It’s been established, even by the pitee, that drivers who don’t wear seatbelts are a danger to more than themselves.
If only it were so simple that they were the only ones who end up killed, yah?
I take it you are not an EMT or otherwise responsible for cleaning up ejected bodies?
Also, having your seatbelt on allows you to retain control over your car if you have a minor incident. Having a seatbelt on can make the difference between a minor fender bender and a pileup. This is a bit less of an issue with modern cars with bucket seats as opposed to the bench seat design of older cars.
We do have laws to mitigate the damage from the first two, and the latter is actually pretty well regulated.
Agreed, you can disagree with a law, you can advocate against a law, you can protest against a law. But if you are paid to enforce the law, then your personal feelings about it shouldn’t enter into it.
But then, there’s a reasonable chance that I’ll need a new heart or other spare parts at some point in my life, so for that reason, I can selfishly and cynically oppose motorcycle helmet laws.
How? because when they got ejected they hit someone standing there? You get in a head on collision with a car or a bridge abutment, or a tree, no one else is affected by you not wearing a seatbelt.
You are driving along, and you go into a skid. You are pushed by the forces into the passenger seat, and now, instead of being able to recover from the skid, your car is now an unguided missile.
There are a number of scenarios where a minor accident or incident can cause you to lose control over your car if you are not properly secured in the driver’s seat, turning it into a major accident.
I can find more with a bit of googling, but here’s one example that I found in a few seconds.
Because somebody has to do the cleanup after, and that’s generally cheaper/easier when people are alive than dead. And knock-on effects can be reduced if somebody is merely injured and not dead and can exert some control over the situation. And that’s also reflected in insurance premiums.
In the hypothetical world where nobody else is affected, go nuts with the philosophical debate on whether or not it’s ok to let them die. But in the real world, seat belts reduce costs for the rest of us. Human beings are pretty bad at estimating the true cost of externalities, and this is one example of that.
Also, a seatbelt-less person in a care effectively becomes an unguided missile within the car, injuring others in the car when their 11 pound solid noggin smashes against them.
Police in Seattle haven’t been allowed to pull over drivers for adult seatbelt noncompliance as the primary reason for years now, for better or worse.
I suppose if we wanted to pass a law that if you are not wearing your seatbelt, then you get no medical treatment unless you can pay upfront in cash, then at least those unbelted drivers aren’t foisting their irresponsibility off on the rest of us financially.
Not sure how that would fly. Maybe EMT’s just carry euthanasia drugs with them to kill any unbelted drivers or passengers so that we don’t have to pay for their injuries. It does need to be something that won’t spoil any useful organs.
Tough law to write, but it seems to be what people want. @Just_Asking_Questions, maybe write your congressional representative about this.
Said by PKBites:
Besides, if it’s so important why is the fine only ten lousy dollars?
Because your local government (I presume state government) is incompetent, not because it isn’t important. Here in Ontario the fine for not wearing a seat belt varies from a minimum of $200 up to $1000, depending on circumstances, plus two demerit points. The demerit points mean that if you persist in not wearing a seat belt you’ll eventually get your license suspended. Also your insurance rates quite properly may go way up.
This sort of slippery-slope argument puts you at risk of being regarded as the same sort of libertarian moron as PKBites himself. As I just said above, seat belt laws are taken seriously in Ontario. So is texting while driving. But anyone who wants to can still smoke (tobacco or cannabis – both are legal), ride a motorcycle, or eat cheeseburgers. The principle at work here is called “common sense”, also sometimes referred to as “sanity”. The absence of sanity leads to slippery-slope arguments being used to preclude any laws at all, which may be the sort of anarchy that is a libertarian’s paradise but is not the way civilized people wish to live.
That may help for some of the externalities but not all of them. To meme, we live in a society. There’s just no way to totally divorce the costs we impose on society without totally removing ourselves from society.
Yeah, around here in some of the ‘nicer’ parts of town, that’s often used as an excuse when the real issue was DWB (Driving While Brown/Black). Unfortunate but so it goes.
Where the fuck does this come from? I certainly never said that. Sheesh. I think some innocent posters are being hurt by your unsecured flying invective.
