Pierce, Herns, Sloan & McLeod LLC

Basketball is among the most popular team sports for young people in South Carolina and throughout the U.S. While it doesn't involve the hard bodily contact of football or the deadly projectiles at play in baseball and softball, a recent study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital shows that an average of 375,000 youth basketball players visited an emergency room every year over the past decade for treatment of injuries.

The long days from Memorial Day to Labor Day are a time when many families hit the road and head for Atlantic beaches or drive inland to the forests and streams of the Carolina and Georgia mountains. But those days can also be deadly: 281 people lost their lives on state highways during June, July and August of 2009.

100 Days of Summer Safety: The long days from Memorial Day to Labor Day are a time when many families hit the road and head for Atlantic beaches or drive inland to the forests and streams of the Carolina and Georgia mountains. But those days can also be deadly: 281 people lost their lives on state highways during June, July and August of 2009.

Across the country, there has been a movement at the state and federal levels to ban drivers from sending, receiving and reading text messages while driving. The focus on text messages began in earnest over the summer when the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute released a study that found that drivers who text while driving have a 23 times greater risk of being involved in an accident than drivers who do not - a risk that is far greater than even drinking and driving.

In the past year a number of individual states have taken action to curb the practice of texting while driving or other forms of distracted driving. Following reports comparing the danger of distracted driving to that of drunk driving, at least eighteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted measures that control when and how drivers can use hand-held electronic devices while behind the wheel.