I expect that you are correct, but I believe that all medicines and drugs should be freely available to adults. Any manufacturer, distributor or retailer making false claims can be sued, but as long as information is accurate, the purchasing decision should be the individual’s.
After all, I can go out and buy Round-up and ingest it if I want. Why not Oxycontin or Prozac?
I don’t see where a politcal party is relevant to where you feel the line should be drawn between individual liberty and “public good”.
But, to answer the question - I’d vote for a very limited role for government in this area.
Is that why speed limit laws are so widely and conscientiously obeyed? :dubious:
Most Americans are happy to have the government legislate other peoples’ activities, not their own.
That’s quite a simplification of the situation, but since this is about helmet laws and not the pharmaceutical industry I’ll pass on the argument now that I’ve stated I don’t think this is a good example for your position.
Hmmm… in the past, it’s usually been “do without safety equipment for the same pay”, not more.
That’s the big question, isn’t it? Who defines “stupid”? Who determines “safe enough”?
One of my big problems with a lot of laws passed for the “public good” in regards to safety is they take a one-size-fits-all approach making no allowances for education, experience, or skill. Nor do they allow for exceptions when reasionable and necessary. Add in the courts and ambulance chasing lawyers and it gets ridiculous.
Airbags (to keep in the transportation theme of things) are a great example. The way the regs were originally written, they had restrain an “average man” - IIRC between 5’8" and 5’10", 180 lbs - in a crash of a given speed (which I can’t recall at the moment) and unbelted. Which is all find and good IF you’re an “average man”. Where’s the problem? Well, just for starters, 51% of the population isn’t male, meaning they tend to be smaller, lighter, and have less muscle mass to cushion the impact of the airbag when it deploys. As I pointed out to a friend of mine, if an airbag goes off in a car it would hit him in the chest and me in the face. Sure, I’d rather suffer a broken nose and/or cheekbone than die impaled on a steering wheel, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about the busted face. Although airbags have unquestionably saved lives in serious accidents, they’ve also decapited children in fender-benders that would have caused no harm whatsoever otherwise. And you can’t turn the damn things off in a car (in my pickup you do have the option - for the passenger side only). This “you can’t turn it off” situation makes airbags potentially deadly to those with frail bones, dwarves, and the like who have a “safety device” forced on them without exception. Although they eventually did allow for folks to have them deactivated for such reasons, virtually no mechanic will do so because of the potential liability. I find this intolerable. Either design the things so they’re adjustable, or give folks the option to turn them off when the situation warrants it. If they’re foolish enough to turn them off when they shouldn’t… I find that more acceptable than opposite alternative.
The distinction? If you turn it off by your own choice you are volunteering to assume more risk. If you can’t turn it off you are having the risk forced upon you.
But I (and others) are not convinced that there actually ARE this legion of brain-damaged former motorcycle riders out there. Certainly in children, bicycles are a far greater cause of brain injury than motorcycles, yet there are not nearly as many mandatory helmet laws for bicycles, nor are the penalties for noncompliance as steep in the ones that do exist compared to seatbelt and motorcycle helmet laws. Far more survivable head injuries occur in cars than on motorcycles, if only because so much more driving is done in cars.
As for the idea that post-head injury rehab drives up insurance costs… MANY insurance policies specifically exclude “cognitive rehab” services, in-home care, and other requirements of the head-injury and longer-term disabled. (I happen to work in the health insurance industry, so that’s what I base that on) So that’s a bogus argument in my book. Frankly, a lot of that post-head injury rehab has never been proven to work. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. Post-brain injury rehab is not as advanced an area as, say, rehab for a lost foot.
See, these days a lot more people survive head injuries than 20 or 30 years ago… so NOW we’ve got a big population of brain-disabled adults and we’re just not sure how to help them because, as I said, it wasn’t that long ago they wouldn’t have survived at all. But this group arose after the helmet-required laws were passed and are a result of better trauma care, not helmets or lack of them.
Sorry, DSeid, laws for the “public good” are a sign of a society that refuses to take responsibility for their own actions. The list is endless and the laws basically unenforceable without implementing a police state. But that’s another debate.
I was actually lurking in this thread because I was deeply involved in getting the “helmet law” repealed in Texas a few years back. I was wondering if the pro and con positions had changed to any degree. They haven’t. When we finally got down to the “nuts and bolts” in Austin it was all about the “bucks” and the power of the insurance lobby.
The compromise added two provisions to the bill.
I’d have to see a cite for that. I can’t believe anyone would be so stupid (or lack the cognitive ability to think things through) as to imagine that seat belts on motorcycles would be a good idea.
I took the liberty of forwarding this to a talk-radio host in St. Louis and he used it at the end of his program today. I hope you don’t mind.