I think if some guy has a heart attack and the EMTs see cigarettes in his pocket, they should just pack it up and go back to the station. Why should my taxes pay for that? Let the dead guy’s family clean up the body. How’s that sound? Similar?
Correction: A human head weighs 8 lbs.
Cite:
I was going to comment about that. These little “ticky-tack” type violations have often been used as pretexts for a pullover in the hopes of finding something bigger or to check up on the occupants of a car. (Yes, I understand one’s definition of “ticky-tack” may vary.) I had a friend who kept getting pulled over because he owned something that looked like a “drug dealer’s car” back in the early 90s, always on pretexts like rolling a stop or not signaling a lane change or whatever they could come up with, but never once did he actually get cited. They just wanted to check up on him and see what’s up. It was a bit of a running joke with us at how often it was happening. He got rid of the car a couple months later and, mysteriously, his problems of getting pulled over every week disappeared.
So… here again I just want to point out how this might make more sense if evaluated from a more “social justicey” (my words) standpoint. Where previously I noted, only half in jest, that there might actually be more danger to a driver from a traffic stop conducted by pkbites than from not wearing a seatbelt, because pkbites seems like the kind of jackass that would shoot you for reaching for your seatbelt (how does he know you’re not reaching for a gun?), there is also an argument in favor of smaller fines because people like pkbites are particularly adept at pulling over and citing predominantly black, predominantly poor individuals, and a more sizable fine might actually be world-shattering for them if they can’t pay it and so end up with additional charges or a debt that goes into collections. In short, higher fines have the potential to feed into the criminalization of poverty.
It’s worth considering, also, whether and to what extent actual enforcement of the law is necessary to obtain the benefit of social acceptance for seatbelt wearing, and the concomitant disdain for non-seatbelt wearing, with the law giving it moral force even absent rigorous enforcement. It may be that the shifting social attitude toward seatbelt wearing—with the existence of the law contributing only indirectly and its enforcement almost not at all—may be the real power driving people to wear seatbelts. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be illegal to drive without a seatbelt. It just supports the notion that a nominal fine, infrequently applied, may be more than sufficient to obtain the desired end without contributing excessively to other social ills (such as providing another avenue for racial discrimination in application, or the effective criminalization of poverty).
You claimed that an unbelted driver harms no one but themselves. That’s not true, but at least I shouldn’t have to pay for their medical treatment.
Smokers do actually pay higher insurance costs than non-smokers in most states, so at least they are paying for their choice, unlike the unbelted driver.
You are the one that is saying that people should be held solely responsible for their choices. Now, personally, I don’t think that that’s a good way to look at it, but I am just pointing out the consequences that come about if you have your way.
Many states, Ohio included, do not allow a cop to pull you over just because you are not wearing your seatbelt. I don’t have a problem with that at all. If nothing else, that’s the law, and not a particular cop’s preference for what the law should be. I don’t know what the law is in @pkbites’s state, but if that’s not the law there, I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t pull people over for not wearing a seatbelt, but there are some people he chooses to pull over, and uses them not wearing a seatbelt as an excuse.
Fines that don’t get paid don’t necessarily go to collections, they often result in jail time.
But that’s a whole different discussion.
A just society doesn’t deny medical care when medical care is available. Lacking the ‘ability’ to murder people through inaction, the next best step is to reduce the public burden of caring for those who are no longer capable of contributing. Automotive laws and licensing are one way. So are most social services that keep people healthy and working.
I mean, you can reduce it to cold numbers if you care to. A healthy person is working and paying taxes. A person who’s been bankrupted by medical bills is a drain. Even the horrifying “let them die” outcome is likely to create burdens since children who experience trauma (such as being orphaned in a car crash) are more likely to have academic and social problems down the road.
This is why fines should be weighted by income.
I don’t disagree with you on anything you said.
However, @Just_Asking_Questions is claiming that not wearing a seatbelt doesn’t cost anyone anything other than that individual. I am just describing how the world would have to be if that were true.
I don’t want to live in that world, but I have no problem describing it to people who advocate for it.