This is a retarded arguement. Hey, if you don’t like the laws, move to Canada! Yeah, that works. This is my country, a democracy, if the government doesn’t act justly, it’s my duty to raise issue with it. Sure, if I’m the minority and people like the thought of living in a police state for their own protection, then fine, I’m out. But if people see these supposedly minor infringements on liberty and the complete unrestrictions of law enforcement as anything less than the totalitarianism that it begets, they are blind.
You’re half right. And missing the point as completely as you possibly can.
In 25-30 years when seatbelts have been second nature to everyone their whole lives, everyone with wear them. Thats absolutely a good thing.
But you know what else, there’ll still be a stupid archaic law on the books which allows the cops to pull you over without cause. So you’ll be driving around in a super-futuristic car that automatically restrains the driver to the seat without any discomfort or additional, albeit unlikely, risk factors. But Mr. Government Enforcement Professional will still be able to pull you over because he doesn’t like something about the way things looked. He’ll be able to ask you where you;re headed, your purpose, ask you to take a breathalizer, and snoop around the inside of your car for “contraband”. Maybe that oh-so-useful law you loved in 1998 will seem a little more shortsighted to you.
Look, I conceed that seatbelt laws do increase usage (though I believe that, as featherlou points out, that non-usage is generational). Legislating it will make alot of those old codgers who’d prefer not to like in the good 'ole days wear them when they normally wouldn’t. I wore them before it became law, just like the rest of my family and just about everyone I knew. But the reason for the distinction I drew is this. That doesn’t make the law a good one! You can make alot of laws that will indeed improve compliance to things that are good for the society on one level. But that doesn’t make the law a good one or a just one.
You could raise the punishment for shoplifting to $5000 and 90 days in jail, minimum. I bet shoplifting rates would plummet, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
You could make it illegal to have unprotected sex on welfare because it would save society millions of dollars in medical and chuild rearing costs. Doesn’t mean that you should suspend human rights to do it though.
You’ll probably call those examples ridiculous and extreme. Making the “slippery slope” straw man defense, but guess what, those are close parallels to the types of restriction they have in China. Keep jusifying new laws based on your logic and in 50 years we’ll be there.
Fact of the matter is this, there are thousands of different activities and lifestyles that are risky and/or are a drain on society to varying degrees. You cannot allow the government to outlaw them, giving them the right to search and detain with minimal cause, based on the arguement that it costs me money in the long run. (Nevermind the fact that any savings are going straight to the insurance companies pockets in this case, your rates aren’t going to go down.)
If you did that, skydiving and xtreme sports would all be illegal. Burning candles indoors would be illegal. Sunbathing would be illegal. Down the line.
Laws are very important. The govern the way we live and are neary always perpetual. People are far to carefree and shortsighted in the manner in which they are willing to pass them.
Find a way to make seatbelt usage compulsory, I’m all for it, just don’t get the police involved in my life to do it.
Greater good? Frontiers? What’s next, citing Vulcan dogma about the needs of the many?
All laws, no matter how well-intentioned, give power to the state while robbing liberty from the individual. Of course laws are necessary - but there are a few people who believe punative laws that try to protect people from themselves are unnatural and unnecessary.
My Collectivist Nanny State…Love It Or LEAVE It! :dubious:
China, North Korea and the former Soviet Union must be really, really civilized. You’d probably love it there.
My sister would be alive today if she had worn a seat belt. So would her three friends who died with her.
I wear my seatbelt always, including my trips to the cemetary to see my sister.
I have no feelings on the laws one way or another. To me it’s like making a law forbidding you to stick a butter knife in an electrical outlet. It’s a common sense thing, not a legal issue.
To featherlou and any others that are terrified of driving and are all for total safety. I say BS. You have already engaged in risk assessment and taken only the parts that you want.
It is a proven fact that helmets save lives and injury in car wrecks. Yet not one here is saying that they wear them on a regular basis.
How many race car drivers wear them on the street? They know how good they are but their desire to be free or their risk management ideas or their whatever allows them to rationalize their way out of doing it.
Wearing helmets would at least halve the injury rate in 90% of accidents. So why are you all not advocating the wearing of helmets?
