A horrible holiday tragedy

As the just-completed holiday weekend tragically demonstrated, lawmakers can pass tough laws against drunken driving but they can't prevent its awful consequences so long as some people are determined to do wrong.

And the effects of drunken driving can be just as random and violent as if the driver had strapped a bomb to his body and put himself on a suicide mission for some fanatical cause.

At the moment, no one has proved whether the man whose car collided with that of the Ceran family of Cedar Hills, early on Christmas Eve, was drunk. Police say they suspect so, and at least one media report said the man had prior arrests for driving under the influence. It is difficult to understand why else he would have been speeding down 700 West as if he didn't notice the red light ahead.

In an instant, a family of six was reduced to a family of three. Moments earlier they had been late-night shopping at Wal-Mart, no doubt picking up last-minute Christmas gifts in anticipation of the happy day. Like victims of any terrorist act, they were completely unsuspecting, made to suffer just because, by happenstance, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For several years now, this page has crusaded against drunken driving, urging tough new laws and pleading with local governments to communicate better so that people with multiple offenses are not allowed to go free.

It may be that this case was another failure of the system to clamp down on an offender whose behavior was spinning like the lone bullet in a gun used for Russian roulette. Or it may be that the driver was simply one of the many whose irresponsible behavior had yet to run seriously afoul of the law. That's for the courts to work out.

But the answers won't bring a mother and her two children back to a grieving father and two more children whose lives are forever changed.

Utah lawmakers are to be commended for passing laws in recent years making the consequences for drunken driving more severe. The state consistently has some of the lowest rates of DUI-related accidents in the nation.

But as the community's collective hearts go out to the Ceran family, their tragedy clearly shows that even one drunken driving accident is too many. It shows why everyone has a responsibility to stop a person who may get behind the wheel after having one too many.