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Do you believe in seat belt laws for consenting adults?

Do you believe in seat belt laws?

  • Total voters
    99
  • Poll closed .
scatt said:
I did not ask for qualifiers. A seatbelt does not eliminate body parts or full bodies from exiting a car.
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The chance of a body part detaching from a body while a person is wearing a seatbelt is extremely small. Plus, since it would be something fairly lightweight, it would also do much less damage than the full body. Now, if an accident is bad enough that it detaches a person's body part from them while they are wearing a seatbelt, then it is highly unlikely that the person not wearing a seatbelt would have fared any better, and would likely have been ejected, causing a much larger projectile leaving the vehicle.
 
scatt said:
It was a topic in the thread.
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Not what we discussing when I quoted you. This started around posts #355, where someone questioned the ejection of a person and that becoming a projectile and why it would matter. Then someone else said that it had to do with Newton's 1st Law of Motion, and you commented on whether that law was negated by a seatbelt. I pointed out that the seatbelt acts as an important piece of that Law, the unbalanced force acting on the object in motion to change its speed/direction of motion during a crash. The discussion did not involve single body parts.
 
roguenuke said:
Not what we discussing when I quoted you. This started around posts #355, where someone questioned the ejection of a person and that becoming a projectile and why it would matter. Then someone else said that it had to do with Newton's 1st Law of Motion, and you commented on whether that law was negated by a seatbelt. I pointed out that the seatbelt acts as an important piece of that Law, the unbalanced force acting on the object in motion to change its speed/direction of motion during a crash.
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You corrected yourself already, you admitted it does not stop whole bodies or parts from being ejected.
 
For the most part, I do not believe it is government's job to protect people from their own bad choices.
 
Kobie said:
Way to cut out the rest of my comment.
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You mean the extra sentences you had about a new topic that you should make a new thread about?
 
scatt said:
You corrected yourself already, you admitted it does not stop whole bodies or parts from being ejected.
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You are changing the argument. I never once said that body parts would be prevented from being ejected from vehicles by seatbelts. (Go ahead and show where I did if you want to challenge this.)

And, as I said, the body parts would not be the whole body, but if an accident were severe enough to have pieces of bodies ejected from cars while the person (whose pieces are being ejected without the rest of their body) is belted in, then it is highly unlikely that the person would not have been ejected from the vehicle as well. Plus, those pieces are less likely to cause major problems, damage, other accidents, than whole bodies, since the body parts would not weigh over 20-30 pounds at the very most, given that the bulk of the body would still be inside the car due to the seatbelt.

But seatbelts are not an automatic guarantee of not being ejected. They do greatly reduce the chance though, as I showed in an earlier post. And that is the point. Greatly reducing the chance of ejection where without a seatbelt ejection is likely, but with it, ejection is highly improbable.
 
scatt said:
You mean the extra sentences you had about a new topic that you should make a new thread about?
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You obviously, and unsurprisingly, missed the entire point of my comment.
 
Grim17 said:
This question applies to legal adults only, not children:

Do you believe in seat belt laws?

a) Yes. They are nessisary to protect the public for their own good.
b) No. I'm a consenting adult and shouldn't have to wear one if I don't want to.


Discuss...
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Well, the problem with the "I'm a consenting adult" argument against the law is that if one doesn't wear a seat belt, not only is he or she much more likely to sustain serious injuries or death, but the cost of those injuries or death is borne not only by the family, but also often by the workplace that lost a productive worker...and in any case, if the person does not have sufficient insurance coverage, we the taxpayer also bear the cost. Not only that, but if the one who is seriously injured or died was the breadwinner of the family, all of a sudden we have yet another family in poverty...yet another family that the Right despises as being "takers on the federal dole".

It's simply common sense - and MUCH cheaper for the taxpayer - to require seat belt use.
 
DA60 said:
And I am not interested in debating this point...either you/others get it or you don't.
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No problem - but don't be surprised if the insurance company refuses to cover some or all of your expenses from an accident.
 