Johnny L.A.---- I’ll see if I can find you one but my source was from a conversation with a lobbyist for the insurance industry. It is possible that he pitched it out to get our reaction. The subject was not brought up again to my knowledge. It would make a good joke but this guy wasn’t smiling.
Johnny L.A.---- I’ll see if I can find you one but my source was from a conversation with a lobbyist for the insurance industry. It is possible that he pitched it out to get our reaction. The subject was not brought up again to my knowledge. It would make a good joke but this guy wasn’t smiling.
Yo, Johnny - I work in the insurance industry and while I don’t know if there’s an organized lobby, it IS a statement I hear altogether too often, usually followed by “well, if they save lives in cars think of how many more lives they would save on motorcycles!”
You and I know, of course, this is a statement that can only be based on ignorance, stupidity, or both. Problem is, the world has no shortage of either. The insurance industry is dominated by risk-averse people (we 10% or so who do “dangerous things” on the weekend being a distinct minority) who never experience the things they wish to control, yet feel qualified to render opinions on them nonetheless.
[insert a smiley with its hand over the forehead and eyes and saying, “Aiyiyi.”]
Next time someone says that, you should ask them why it’s “safe” for a seat-belted motorcyclist to have his leg ground into hamburger down to the bone because it’s trapped between the road and the machine as he and it slide together as a unit.
Part of the problem is over-selling “safety”.
This leads to stupidity based thoughts like Motorcycle Helmet = No Brain Injury. It doesn’t. You can still be killed, maimed, or brain injured while wearing a helmet. It’s just less likely you will be brain injured or killed while wearing a helmet. (Note, I did not mention reduced odds of maiming.)
Likewise, folks get the idea drummed into their heads that Seat Belt = Survival to the point that they no longer think. A seat belt does not garauntee survival, lack of maiming, etc. etc. It just changes the odds. Indeed, improperly used seat belts increase the chances of certain types of abdominal and spine injuries.
True safety (in my mind) requires some basic understanding of the laws of physics and some thought to what you are doing. Basic things, like the faster you go the harder you hit, and the more stuff you can put between you and the point of impact the better. In addition, if you are on the outside of something heavy and fast and you’re about to have an accident you’re better off departing said heavy, fast object - you yourself will still be a fast-moving object, but a lighter one and therefore will hit whatever you’re about to hit with less force. And, of course, there’s the leg-ground-off-on-the-road-until-it-looks-like-a-pencil-stub sceanario you mentioned, Johnny. But, as I said, such things are outside the mental universe of some of the folks I work with. If you got them to understand the problem involved their knee-jerk reaction would mostly be to say “Those things are too dangerous, we should just make them illegal” (Again, based on past conversations and experience with these sorts)
I could give a dozen more examples of knee-jerk bad safety opinions based on ignorance of the activity involved.
I hear you Broomstick. I personally think the only way to make motorcycles safe would be to make electric starters illegal but don’t see that happening anytime soon.
While the NHTSA regs were written to require the vehicle to pass a 30 mph crash test (since lowered to 25 mph) with a 50th percentile male dummy, NHTSA and the manufacturers also ran crash tests using other dummies, including small females, large males, and children. The results of those tests indicated that occupants of pretty much any size would not be injured by airbag deployment unless they were extremely close to the airbag (i.e., just a couple inches away from the dashboard) at the time it went off. This was viewed–quite justifiably–as a reasonable risk to run for the sake of the hundreds and thousands of lives that airbags save every year.
To be sure, current airbag designs are much more sophisticated and significantly less likely to cause injuries from their deployment. It is also indisputable that cars were, on the whole, safer with airbags than without, and there are a whole lot of people alive today solely because of them.
I am completely unaware of any evidence that a child has ever been “decapitated” by an air bag. A non-trivial number of children were killed by early airbags, but let’s not go all Fangoria where it’s not accurate.
First off Broomstick, that was “liberterian” not “Liberterian” Only the latter is a political party.
How much public good is served by mandatory helmet laws?
Most studies show that fatalities decrease by up to 40 % when states pass helmet laws. States that repealed helmet laws have seen motorcycle fatality rate increases of over 70% and one increased 183%!
The economic costs to society of helmet law repeals has been estimated at over $180,000,000.
Do these benefits justify the imposition of making people wear helmets? That depends on how much of an imposition you think it is.
Helmets do not assure survival in a crash; they increase the odds substantially though. Decreasing the fatalities by a third seems significant enough to me to mandate helmet use.
Societal benefit vs imposition upon personal freedoms. It is not either or. It is a balance of interests.
CITE! CITE! That’s pure BS.