Because your risk assessment in your own heads says it is not worth it which flies in the face of proven fact.
I try to consider my loved ones in all that I do but my being alive and an absolute bastard to them because I am so unhappy with life is not a good trade off just to never be unsafe.
All those that are for safety should use 5 point harnesses, helmets and never speed and demand that this become law. If they don’t, then they are just griping because one persons risk assessment is different than theirs…
First of all, the civil liberties argument is costing US lives. People who wear seat belts dies unnecessarily because of the USA’s unwillingness to legislate in this area. Why? See the end of this post.
Although I sort-of said that I didn’t understand your argument, that’s not really true: I did. My difficulty is I don’t understand why you see laws as poor ways of achieving desirable social ends compared with (say) markets, peer pressure or any of the other things that we react to.
It’s just demonstrably something that works as part of a mix of acitivities required to persuade road users to comply with a desirable behaviour. If it’s the best way. then why not use it? If I could agree that it’s unnecessary because of generational changes then fair enough … but the evidence has been available for the safety benefits of belt usage in the USA for as long as everywhere else. Yet belt usage in the USA is lower. It doesn’t seem to be enough!
Furthermore, US cars are LESS SAFE because of this civil liberties issue. The US legislation since the eighties required more aggressive airbags to cope with the nutty minority that wouldn’t take care of themselves. Everyone else (the sane voluntarists) had to put up with these, and their disbenefits.
Cars sold in Europe and the US often (usually) have different safety systems for this reason, and the European one is better because it doesn’t have the unbelted compromise.
The NHTSA has been forced to struggle with this, and first slackened off the safety laws to give them time to think of a solution. Now they’re coming back with “smart airbags”, but this is all more complex than it would be if manufacturers could make a working assumption that US citizens wear seat belts.
You don’t think the police have anything better to do than go haring after drivers who might potentially not be wearing a seatbelt? In Calgary, you can practically drive your car buck naked with a big fat joint in one hand and an open beer in the other and not get pulled over, because we have way too few police to bother with “minor” infractions. I (of course) don’t know what enforcement is like everywhere else in North America, but getting all worked up about the remote possibility of it actually being enforced seems like a tempest in a teapot to me. And if you’re not actually doing anything illegal, why do you care if the police ask you where you’re going and what you’re doing?
You know what this sounds like to me? It sounds like people who don’t want the laws to *affect *them, but are probably more than happy to have laws protecting them.
(As for wearing helmets in the car, I’ve never thought of that before. If they legislated it, I would wear them, because I would assume that they had done some research before passing a law, and wearing helmets is the right thing to do.)
Did you just make that up? Because if you have some real data that shows wearing helmets in addition to using seat belts and airbags significantly reduces injuries [and their related cost to society] on public roads then I might be convinced to advocate them.
But we’re not talking about helmets, or sky diving, or un-protected sex, or the police state of China, or any of the other plentiful straw men being paraded around in this thread. We’re talking about seat belt laws. In New York [the first state to pass such a law] in 1984, the year the law was enacted, compliance was about 16%. The next year it was 57%, and in 2003 it was 85%. [cite] To me that’s pretty compelling evidence of the effectiveness of legislation.
Also, in NY at least [which is a primary enforcement state], the fact that you might not be wearing a seat belt is not probably cause to pull you over. A police officer must observe a front seat passenger or passenger under 16 not wearing a seat belt to stop you. So the opinion that seat belt laws can be used as some kind of PATRIOT Act on the highway is ridiculous.
I obviously meant “probable cause.”
I did not know you were Canadian…
If you can’t see why a person would object to police pulling them aside and questing you for no reason, it can never be explained to you.
You think you can even drive down here with an open beer can, come on down and learn what the prison system is like, cause you are going.
We have a LOT of police that only do traffic work. we have many towns that a large part of their revenue comes from traffic fines…
You are right, you do not have a clue about much of this county it seems.
Also, since none of the laws you want to put on us will affect you, I wonder what your persistence on this subject is about. You want us to be as controlled by our government as you are by yours?
Now I see where this bit about all medical is paid by the poor public man is coming from. I hear so much good about the health care system up there.
