The Irony is simply delicious!

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:47:17 -0500, Stuart&Janet rearranged some electrons to form:

Links were broken?

Lets try this again.

It's rather sad. However one my break the laws of Man but not of Physics. StuK

He practiced what he preached! That's refreshing to see these days. I think he was very smart, but I *know* he didn't have any common sense!

Darwinism at its finest!!

Seat Belt laws are a source of raising revenue and nothing else. They have saved many lives while on the other hand people who weren't wearing a seat belt were ejected from the vehicle and lived while the seat belted occupants all died. Personal preference should be the point of interest. I used to write tickets and investigate accidents for a living and I've yet to see a seat belt being the cause for and accident unless someone tried to put it on while the vehicle was in motion and this probably was the result of seeing a cop coming and the driver then attempted to buckle up to avoid a possible citation. If the government and law enforcement had any balls they would be a lot more concerned about cell phone usage while the vehicle is in motion. I can't count the amount of traffic accidents that cell phone users cause or are involved in. Yet, most states don't have a law outlawing their usage while traveling down the road. Give me a break. Communication companies and lobbiests for them have derailed such laws so they can make money at our expense. Now do you expect an intelligent person to accept the seat belt law which is being forced upon you so local jurisdictions can profit from the fines levied for failure to comply with this totally ridiculous law. Wake up people! You're being sold a bill of goods. Furthermore, many states insurance laws allow them to consider the failure to comply with the wearing of a seat belt, as a moviing violation which leads to additional increase in your insurance rates. The seat belt laws are a joke but why am I not laughing? Some day just for the fun of it count the people you see using a cell phone along the route you take to work and I can only imagine if this doesn't alarm you, you obviously are living in your own happy place and will need the government to make more decisions for you in the years to come. Seat belts equal personal choice. Cell phone usage while driving equals an accident waiting to happen.

Steve

04 Cobra

"Stuart&Janet" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@golden.net...

If you don't wear a seat belt, and get in an accident you are much more likely to be injured and taken to an emergency room. EMS and the emergency room will treat you. Even if you have insurance, this costs me money. I want seat belts to be the law so that your own stupidity doesn't cost me in higher insurance bills. If you don't want to have to wear a seat belt you need to agree to pay for all your emergency medical treatment out of pocket. You talk about taking responsibility for yourself, try doing it! You better keep at least $30,000 in a bank account so that I know you can afford medical treatment. It's your life, and you can do whatever you want with it. Just don't make me pay for your idiocy. If you're on the side of the road and bleeding to death, you'd want others to take a little responsibility for you.

Jim S. '92 LX Coupe

What's the statistics on that, though? From what I have read, those cases are the aberrations, and not the norm.

Do you prepare for the 5 sigma case or the 1 sigma case?

*shrug* I always belt up, so I couldn't give a flip about the issue.

Agree on the cell phones, though. People point to the raw numbers without weighting the market penetration.

For example, say radio fiddling accounted for 50% of accidents and cell phones 10%. But radios are, effectively, found in 100% of all cars while cell phones are actively used in, say, 5% of cars.

If there are 100 accidents in a population of 100,000 cars, then 50 will be caused by radios and 10 by call phones. Ah! Radios are 5 times worse than cell phones.

But all 100,000 cars have radios, so the accident rate for radios is

0.05%. Only 5,000 of the cars have active cell phone users, so the rate for them is 0.20%, or 4 times that of radios.

They reported the actual numbers earlier this year in a study, and I think the real world results were worse. I know that the last dozen close calls I have had have been instigated by people on cell phones. One woman almost blew through a stop sign. She would have broadsided me, and her three VISIBLY UNBELTED kids wandering around the back seat would have been S.O.L.

I agree with you on this being their motivation. In addition to it, there is a control freakism to it.

But all and all I am for not only seat belt usage better better seats and better restraint systems to keep the driver in place and in control of the vehicle. I have no objection to a simple law that requires seatbelt usage. I don't find them any different than those requiring headlamp use at night. However that is as far as it should go. No seat belt checkpoints and other nonsense this crusade is being used for.

