Crack down on drunk drivers

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need for lawmakers to act now

to prevent alcohol-related fatalities.

Ty Couch, a 6-year-old Greenville boy known for his cheery smile, was the latest victim of an alleged drunk driver in South Carolina. The boy was riding with his father and older sister to the races at the Greenville-Pickens Speedway on Saturday when their car was hit by a Spartanburg motorist who was charged with DUI.

Ty's Wednesday obituary read: "Going to church and talking about Jesus and NASCAR races were some of his favorite things. He was his Mother's baby."

The larger tragedy is that alcohol-related fatalities are all too common in our state, which has the highest rate of drunk-driving deaths in the nation. It's past time for state lawmakers to prevent drunks from becoming potential killers on the road.

There's hope for progress this year. One legislative proposal would lower the state's blood-alcohol standard. Another could do away with minibottles in bars.

But some Senate lawmakers, unfortunately, want to water down the current law that allows law enforcement to immediately take away the driver's licenses of alcohol-impaired drivers.

Current law allows licenses to be immediately revoked when a motorist has a blood-alcohol level of 0.15. But the Senate bill gets rid of that provision of the law, known as automatic license revocation (ALR).

Both the House and Senate bills take a step in the right direction: reducing the legal limit for a driver's blood-alcohol level from 0.10 to 0.08. The House also lowers the ALR level to 0.08, but the Senate bill does away with ALR entirely. In short, the House bill will save more lives. The Senate's bill may make a dreadful situation even worse.

Clearly, the threat of a driver's license being taken away immediately is a strong deterrent to drunk driving. Forty-two states and the District of Columbia believe ALR is a powerful tool for fighting drunk driving. There is still time for senators to amend their drunk-driving legislation and adopt the House's better bill.

On a more positive note, a bill is making its way through both the House and Senate that would end the requirement that bartenders use only minibottles for making drinks. South Carolina remains the only state in the nation that retains the odd and potentially deadly minibottle requirement.

Minibottles give South Carolina the strongest mixed drinks in the country because those drinks contain more liquor than drinks poured from larger bottles. It's not hard to believe, as does MADD, that minibottles contribute to drunk-driving fatalities.

The state also should have stronger seat belt laws and desperately needs more troopers on the roads to deter drunk drivers and others who recklessly break the law and put lives at danger.

Lawmakers have it within their power this year to prevent more tragedies of the sort that claimed the life of a 6-year-old boy named Ty this past Saturday.