Can't we all just drive smarter?

It seems there has been a rash of deadly accidents lately involving people from our area, and I'm guessing that most of them could have been prevented if people had been paying better attention to the way they were driving. But in at least one of those cases, according to police, a deliberate might have been involved. Two young people were killed last Saturday night when a 19-year-old man driving on Route 50 near Hickory tried to pass another vehicle and struck the victims' vehicle head-on. The teenager passed on a double-yellow line, according to state police. How many accidents, fatal and otherwise, can be attributed to people who decide that the laws and rules of the road just don't apply to them? I travel Route 844 daily, and some of the driving I see on that road would curl your hair. People speeding 15 or 20 mph over the speed limit, tailgating the folks in front of them and them passing them wherever they damn well please, double-yellow lines be damned. Crest of a hill? No problem, they think. What happens when a deer jumps off a bank as one of these idiots is tailgating someone? People are dying because other people are idiots. And that's a shame. Maybe the penalties for these types of violations aren't strict enough. But unless these folks go to jail, it really won't matter. Take their licenses? They don't care. They drive anyway. Perhaps the only way the rest of us will be safe is if those who deliberately put others in peril are put away for a long enough time to make them think twice about doing it again.