But keep chipping away, you might get nuff folks to agree with you and get laws passed that you approve of. You seem to have the reasonable and correct way for us to live our lives.
Well, if you can’t see why a person wouldn’t care about someone pulling them over because they aren’t breaking any laws, I guess I can’t explain that to you.
I never said you could drive with open liquor here; I was using hyperbole for effect, saying you practically could, because Calgary has so few police officers per capita.
I don’t think I’m particularly persistent on this subject; I simply don’t understand why there is such resistance to a law instructing you to do what many of you do anyway, for your own good. And I haven’t said anything about health care in this thread. You’re attributing someone else’s opinions to me.
Oh, and if you think you aren’t as controlled by your government as we are by ours, I think you may be a little delusional. Or not. How could either of us say, when we only have our own experience, and not the other’s?
Boy, that is a weak argument. Is that really the basis of all this hysteria? By identical argument any law regulating minor matters is EVIL.
“Hey, that guy might be suspicious, lets pull him over”
“But on what grounds?”
“I didn’t see a turn indicator from across 3 lanes of traffic”
“Good enough, lets see if he’s doing something unAmerican!”
… and so on ad infinitum WRT jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalks, talking on a mobile, etc etc. Do you have the slightest evidence this actually occurs, specifically with seatbelt enforcement and not other minor matters?
Moving this from IMHO to Great Debates.
That’s because you have nowhere to run.
I don’t see anywhere in the US constitution that the mandates or even allows for Government intervention in personal choices based on safety. I do see the concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Obviously the Supreme Court has ruled that it is within the bounds of the legislative body to enforce public safety laws. IMO they have overstepped their bounds regarding individual choice. There seems to be no logic behind the justification other than it will save lives and save money. Without logic to guide the concept of safety regulations there is no end to the form it will take. We have gone from no smoking in the office to no smoking in every business located within city boundaries. Without guidelines we, as private citizens, will eventually be forbidden to engage in anything that is potentially dangerous.
Make no mistake, I think people who don’t use them are foolish. I’ve had to watch a doctor come out and tell a family their mother didn’t survive. This woman would easily have walked away from the 45 mph crash that killed her. I wear my seat belt and I choose my cars partly based on how well I like them. I would go so far as to call myself a seatbelt snob. But I am vehemently opposed to the enforcement of them. There needs to be guidelines that justify government interference with personal choice.
A person who is not seatbelted in is a danger to themselves and to the other people on the road. It is much easier to be in control of a vehicle when you are upright, conscious and in front of the steering wheel, as opposed to being unconscious, on the floor, thrown to the passenger side, in the backseat or any combination thereof.
You do not have a right to drive a car. Driving is a privilege, not a right. This privilege has many strings attached, you must carry insurance, you must be sober, and you must wear your seatbelt.
You do not have the right to spend my money, whether it comes from insurance money or taxes, on the cost to keep your silly self alive after you suffer injuries which would have been reduced or eliminated had you taken two seconds to buckle up.
You do not have the right to put yourself in position to not control your vehicle as to avoid a secondary collision after the first impact knocks you out. If I’m on the road, I want all of us to be able to control our vehicles after the first impact so we all might avoid additional impacts. If you aren’t belted, you aren’t going to be able to do this. You’re risking my life as well as your own.
If nothing else, this thread illustrates how doctrinaire much of libertarianism is. Practically all of us agree that seat belts save lives and money and reduce injury, but there’s a libertarian contingent here that says, “So what if the law saves lives? This is about rights, about choice.” But of course the right we’re talking about here is the right to be flung through a windshield at a high speed. No one would ever exercise such a right willingly, which leads me to think libertarians don’t want the actual right, they only want the principle of the right. That’s way too ivory-towerish for me. Call me a nanny-stater if you want, but I think seat belt laws are perfectly sound public policy.
Are you F’ing kidding me?
You don’t want to wear your seatbelt becuase it prevents you from rooting around in the passenger footwell. Heres a novel idea, how about watching the freaking road and paying attention to driving? Its people like you that make driving the most dangerous thing, by far, that I do regularly and if there were a way I’d keep the lot of you off the road.