If Republicans Want To Drive Without Seatbelts, Let's Just Let Them
This is so tiring.
People often like to pretend that this country only very recently went off the deep end and that there was some beautiful, halcyon time during which most people were basically sane and reasonable. But that’s not exactly true, is it? We very often just don’t find out how truly wacky people we don’t know are until they have a reason to demonstrate.
One of the weirder moments in American history remains that time when people were very, very upset about seatbelts. I say “that time,” but it was actually close to a 50 year battle to get Americans to wear seatbelts.
And boy, you know, you’d think that it’d be over by now, that we’d all now agree that seatbelts and seatbelt laws were a very good thing, given all the lives that have been saved at this point. But you would be wrong.
Indeed, just recently in Ohio, US Republican Senate candidate Frank LaRose announced that he considered seat belt alarms in cars to be an example of “government overreach.”
This came up, Heartland Signal reports, in the context of a conversation about a conspiracy theory popularized by Ted Nugent about President Joe Biden signing a bill into law that would require auto manufacturers to put kill switches in cars that would allow “the government, police and car manufacturers” to disable your car remotely.
Is this true? No, it is not. Rather, the bill would, USA Today reports, give car manufacturers until 2026 to “require new cars to be equipped with technology that ‘passively monitors the performance of a driver,’ identifies whether they may be impaired and prevents or limits motor vehicle operation ‘if an impairment is detected.’” Is that a good idea? Eh, I’m withholding judgment until we know more about how that works and functions in the real world. Does it give the police or the government the ability to stop your car without having to follow you on a high speed car chase in order to do so? It does not!
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” LaRose said. “Allowing the federal government to control your vehicle is a very bad idea. I mean, I don’t even like how automated a lot of things are in cars these days like the little bell that rings if you decide not to buckle your seat belt or whatever else. It just, it goes too far.”
Well, it may be going a little further, soon enough — as well it should, because people still ignore those little 4-8 second alarms, so the new rule will be that the alarms will go off until the driver and front-seat passenger are both belted.
“Wearing a seat belt is one of the most effective ways to prevent injury and death in a crash,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Acting Administrator Ann Carlson said of a new proposed rule change in August of last year. “In 2021, almost 43,000 people lost their lives on America’s roads, and half of those in vehicles were unbelted. This proposed rule can help reduce that number by getting more to buckle up.”
Seems pretty hard to oppose “government overreach” that saves so many lives. I don’t get the appeal, personally. Though I also don’t actually get how these people, who so cherish the right of people to do stupid ass shit that could kill them, also tend to be opposed to assisted suicide for people who are suffering. So government overreach is only acceptable when people actually want to die, not when they are just being reckless enough to potentially die by accident. Makes sense!
That being said, I am actually a great lover of freedom. And I am starting to think the only fair thing to do is to allow Republicans like Frank LaRose to opt out of seatbelt reminders and any other safety regulations that will only affect them personally — so long as they are willing to sign release forms saying that they know and understand the risks, and that they and their families will not file lawsuits if they die or are otherwise maimed.
It’s not that I want anyone to die. I most definitely do not. But it is exhausting enough to have to fight these people on regulations meant to keep us all safe without also having to fight them on things that have no impact on anyone but them (provided they are not also clogging up our emergency rooms). Maybe if we give them more freedom to senselessly risk their own lives they won’t be so constantly panicky about
True seat belt story: Near where I live, some years ago, a woman was driving her son and a friend to school on a wintry day. They passed through a covered bridge -- this area is quaint AF -- and she lost control on some new track thingies that had been put in recently. The car punched right through the side of the covered bridge a la Beetlejuice, fell maybe 20 feet, and landed on its roof in an icy creek.
As luck would have it, two medical residents were in the next car (this place is teeming with doctors, since there's a large academic medical center nearby). They leapt into action, got the kids out, and went back for the woman. By the time they got the woman out, her head had been underwater for --- quite a while, but they went to work reviving her anyway.
Amazingly after a few minutes, she sputtered back to life, and ended up without any serious sequelae, despite her long immersion.
The mammalian diving reflex, an evolutionary quirk from long ago, had saved her. When you're immersed in very cold water -- a few degrees above freezing -- your brain functions slow way down to conserve oxygen, in this case enough to spare her serious brain damage or death.
What does this have to do with seatbelts? There were some letters back and forth to the local paper about seat belt mandates, and she wrote in, pointing out that EVEN THOUGH she'd been a victim of the one-in-a-million "nightmare scenario" of being pinned in a submerged car by a seat belt, she realized that if she had NOT been belted, she would almost surely have had her neck broken in the initial crash. So the damn thing had actually saved her life!
Well, that and two quick-acting medical residents.
Sorry for the O/T but the DC court say fuck off to trumps claim of presidential immunity. Lose some more you losing loser.