happyheathen,
Boy that’s a lot of ifs, here’s one more for your list:
If pigs had wings they could fly to the moon.
sx633 -
Welcome to the party!
(here’s your sign…)
p.s. winged creatures could make it past the atmosphere - that’s why we use rockets, not airplanes.
That should, of course, read “couldn’t make it past”.
My hands are cramped from handed out all the signs.
And thousands of others died or were maimed during the same time frame because they weren’t restrained. In other words, died pointless, needless deaths, or endured years of needless suffering due to inadequate safety precautions. Your point would be…?
hh, sure, lots of kids roamed around in cars before seatbelts and didn’t die. and others did. back in the ‘old days’, lots of pregnant women smoked, drank all through pregnancy, and lots of babies weren’t adversely affected. and others were.
when we learn better ways of keeping our kids safe, generally, we try and do them - doesn’t mean we’re wrapping them in cotton, doesn’t mean we’re not letting them have good old american fun, means we’ve learned better ways.
RE: your airplane scenario - can you first give me survival rates for passengers when their plane drops out of the sky? My general recollection is that when dropping out of the sky is the issue, survival isn’t a likely outcome regardless of the seating. FTR, I do think that kids should be in seats vs. parents laps for the most part, while in any moving vehicle, yes, including planes.
**wring - **
The newbies, I excuse, but you really should have read page 1:
For an example wherein a baby-in-arms could expect injury:
see also:
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001212X18961&key=1
well, hh, you really should have finished reading my post, though, don’t ya think (where I said for the record, kids on planes should be restrained as well?)
but to make the entire comparison more accurate, you’ll need to factor in relative frequency for the various scenarios, and I think that you’ll find that plane crashes (either type) are pretty damned rare per person, vs. auto accidents.
and, of course, in the car scenario, it’s not even necessary for there to be an accident in order to cause serious injury to the child - a swerve to avoid the accident, sudden slow down etc.
BUt all of this is, of course irrelevant to the main thrust, which is :
now that we not only have an appreciation for the risk to the unrestrained child in an auto and have the technology easily available to prevent said risk, why on earth would the responsible parent fail to utilize such methods?
and, more to the point, why would any idiot defend such a practice?
here little johnny, this butane lighter should be really fun to play with, much, much better than those silly old matches I used to have…
wring -
I’m not going to cut-n-paste this entire thread.
The issue is (as stated way back):
is it fun or is it irresponsible behaviour?
whose behaviour was more outrageous - the driver with the kids, or the OPer tailgating at 90 mph (see math above)?
w/o question, the parent allowing children to roam around.
the OP who (momentarily) was getting close to the car at 90 mph, had a brief span of time where the occupants of their car was at potential risk. Assuming that they were all properly restrained, their own risk of injury was less than the unrestrained children in the other car.
the Parent, allowing children to roam around had (for however long a period of time they were on the road) 2 unrestrained people, who were at risk of serious injury even for minor corrective actions, not necessarily a full fledged accident.
So:
-
Car following: risk factor - if they were indeed tailgaiting, for the exact period of time that they were tailgaiting (and no more), there was some risk of injury, if there was an accident, if there were a ‘minor corrective action’ (swerve, bump etc.), there were not necessarily at risk.
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Car w/kids : risk factor - all unrestrained occupants were at risk for injuries should any event happen - minor corrective action, major/minor accident. and they were at such risk for the entire duration of their ride.
And, heathen, as has been pointed out to you over, and over, and over…
It is irresponsible behavior. Horribly irresponsible, since any slight change in speed/direction would cause little Jack and Jill to go hurtling out of the car.
The greater crime was committed by the person driving the BMW. Let’s review, shall we?
-BMW was speeding long before and probably long after Nightingale got the liscence plate. So, the BMW was breaking the law for a greater duration of time.
-BMW was breaking more laws for longer, since having an unrestrained child in the car, let alone two of them sticking their heads out the sunroof, is illegal.
-Nightingale was speeding, yes. However, she was doing so to be able to report someone else who was speeding. So, assuming that we’re only looking at those two cars, Nightingale’s speeding briefly raised the number of speeding cars to two. However, once Nightingale was done reporting, she stopped speeding, and presumably the BMW stopped speeding when it got pulled over. So, through a brief period of speeding, Nightingale lowered the number of speeding cars on the road to 0.
-There is, once again, the possiblity that Nightingale was not tailgating, since she could have read the tags from the other lane.
-Even if Nightingale was tailgating, in the event that the BMW had to slow down long enough to make said tailgating a problem, the unrestrained kids would most likely have been thrown from the car whether Nightingale hit them or not.
'Kay?
HAPPY HEATHEN –
As has been pointed out, thousands more were not raised, successfully or not, because they died as unrestrained passengers in traffic accidents.
Look, this isn’t that hard: Society as a whole has decided the following:
(1) Everyone in vehicles should be restrained – that’s why in the vast majority of jurisdictions, there are universal seatbelt laws: every person, regardless of age or position in the car, shall wear one.
(2) Children in vehicles should be restrained in a manner in keeping to their age and/or weight – which can mean anything from a backward-facing infant seat for a newborn to a booster-seat/seatbelt combination for a child approaching the age of six.
Society as a whole has determined that the cost to society of unrestrained drivers and passengers outweighs the (negligible) benefit of allowing people to roam around the inside of their cars while the car is in motion.
