States should ban all driver use of cell phones and other portable electronic devices, except in emergencies, the National Transportation Board said Tuesday.

The board made the recommendation in connection with a deadly highway pileup in Missouri last year. The board said the initial collision in the accident near Gray Summit, Mo., was caused by the inattention of a 19 year-old-pickup driver who sent or received 11 texts in the 11 minutes immediately before the crash.

At the time Missouri had a ban on people under the age of 21 sending text messages while driving. So this was already illegal. In other words, you've already got a ban on the thing that you're saying caused this accident, and that ban didn't prevent that accident, and you're saying that this somehow justifies a broader ban on other things that didn't contribute to this accident?!

It gets worse, its not clear that text messages caused this accident at all:

Driver distraction wasn't the only significant safety problem uncovered by NTSB's investigation of the Missouri accident. Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment at the time of the accident. He had an average of about five and a half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.

What if he fucked with his stereo at the time instead of fucking with his phone? Why aren't you calling for a ban on car stereos? What if he glanced at a map? Why aren't you calling for a ban on maps? Why make any reference to this case at all, which has absolutely nothing to do with the ban that it supposedly justifies?

Oh, I see, because it will result in a bunch of news media outlets running photographs of a school bus in a pileup.

Hey, if you can't make a reasonable argument for your policy recommendations, why not try terrorizing people?

At any given moment last year on America's streets and highways, nearly 1 in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a handheld electronic device, the safety administration said. And those activities spiked 50 percent over the previous year.

Have accidents increase 50 percent over the previous year? Have laws banning cellphone use reduced accidents? Where is the data justifying these bans?

Clue: They aren't talking to the data anymore because its not clear that the data justifies these reactionary bans.