Mandatory Seat Belt Laws Save Lives

This article is going to give a different viewpoint to the "Mandatory Seat Belt Laws, When Will We Stop Legislating Personal Choice?" I've been around long enough to remember when seat belts were not even in all vehicles. If they were included, most of the time they were thought of as an annoyance and were usually pushed into the seat crevice if possible to get them out of the way! I just don't ever recall wearing seat belts as a child. No one thought of wearing seat belts when I was a child! Adults usually didn't wear them and children usually didn't wear them.

When I was twelve, I was a passenger in the front seat of a vehicle. We were hit in the side of the car somewhere around the rear fender by another vehicle. I don't remember what type of vehicle. I don't even remember the accident. I remember stories of the accident. I remember the sounds of sirens as the ambulance was coming, but that's about all. The other vehicle was speeding. It hit our car so hard that it spun it around in a store parking lot. As the car was spinning from the impact, the rear end of our car took the store's gas pumps with it from the force. I was ejected from the passenger's door, but not before my head slammed forward into the windshield hard enough to crack the glass. My older sister was driving the vehicle and she too was injured. She leapt after me trying to catch me before I fell from the vehicle. I had such a huge lump on my head and one of my eyes was swollen shut for long time. The bruise on my forehead's temple literally did not completely go away for almost a year! I still suffer from the damage that car accident did to my neck from the force of impact to the windshield. It literally gave me a backward curve to the vertebra in my neck and cause's headaches among other things. I have to be careful how I hold and turn my head at all times. The accident was a long time ago, and if I had been wearing a seat belt I could have been spared the majority, if not all of my injuries.

I am all for a law that helps protect and save lives. I will not get into a vehicle without wearing a seat belt and will not allow anyone to ride in my vehicle without wearing one. I did this most of the time before it became a law, but not always. I still forgot sometimes, but I am a law-abiding citizen, I always have been and I always will be. The law helps me remember, I don't forget to wear my seat belt and I won't let my passengers. I also won't let drivers forget to wear their seat belts when I am their passenger. People seem to always be grateful when reminded. Why? Because it saves lives. Even if they think seat belts are bothersome, as some young people tend to think, they still know seat belts save lives. It's hard to argue with the truth and to argue when someone has our best interests at heart. An accident that could be referred to as a "fender bender" can kill someone if they are not wearing a seat belt. All it takes is a blow to the head in the wrong place.

I personally don't care who gets offended when the government sometimes passes' laws that make sense. There are speeding laws that are enforced because they make sense. People don't always abide by those laws, it happens every day. That is their personal choice to speed, no matter how foolish. The speeders know they are running the risk of getting a traffic citation. They do it anyway. We have speeding laws for a reason. Just imagine if there were no speeding laws. The above referenced article describes seat belt laws as "a real nuisance, for no real reason. Most people I know either wear seat belts or they don't. We're all fully aware of the penalties of not wearing a seat belt, and we still feel the need to make our own decision regardless of the consequences". As I said before, speeders know the risk they are taking and are willing to take the risk. People know the risks of getting behind the wheel of a vehicle after drinking alcohol and they do it anyway. People break driving laws every day, it doesn't mean the laws shouldn't exist. It doesn't mean the laws are wrong. It is a matter of personal choice to break those laws, but those laws are there for good reasons. The seat belt laws are for good reasons, also. They save lives. Just as someone may want to make the personal choice of driving 100 m.p.h., it is not a safe choice. They may do it anyway, but I know I'm glad it's not legal! I am the first to admit the government makes lots of bad decisions, but that's for another article. Driving laws intended to help keep us safe, they just aren't bad decisions. The seat belt laws just make too much sense to argue with them. I choose my fights carefully.

People do break traffic laws and it happens every day. It is unfortunate and it causes injury to them and others that could be avoided. I was stopping at a traffic light about a year ago with my grand child in the back seat. We were happily on our way to Toys R Us. I heard the loud screech of tires. Just as the line of cars in front of me starting moving slightly, I looked in the rear-view mirror about the same time as the pickup truck came speeding over the hill behind me. He was going much too fast to stop. I was in the right lane and tried to get off the road to get out of his way. I knew he was going to hit me. At least when he did, the vehicle in front of me got out of the way in time so that I did not hit them as well. That truck hit me so hard that the mid-size car didn't have a trunk any more and the back doors wouldn't open. My vehicle was totaled, while his big truck was barely damaged. If I had not been wearing my seat belt, I surely would have gone through the windshield. My little grand child was in the high-backed booster seat, which I still prefer over the backless kind that uses the adult's belt. That booster seat saved her life. She was held so safely and snug in that seat, thankfully she didn't get any injuries. She would have probably sustained fatal injuries if that same accident had occurred thirty or forty years ago when six year olds didn't wear seat belts either.

This time, let the government interfere. When they do get something right, I choose to applaud them, not complain. I don't see seatbelt laws as a punishment. I don't see speeding laws as punishments. I think we need stricter driving laws and it needs to be much harder to obtain a driver license so we are more qualified to operate something that weighs several tons.

We all know children "do as we do, not as we say" much of the time. Statistics show that when parents don't wear seat belts, children's seat belt usage also drops by 36 percent. I am not even going to get into the other statistics that show what percentage of lives are saved by wearing seat belts. The information if readily available on the web. There are plenty of statistics at www.nhtsa.dot.gov/ I will let the statistics at the web site, along with all the other statistics available on why we have driving laws, speak for themselves.