes said a lot of Oklahomans just don't like the idea of the government telling them what to do.
"Our studies have proven that people are dying because of texting while driving," Karnes said.
"We need this law to pass. It's not about somebody's personal right. It's about saving lives."
Tulsa Police Department's Traffic Safety Coordinator, Ofc. Craig Murray, couldn't agree more.
"We want you to wear seatbelts, but look at the lives we've saved," Murray said. "We want you to slow down. Look at the lives we've saved. We don't want you to drink and drive. Look at the lives we've saved. Well, this is the next hill we have to climb."
It's still unclear how a texting while driving ban would be enforced in Oklahoma if it were to pass. But Murray said it would be fairly easy at night. Officers could just look for the light of the cell phone shining on someone's face as they're looking down.
During the day it would be trickier, but he expects enforcement would be similar to how officers enforce drunk driving laws. They would simply look for people driving erratically, swerving in lanes, driving too fast, or driving too slow.
Generation Text is collecting signatures on a petition demanding the texting while driving ban in Oklahoma.
Click here to see the petition.