The thesis is that it is neither smart nor legal to allow kids to roam around freely inside the cab of a car or truck. Now, that it is illegal I trust we can take as a given. That leaves the question of whether it is smart. In that regard:
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Pointing to all the people who avoid the risk and therefore are not involved in an accident/injured/killed is irrelevant. Any cost-benefit analysis involves determining whether a risk of 1 in a 100 (or 1 in a 1000, or 1 in 1 million) is or is not okay. Unless your argument is that the benefits automatically outweigh the risks so long as an accident remains less likely than a successfully made trip?
-
Pointing out that children ought to be equally restrained in other situations, but are not, is likewise irrelevant. The OP’er did not say that she disapproved of unrestrained kids on planes, because she didn’t observe an unrestrained kid on a plane. She observed an unrestrained kid under circumstances in which their being unrestrained was neither legal nor (in her opinion) smart – in a speeding vehicle.
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Asserting that only those who live their lives perfectly in every way may criticize their neighbors is a red herring. Even if she did have to roar along at 90 mph to get the license number – well, slap her hand for that. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the actions going on in the other car.
The fact of the matter is that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, the number-one killer of children in America is highway accidents. Between 1990 and 1999, over 90,000 children under the age of 20 died in motor vehicle crashes, and eight million children were injured. Of them, only 60% were restrained. Now, if the NTSB is correct in asserting that seatbelts halve your chance of being killed in a wreck, that’s 18,000 kids per year who died because they were unrestained. (Take 90,000 dead kids; assume 60% were restrained; assume half of the remaining unrestrained kids would have lived if restrained.)
(All citations from the NTSB’s website.)
We as a society have historically made a series of determinations that stupid decisions by parents render them “unqualified” to raise their kids without government interference. That’s why you can’t send your kid down for a twelve hour day in a coalmine. That’s why you have to sent him or her to school. That’s why you can’t withhold life-saving medical treatment – no, not even if your religion requires it. This is just one more example of that decision being made by society as a whole. Now, you can sure try to argue that these are regulations that didn’t need to be made – interfering laws that didn’t need to be enacted – but, as I have said, in light of the statistics that appears to me to be a hard argument to make.
Even sillier is the idea that there is any real way to expect the unexpected – definitionally, there is not. I have been in two wrecks in the past three months. In the first, a deer sprang out in front of my car on a narrow road at night. Even anticipating that there might be deer on that road – which I knew – and even adjusting my behavior accordingly by driving more slowly and watching more carefully – which I did – I could not “expect” a deer to leap in front of my car. In the second, I was rear-ended by a person who did not understand the concept of a “safe driving distance” or a “safe stopping speed,” and the fact that I knew those concepts was of no use to me when he drove into my trunk. In both cases, an unrestrained child in my car would almost certainly have been hurt, and perhaps badly so. There is no way to “expect” such accidents. No one intends to get in an accident; that’s why they’re called “accidents.”
NIGHTENGALE saw a condition she knew to be illegal and believed to be dangerous. She called the appropriate authorities and reported it. The End. I am amazed that some would not only take her to task for being a busybody (if in fact she was – and I dont’ think she was – that was a judgment call that was hers to make), but to go beyond that to argue that the actions of the driver of the other car were not both illegal and dumb. It seems pretty obvious they were both, and therefore are not worth defending.
I’m not sure these are the issues, but even if they are:
Why on earth can’t the answer to both those questions be “Both”? An activity can be both fun and irresponsible. And the fact that activity B is “more outrageous” than activity A – granting that for argument only – does not mean that activity A was not “outrageous” and therefore unacceptable.
and, as stated repeatedly, letting the kids have such fun can, under certain circumstances, be reasonable.
(not while buzzing by somebody at 90, and not with some “safety for all!” bozo tailgating at 90, but sometimes)
'K?
When?
remember the part about clear, straight roads, etc?
are we going too fast for you?
clear straight roads of course have no deer nearby, no potholes, no other traffic, no cross streets, and certainly no cars on them ever have tires blow out.
My parents didn’t make my little brother wear a bike helmet because it was a quiet residential road with no dangers and he always road way off to the side, besides we all know how helmets aren’t fun to wear. Making him wear a helmet is almost as bad as wrapping him up in bubble wrap, isn’t it? Lord knows how many scars I got as a kid while riding my bike - but I had fun getting them!
He was hit and killed 6 1/2 years ago at the age of 7 riding his bike way off to the side of that quiet residential road. An old lady was driving approximately 20 mph, saw him, panicked, hit the gas instead of the brake, swerved, hit him, and crushed his skull killing him instantly.
Too bad he isn’t around to show off his childhood scars.
my sympathies for your loss.
accidents happen.
the question is:
where/when does fun become “irresponsible danger”?
compare/contrast:
Howard Hughes the air racer
v.
Howard Hughes the recluse.
which is preferable?
Your comparison is black and white. What about the gray areas inbetween?
Gah! That pisses me off so much!
[hijack] When my brother was 4 years old (granted now he’s 15) we were at a family reunion. A distant relative of my father had driven up to Philly from Virginia with his dog in the back of a pick up truck. The dog seemed fine for most of the day. My brother was sitting next to me at the picnic table, he slid down under the table to pet the dog. I swear I can still remember him saying, “Good Doggie.” The next thing I know I hear GRRR and snap and my brother crying.
Fucking 16 hours later after extensive plastic surgery and my baby brother almost losing an eye he was released from the hospital. The asshole refused to accept the blame for his dog attacking my brother. Not like a drive from Virginia to Pennsylvania in the back of a god damned pick up truck on a hot summer day wouldn’t have anything to do with the damn dog being in a foul mood. The dog was put down and we never really associated with that side of the family again. [/hijack]
But, yeah, I agree that totally should be illegal.