Our community has been diminished by 19 lives. Nineteen Lubbock residents lost their lives in 2008 and 2009 in traffic accidents - and they were not wearing seatbelts.

What does it say about our society when we, the adults, will break the law and put ourselves, and our loved ones, in harm's way - with death being a consequence?

Click It or Ticket is under way across Texas through June 6.

Local police officers are expected to dedicate more than 300 hours looking for seat belt violations in the next two weeks, getting overtime pay through grant funds.

What does it say when our police force has to dedicate hundreds of hours to catching and ticketing folks for what shouldn't even be an issue?

The law is the law. This law is for our own safety.

Thanks to their seatbelts, in 2008 more than 800,000 Texans walked away from collisions without injuries. But roughly 1.1 million motorists - the equivalent of the entire population of Dallas, for example - still don't spend the two seconds it takes to fasten their seatbelts. Motorists least likely to buckle up continue to include men, teenage boys and pickup drivers and passengers, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

For the first time, adult passengers in the back seat now must be buckled up, and children younger than 8 years old have to ride in a child safety seat or booster seat unless they are taller than 4 feet 9 inches. Fines range from $25 to $250, plus court costs.

Most unsecured drivers and passengers will blame it on forgetfulness. Others will rationalize since they're not going very far, they don't need to buckle up, according to Carol Rawson, director of the TxDOT Traffic Operations Division. "The fashion conscious will say they don't want their clothes to get wrinkled," she says. "The defiant ones will point out it's a free country and they don't need the government telling them what to do, including buckling up."

The likelihood of getting a ticket for not being buckled has been a prime reason for steady increases in the number of drivers and passengers who use their seatbelts. Since the Click It or Ticket push began in 2002, the state's safety belt rate has climbed from 76 percent to 92 percent today, saving an estimated 2,400 lives and preventing more than 56,000 injuries.

No one wants an expensive ticket. Being forgetful or hard-headed and not using your seat belt - in the front or the back seat - won't protect you from receiving a citation, and it also won't keep you from getting hurt or killed if you're one of the hundreds of Texans involved in a car wreck every single day, warns Ms. Rawson. "There are more than 1,000 tombstones marking the graves of those who died in traffic crashes in Texas in 2008 because they, too, chose not to buckle up," she says.