Frank Lautenberg: “If we ever forget what it is we are talking about today, just continue to read the papers, and there will be stories…”

“If we ever forget what it is we are talking about today, just continue to read the papers, and there will be stories about the intoxicated driver who went way over the limit and took a life. I will never forget a young woman who came in from Maryland to talk to us one day. She was waiting with her daughter for the schoolbus, child in hand. Someone driving a car at 8 in the morning jumped the curb and killed this child whose hand she was holding. Then there was the man in Hawaii who was driving with his wife behind a car that his son and daughter had rented. They were struck by a drunk driver. It killed them both. These things happen all the time, enough to kill over 17,000 people a year. That means that in less than 4 years, there will be as many people killed on our highways as were killed in Vietnam. So this is not a trivial thing, and we are going to have to keep on working on it.”