Florida will start enforcement of our new primary seat belt law. I feel better now that even more scarce police resources will be diverted from violent crime to enforce personal choices on Florida residents.
I was always proud of Florida for resisting this for a long time, but we finally caved.
I like Gov. Crist’s quote “The most important function of government is to protect.”
Is he serious? That should be “protect the strong from oppressing the weak” not protect people from themselves. Terrible.
There isn’t an LEO in the world who is going to choose ticketing your unbelted posterior to responding to a violent crime. The only time this is going to show up - like in other states which have already passed seat belt laws - is if you aren’t wearing your seat belt when you get pulled over or come up on a checkpoint.
It’s also less about your personal choice than the danger and cost you pose to others. If you are not restrained in a collision, and there are others in the car, you’ve just become a potentially lethal missile. If you, for any reason, cannot pay the medical bills which are astronomically higher for unrestrained injuries, the rest of us unfortunate taxpayers eat the cost.
If there were a way in which you could ensure that all your passengers were adults who consented to the danger of being squashed by your mass during a collision, and if you had signed some manner of enforceable quitclaim on medical treatment if you were unrestrained in a collision, then I would oppose the law.
There isn’t, and you’re not even being forced to wear a seatbelt. You’re just being required to pay up front for the costs you’ll likely inflict on the rest of us.
Anyway, this law protects the smart passengers from the stupid passenger flying around the car during an accident. It protects tax payers and health insurance customers from picking up the tab for deadbeat stupid drivers with no seatbelt and no health insurance. It protects society from cripples living off of social security when they would otherwise have survived the accident with a few scratches. It protects the children of idiot drivers from being orphaned by their parents. I could probably go on.
75 bucks per infraction in Michigan. easy money, very little danger. Sometimes they just tack it on to people they are getting for speeding or pissing off a cop.
It can also be a convenient excuse to pull someone that isn’t a white soccer mom driving a mini-van over and see if they’re up to no good. More convenient than the old “One of your taillights is out” excuse.
So if you’re running drugs or stealing garden gnomes then you’d best buckle up.
From the stats I can get from the U.S. census website, there were 3,374 traffic fatalities in 2006. Florida has a rate of 6.2 murders per 100,000 people. Based on a 18 million or so in Florida, that would work out to 1,134 murders per year. (if my math is correct)
When people complain because police pull them over for a traffic violation and ask if the police should be focusing on more important crimes, I am reminded that I am far more likely to die in a traffic accident than be murdered. So perhaps it is about protecting people.
I agree with the OP. I’m certainly no libertarian but I’m on record as saying seat belt laws are wrong. Wearing seat belts is inarguably the right thing to do - but it shouldn’t be mandated by law.
Driving a car at a high speed is likely to have an effect on other people. Not wearing a seat belt, for all reasonable purposes, is not. The overwhelming majority of people who would be injured by somebody not wearing a seat belt are the people not wearing them. If you eliminate that group, what you have left are a statistically insignificant group of people who were injured because somebody else wasn’t wearing a seatbelt - which is probably no larger than the statistically insignificant group of people who were injured because they were wearing a seatbelt. And I also don’t subscribe to the often raised issue of injuries to society - individuals should not have their rights reduced because other people feel they have an interest in them. You don’t owe your life to anyone else. So my opinion is that people should be allowed to make stupid decisions if they’re the ones who will suffer the direct consequences.
(1) People should not use terms like “statistically insignificant” if they don’t know what it means. Notably, “statistically insignificant,” unlike one connotation of plain old “insignificant,” does not mean “very small.”
(2) Who doesn’t wear their seatbelts? Honestly, this is like passing a law to require people to wipe their asses after they take a dump. Technically, yes, I guess it is a curtailment of your liberty to go unwiped. But who does that?
Cry me a river. Folks who don’t want to wear their seatbelts are fools, and I doubt they are bright enough to pilot a 3000 pound hunk of metal. On the first violation, they will all be forced to drive microcars w/50cc engines when I am king. Seatbelts are a safety device, like headlights. You wearing it protects me from prosecution/trauma in the event we get into an otherwise minor accident which would have killed an unbelted driver.
Heck, I 'd wear my helmet while driving all the time if the wife didn’t make fun of me for it. I’ve rolled a vehicle. Afterward, I drove it home because I was wearing my seatbelt while it was on the roof. Without it, I’d almost assuredly have been out the window, under the vehicle, and dead.
Additionally, the cops don’t need this as manufactured PC to pull you over. They can always say your license plate light is not bright enough, pull you over, go on a fishing trip for violations in your car, and have it stick in most places in the US. If you’re not wearing your seatbelt, it’s just gonna be another fine they tack on to your day after already pulling you over for something else.