Are you saying this as an example of stupid unsubstantiated safety reasons (such as seatbelts on a bike), or is there really a logic behind this? 
By the way, some bikes DO have seatbelts, you know. Oddly enough, this eradicates the need for a helmet as well, in the legal sense.
Except, of course, that there are still all those unsophisticated older airbags out there on the road.
Leaving aside the personal injury lawyer sites…
From NOVA - you do have to scroll down about 4/5’s of the way through site to find the mention of decapitation.
Second letter on this page, another scroll-down
Under the header “air bag injuries”
Yes, my posting is occassionally graphic, but in general not exaggerated
Cite, please.
Cite, please.
To you, perhaps. My position is that if people don’t want to buckle up or wear motorcycle helmets that’s THEIR problem - I’ve yet to see evidence that this truly costs either society or me any significant sums in relation to the money spent on other items.
True - but I tend to lean more towards “personal freedom” than most people. Maybe it’s because I don’t believe my total purpose in life is to benefit others - yes, it’s a good thing (and I do my part to help others when I can), but not my main reason for being.
On a regular basis I engage in activities that carry a definite risk of death or injury - if they were outlawed I would be safer (and considerably wealthier), but a much less happy human being. What good is it to make me “safe” so I live 100 years, but it’s a 100 years of misery and depression because I can’t do the things that make me happy?
Sort of reminds me of how a poster in another thread told me I should give up my “surplus liberty” for their peace of mind. Um… let’s not go there.
I don’t think helmet laws will throw anyone into deep, dark, depression, but it’s on a slope between total freedom (which is not workable) and total safety (which might as well be prison).
I think there is a role for government regulation of safety equipemnt, including regulations regarding use, but I view any new regulation or mandate with a great deal of suspicion. As I said, I could name a dozen idiotic “safety” ideas I’ve heard proposed over the years, and not just with motorcycles or cars.
Yes, airbags HAVE saved lives… but they’ve also killed people who would have otherwise lived. Understandably, any new technology is going to have some problems. I can see that. However, when I went to look at new cars in the late 90’s I saw altogether too many instances where, in order for me to reach the pedals, I had to pull the seat up until I was on top of the steering wheel (and the airbag). Whereupon the dealer would say “you should sit at least 14 inches from the steering wheel”. Huh? If I did that I couldn’t reach all the controls. THAT’s not safe, either. And being told “Well, maybe your husband should do the driving” isn’t a valid solution, either :rolleyes:
(The correct answer, by the way, is “pedal extensions”. Which, of course, the dealer never seems to have on hand. Me, yeah, I’d make the effort to get them - a lot of other folks wouldn’t. Which is one reason why the accidents statistics have instances of “properly restrained” (meaning seatbelted) adults being severely injured or killed by airbags)
Likewise, if you mandate helmets, unless it’s done properly, you’re going to have some problems arising from the helmets themselves. My answer to that (assuming we’re in a situation with a helmet law) is better helmets, and teaching people how to choose one that actually fits. (I have a theory/opinion that most helmet “problems” come from a poor fit, but no proof so don’t bother asking for a cite on that one) Just like the solution to airbag problems is a better airbag. And pedal extensions offered at the dealership for those who are short. Or an option to turn one off if you do have a physically frail driver. No one should be obligated to put themselves at greater risk because of a “safety” law. That’s just wrong.
Back to motorcycles - yeah, you should wear boots and leathers while riding, too. However, if you’re riding through Arizona in the summertime I could see a serious risk of heatstroke from that, too - in which case, although the risk IN an accident is greater with lighter clothing, the chances OF an accident are less if the driver isn’t about to pass out from the heat. And you’re almost always better off avoiding an accident rather than trying to survive one.
That is one of my biggest gripes about the safety laws - they’re written with no possibility of exception. It’s one-size-fits-all.
The cites cites cites:
JAMA 1994 Nov 16;272(19):1506-11
Med Care 1992 Sep;30(9):832-45
JAMA 1990 Nov 14;264(18):2395-9
J Health Polit Policy Law 1983 Spring;8(1):76-98
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (A CDC publication)
June 17, 1994 / 43(23);423,429-431
Quite true, and those vehicles are significantly safer overall because of it. But like the warning label says, stick the kids in the back seat.
As for decapitation, I certainly won’t fault you for making that claim in light of those cites, but I’m still skeptical. The plaintiff’s lawyers I’ve known would have loved to have gotten something like that in front of a jury, but I’ve never even seen them mention such a thing.
Some of your stats are here.
http://www.geocities.com/rt_66.geo/helmet.html
Coldfire: I understand that motorcycles are regarded more as a means of transportation than a recreational sport but the skill of the American biker went to hell with the advent of the “button”.