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ChrisL said:
I guess you didn't understand my post. I'm saying that can be the case with anything on or in the car, so I don't see that as a valid reason.
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There are few 150 pound objects in a car unless it's a person. That and a bag of cement (only 80 pounds) won't expect you to pay for it's injuries if you run over it. Luckily, some states won't make a driver pay for running over a person ejected from a vehicle because they didn't wear their seat belt and other states reduce the amount they have to pay. Works for me! Risk your life and health if you want but don't expect me or your insurance company to pay when you do.
 
scatt said:
Seatbelts negate the possibility of losing control?
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Seat belts reduce the possibility of losing control, which is all any safety or design feature can do, change the odds for the better. ABS doesn't stop people from losing control, either, but it reduces the possibility. Ditto for windshield wipers, exterior car lighting, good tires instead of May Pops, etc, etc, etc.
 
MoSurveyor said:
No problem - but don't be surprised if the insurance company refuses to cover some or all of your expenses from an accident.
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I agree that is a strong possibility AND I have zero problem with that.
 
MoSurveyor said:
There are few 150 pound objects in a car unless it's a person. That and a bag of cement (only 80 pounds) won't expect you to pay for it's injuries if you run over it. Luckily, some states won't make a driver pay for running over a person ejected from a vehicle because they didn't wear their seat belt and other states reduce the amount they have to pay. Works for me! Risk your life and health if you want but don't expect me or your insurance company to pay when you do.
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Are you serious? During an accident pieces of the CAR can become projectiles as can tires and hubcabs and other pieces of the vehicle. You people just want to make more and more unenforceable retarded laws, while coming up with all kinds of ridiculous scenarios.
 
ChrisL said:
I'm not buying the "human projectile" thing too much because really anything is going to become a projectile during an accident, anything in the vehicle or on the vehicle has that potential, so that's a lame reason for forcing adults to wear seat belts IMO.
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*sigh*......then please don't use a seat belt.....it's that simple.

There's laws against speeding. People go over the speed limit all the time. You gonna rail on about the "retardedness" of speed limits?

Oh wait, that's right....everybody here (except one I think) agrees that wearing a seat belt is a smart thing to do and that they wear them all the time.

Really is a weird thread.
 
Dragonfly said:
*sigh*......then please don't use a seat belt.....it's that simple.

There's laws against speeding. People go over the speed limit all the time. You gonna rail on about the "retardedness" of speed limits?

Oh wait, that's right....everybody here (except one I think) agrees that wearing a seat belt is a smart thing to do and that they wear them all the time.

Really is a weird thread.
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I never said it wasn't a good idea to wear seat belts. I said we don't need MORE unenforceable laws to apply to adults who can make their OWN decisions about such things, regardless of whether YOU like it or not.
 
AND, as I noted earlier. Mandating people to wear seat belts only increased seat belt use by about 10%. This is just ANOTHER way for the government to take our money.
 
Dragonfly said:
There's laws against speeding. People go over the speed limit all the time. You gonna rail on about the "retardedness" of speed limits?
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Well yes - speed limits are pretty retarded and those laws are frequently exploited to set up revenue for local police by placing a decreased speed limit on the bottom of a hill and other such shenanigans.

Remember - you are always liable for any harm you do.

If your body is launched out of the vehicle your car is an immobile piece of slag and your ass is in the hospital anyway, or the morgue - I doubt many $100 citations are send to the family to give to the driver if they wake up.

If you hit a pedestrian because you're going too fast, there are serious criminal charges for that kind of negligence. And so on...
 
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ChrisL said:
Are you serious? During an accident pieces of the CAR can become projectiles as can tires and hubcabs and other pieces of the vehicle. You people just want to make more and more unenforceable retarded laws, while coming up with all kinds of ridiculous scenarios.
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Which is something that cannot be helped in most cases. Where it can be prevented or the possibility of those things becoming projectiles, we design cars so to do it. We control what we can. We know that we can greatly reduce the chance of people who are in the car of becoming projectiles though, and that is through the use of seatbelts.

And these aren't ridiculous scenarios. About 25% or more of those killed in car accidents were ejected from their cars, the vast majority of those because they didn't wear their seatbelts. There are easily found videos online of people being ejected from their vehicles while on busy freeways/highways, and then being run over by other cars, some even on the other side of the divide. Do you want to be that person that runs over the guy/gal that wasn't buckled in?

Seatbelt laws are just as enforceable as speed limit laws or child restraint laws or DUI laws or texting while driving laws.
 
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