Did we say it was irony? The question was posed, but not answered I think.
Yes, I certainly think so. We do it all the time, when the burden/restriction on the citizen is considered reasonable. This is pretty much the point of all health and safety legislation, whether it be work safety, sports safety, food safety, whatever. You need to balance individual rights with whatever might be done to mitigate risk. If a law is out of line it’s likely to fail.
They have tried compromise approaches like that, and they have two problems. 1) They don’t begin to make the rider responsible for the full cost; they’re intended to allow the choice while not being prohibitively costly. 2) The same organization that organized the protest that prompted the OP protests these sorts of measures just as passionately:
The mentality is very much “I don’t care what the rationale is, I don’t wanna…”
I ride. I wear a helmet. I hate helmet laws.
I’ll make the decision to protect my pill, I don’t need the government to decide for me.
I drive. I wear seatbelts. I hate seatbelt laws.
I’ll make the decision to not be a projectile in a front end collion; I don’t need the government to make that decision for me.
I’m a paramedic. I’ve seen seatbelts save lives. I’ve seen them kill. I’ve seen helmets save lives. I’ve also seen them transform people in to vegetables with no hope of recovery.
Just my opinions.
But overall, would you admit that seatbelts and helmets save more lives than they take/disable?
The statistics don’t lie. Yes, they save more lives than they affect negatively. However, that does not change my opinion that such things do not need to be legislated. I have the facts. I make the decision.
How do seatbelts kill?
Poor taste, and it doesn’t make much sense either. If the man’s position had been that helmets do not improve safety, it would make more sense. However, it is much more likely that he simply felt that the helmet choice should be his to make.
Should every enforceable safety measure be mandated by law? Hell, driving a motorcycle with any attire is dangerous – why mess around with helmets at all? Ban motorcycles altogether! For that matter, helmets would doubtless make automobile crashes more survivable – should that be a law too?
If you think about it in terms of risk management, the law tends towards the sensible. Nobody suggests that you can eliminate all risk, but where you can make significant safety gains with mandated measures that don’t encroach unreasonably on your freedoms, that’s what’s going to happen.
Your analogy is not very strong, since very few people are likely to be persuaded that motorcycles present an intolerable risk in-and-of-themselves - and we do have mandated safety measures that provide the most mitigation of risk, without being unduly burdensome. Restraints and airbags do enough to keep your head safe that a helmet wouldn’t offer enough of an additional safety dividend to make it worthwhile. (He explains, just as if he weren’t wasting his time by answering a lame reductio ad absurdum as if it were a sincere question.)
The benefit of being helmetless is… what, exactly? And how does it compare with the tangible costs?
Not everyone has the facts. Regarding seatbelts in particular, why should children suffer from parental ignorance/stupidity?
Helmets I don’t care so much about, as you should learn enough in the process of learning to ride, getting licensed, and purchasing a bike to know the score, and it’s a lot harder to inflict harm on others through ignorance that way.
The benefit is your freedom. I don’t want rules telling me to wear a seatbelt. I don’t want rules telling me to wear a helmet, or a condom, or to brush my teeth after every meal. I don’t want my choice of dinner legislated. Just because it makes sense to you that it makes whatever activity safer doesn’t give you the right to force me to do it. Our freedoms have been slipping away for years, and that slippage has accelerated recently. Decide what is best for you and your family and leave me to decide what is best for me and mine. I would rather die today as a free man than live another 100 years living a risk-free boring existence. You want me to wear a helmet? Then you wear one too. There aren’t many activities, including walking, that wouldn’t be safer wearing one. However, if I choose not to, that should be no-one’s busness but my own. If that makes me stupid, then fine, I’m stupid. That’s also my right.
Yes, that is a fair description of what the law does in many cases. The question is, is that what it is doing in this case? And do you think that is the approach that should be taken?
Given that the lack of a helmet affects nobody other than the rider, I fail to see what business the state has in intervening in this situation.
If the goal is to make meaningful reductions in risk, banning motorcycles would have a much greater impact than requiring a helmet. A helmet is unlikely to save you when you hit something solid at speed. Of course, that would be very unpopular. But given that a fair number of posters here seem to feel that it is the government’s role to protect individuals from themselves, wouldn’t that be much more effective?
Who says they do enough to keep your head safe? Head trauma is often what people die from in car accidents and deaths from car accidents happen all the time. I would be willing to wager that a large portion of those deaths would be easily prevented through use of a helmet.
This shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out – many find it enjoyable to have the wind blowing through their hair, to not feel stifled and sweaty on a hot day, etc. Does this pale in comparison to the protection from possible head injury? To me, yes, but I cannot see how that is anyone’s choice to make other than the person on the motorcycle.
I would think that those of you seem to be concerned that someone’s misfortune might raise your health care costs by some miniscule amount would be supporting bare headed riders. Nearly every crash at high speed is going to result in lengthy hospital stays – helmeted or not – unless the person dies immediately, of course. Every rider without a helmet is one less costly hospital stay you need to be worried about…
MisterW
I’d fully support the let em ride free and die and save me some money at the same time option. And your point may be valid. But, then again, I suspect many fairly minor accidents are turned into million dollar /lifetime disasters by just a “minor” head bump.
Would you support higher insurance rates for helmetless riders if the actual data suggested that was what was needed to keep the insurance profitable?
I don’t know what the paramedic is talking about, but every once in a while seatbelt-less riders will be thrown clear of the twisting crushing metal and survive. Assuming that in some infrequent cases, some dead person who was buckled in would have been one of those lucky people thrown clear, it’s fair to say that seatbelts have killed some small handful of people.
After actually thinking about it for a bit, I’m afraid I’m coming up pro-choice on this issue. I’m not a rider, don’t want to be and don’t care for people I know who have made it an integral part of their persona–it really has no effect on me. I think there are things that can be done to mitigate the generally increased healthcare costs associated with helmetlessness–maybe holding the injured party personally accountable for the care the ER was not allowed to refuse, making the same people “fly standby” for physical therapy and getting bumped when someone else needs the time slot, etc. Basically “Fine, go without the helmet, but recover from the consequences ENTIRELY at your own inconvenience.” Same for those who eschew seatblts, for that matter.
I entirely agree that people should have the right to assume risks that pertain only to themselves, and that they should also be held accountable for the consequences.
I can’t speak for every state, but every one I’ve been involved with doesn’t allow medical payments coverage for motorcycle insurance. Bodily injury liability, for injuries to others caused by the rider? Yes. Med pay for the rider? Nope. If such coverage is provided I could get behind an exclusion for braincare in the event the rider is hatless.
Right, I’m sure there are plenty of cases where the lack of a helmet makes the incident much more expensive than it might have been. I was just pointing out – since I hadn’t seen the other side of it mentioned – that there may be just as many (or more) cases where what would have been an expensive medical nightmare turns into a cost free personal tragedy.
If insurance rates operated such that they were taking nto account all other types of risks that individuals engaged in, that would be fair enough. I’m not sure that is how I would want insurance to operate, but that is straying from the topic at hand.
As pointed out in the GQ Do Seatbelts Sometimes Kill? thread, that’s highly unlikely to actually happen. If you get ejected, what happens is all that force that would otherwise go into reducing the car into “twisting crushing metal” is instead applied directly to your squishy human body.