Years of senseless tragedy, years of reform laws aimed at keeping drunks from behind the wheel ...

Laws are only one of what needs to be a many-front war on drunken driving — as we're seeing from the dangerous silliness at City Hall, and the same at the County Building only recently corrected: For more than two years, there's been a city ordinance calling for the confiscation of cars whose owners have racked up multiple DWI offenses.

But where do those cars go? The county, it seems, has found a place for them, finally: Only reecently has that jurisdiction begun taking cars away. The city still has nowhere to put 'em, or at least nowhere satisfactory: The intended lot down near police headquarters isn't paved yet — and it's got to be fenced and set up with security cameras ...

Does it really? What if the offenders' cars get dusty? What if someone brave or dumb enough to risk being seen by cops tries stealing a hubcap? Sure, the car-deprived drunk will scream; let him — or her. Yes, this means legal-liability questions, but that's all the more reason city administrators ought to get off the dime and get a fence up. Surely there are spare rolls of cyclone fencing, or useless fences that can be taken down and put up at the impound lot.

But just in case the lot is beyond municipal capability, a reader offers a good suggestion: "Denver boots," those mechanisms applied to the wheels of serial parking offenders, would disable a vehicle just fine — and it could be done right in the offender's driveway!

There goes the liability issue — and, for good measure, it marks the car as property of a societal menace; a modern version of putting someone in a pillory.

This beats waiting the three months it will take to even get a design for the fencing and paving — and the eternity it might take for the City Council to come up with fees that will come with impounding. And who knows? It might save a life.

It's one of many mechanical/technological remedies to what, in Northern New Mexico, remains a crisis even as drunken-driving fatalities are fading statewide. Ignition interlocks allowing only someone with legally sober breath to start a car are another; if they could be made foolproof and inexpensive, and we think they can, the devices could become mandatory. A case could be made for them, and if reformist politicians don't have the votes, perhaps the car-insurance lobby can round them up ...

Then there's the societal challenge: No more winking at, or otherwise condoning, drunken driving; making such behavior so universally unacceptable that, as local attorney Mark Donatelli suggests in his My View on this page, friends or even bystanders take responsibility for stopping a drunk from getting in the driver's seat.

That will take lots of education — the non-preaching variety — as well as calls to courage and diplomacy; embracing the philosophy behind the friends-don't-let-friends-drive-drunk slogan. Some suggest criminal penalties for passengers of drunken drivers — but that's casting them in the role of expert witness. Blood-alcohol detectors readily available at stores might make more persuasive cases for taking away someone's keys. Technology could be boon as well as bane, as police discover cell-phoners and texters warning of roadblocks and other enforcement efforts.

Can cultural change be made without a wholesale return to Carrie Nation times and prohibitionist policies? We think it can — and in spite of the many high-profile outrages committed during recent times in our area, it's actually occurring; too gradually to be sure, but a broad, measured and sustained approach will help.