Texting -- the modern way to run with scissors?

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All this unfettered communication must be more dangerous than it seems.

This week, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued an alert about the dangers of ... text messaging. Yes, text messaging. That thing you do with the cellphone keypad. Apparently, emergency docs around the country have reported seeing injuries involving texting pedestrians, bicyclists, rollerbladers and of course motorists.

True, two recent deaths have been blamed on moving texters. (Both were in California.) One pedestrian stepped off the curb into the path of a truck; another was hit crossing the street. These are tragic, of course. But there’s also been a report of an injury that occurred while a texter was horseback riding and another that occurred while cooking.

Somehow it seems that texting might not be the biggest issue here.

As Newsweek reports: ‘Most involve scrapes, cuts and sprains from texters who walked into lampposts or walls or tripped over curbs.’ Let me repeat part of that: ‘who walked into lampposts.’ I’d almost pay to see that.

If you need tips on how to text safely, here you go. Or if you want to know how to wring every last bit of information from a single letter, baffling anyone old enough to legally drink, here’s this.

But if you’re wondering about some bigger injury and death issues, here’s this. A sample: 30,694 firearm deaths, 32,691 poisoning deaths and 43,667 traffic deaths. There’s more: 18,124 homicides and 32,637 suicides. Those numbers are from 2005, courtesy of the National Center for Health Statistics.

I’m not trying to dismiss the importance of this issue, mind you... But well, yeah, maybe I am.

-- Tami Dennis