You talk about taking responsibility for yourself, try doing it! You better

I don't know where you live but in the State of Washington proof of insurance is required by law to legally drive a vehicle. I assure you I have insurance that supercedes the legal limits required. So what is your point? Talk about insurance costs, what part of double jeopardy don't you understand? You're not only penalized by a fine but then your insurance rates go up with moving violations. I have no problem with paying fines (and just for the record I wear a seat belt at all times) but I don't need government to tell me that I have to wear a seat belt. Our town is so wacked out that now everyone has to where a bicycle helmet when riding a bicycle regardless of your age. Yet our police department can't and won't necessarily investigate a home burglary or car prowlings because they don't have the needed manpower. They have time to write tickets, look for seat belt violators and stop people who are old enough to go to war or vote and harass or cite them for not wearing a bicycle helmet. Do you have children? Remember, I used to be a police officer, and have children who are of driving age. I don't have to begin to tell you what insurance has run me with both a girl and a boy. My son used to come home and complain about the cops pulling him over whenever they felt like it for no front license plate (required in Wash), loud music, loud muffler, and no working rear license plate light bulb. I drove his car a few times and immediately cops would see the car do a u-turn and quickly fall in behind the vehicle or pull up alongside it and once they saw an old man driving they peeled off and left me alone. Insurance rates increase all the time based upon the amount of claims and payouts the company has to make. Why should people rates go up when they haven't filed a claim or had any accidents? Well they do. I would gladly pay for my "own" mistakes and be rated accordingly but that is the way they do things. Are you aware that insurance companies have the right to charge you high risk insurance for up to 3 years even if your were deemed a high risk driver and quit driving, as soon as you apply for insurance they still can charge high risk rates for 3 years. They are going to get there money one way or another. When I investigated accidents we wrote a citation to cover the cost of the time required to do so because the insurance industry didn't and wasn't about to pay for the investigation. There again though, when it came time to go to court on the civil end of the collision who did they subpeona, the police department investigator. Accident investigation should funded by the insurance companies. The police department shouldn't be the insurance companies secretaries. Our state had the seat belt law where if you were stopped for some other vilolation and observed you didn't have a seat belt on, then they could write you a citation for it too. The problem with the law now is that can be the reason for the initial traffic stop. This becomes a fishing expedition stop especially in the nighttime. An over zealous police officer can stop anything that moves in his district and justify it by saying he was making a traffic stop based on the seat belt law when in reality he or she is looking for drugs or some kind of criminal activity afoot. In Washington I've seen citations written for improper positioning of the seat belt such as when a person tucks the shoulder portion of the seat belt under his or her arm for comfort purposes. I like to think that people should be intelligent enough to know what is good for them and what is not good for them. Life is about choices and freedoms what I see happening is government implying that people are smart enough to look out for themselves. There will always be good guys and bad guys just like there will be law abiding citizens and criminals but the good guys shouldn't have to lose their freedoms because of a few. The men and women in Iraq are risking or giving their lives for that "freedom". May God watch over them and care for them until they return home. I know I'm very proud of them and have the utmost respect for their service. I'm probably far more conservative than this thread makes me appear but I just feel I'm a better judge of what is good for me than the government. Never just accept evrything the government does or says as the gospel because if you do you might as well be walking behind the shepherd who is rattling the can of rocks to get you to follow him over the edge of the cliff.

Steve

04 Cobra

"Jim S." wrote in message news:cs4uts$ snipped-for-privacy@dispatch.concentric.net...

Bicycle helmets are really the object to show the insanity of the safety groups. Bicycle helmets don't do anything but protect from falling over. There is no protection beyond that. A bicycle helmet would probably be more useful as a safety device while climbing stairs.

Of course. The bosses are the elected officals. Robbery investigations cost money. Writing tickets make money. So what are the bosses going to make a police priority? Plus there isn't a special interest group demanding robbery investigations.

A few years ago, when I could still pass as a teenager by a glance at night, I would have cops following me, looking for any excuse to pull me over I suppose. It doesn't happen any more. I don't drive any differently and I am driving the same cars. They would peel off in frustration when I reached home. Cops on usenet have called me 'paranoid', so I find it very refreshing to see you relate this similiar experience.

Yep. they demand that you have insurance even if you don't own a car and don't drive. If you go a few years without a car expect to pay through the ass when you get one again. I've heard this over and over again from people who lived overseas for a few years, lived in big cities and had no need for a car, etc and so forth.

I had a kid cut me off, and while I was adjusting for that, avoiding him, someone cut him off, he over-reacted and slammed on the brakes and there was no way I could get that much more decel out of the brakes. So

*Bang*. Cop writes me a ticket for no seatbelt. I tell him I was wearing it, he changes it to failure to reduce speed. motherf'er. I'd like to see him avoid that one. If I did that to him, he wouldn't write himself that ticket.

Here they have checkpoints for seatbelt usage. Checkpoints, like the Gestopho(sp?) or KGB would have. Of course I've been stopped for a papers check where the cop couldn't come up with anything I had done wrong so he claimed that 'a similiar vehicle' had been involved in 'a crime'. Yeah, lot's of '73 mavericks were being used for crimes in the late 1990s. Bullshit. I might see another maverick once a year around here.

I've come to the conclusion that a great deal of the vehicle code has been subverted for police state like purposes. To get around that pesky bill of rights. Because 'driving' isn't protected, it's been made that the moment we get in our vehicles, most of our rights are effectively suspended.

Now with the war on terror, we have to surrendor our rights to take various other forms of transporation. A Supreme court decision has made even being on foot subject to a police paper's stop. So we aren't left with much are we?

Get the wrong people into office and the structure to turn the USA into something that would rival the USSR is very much in place and ready to go. It just takes the right kind of people to use it that way. I find this to be objectionable wrt the very basis of the US of A.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 20:24:56 -0800, Steve Porter rearranged some electrons to form:

In a column written for the Daily Nebraskan in September, Derek attacked seat belt laws as intrusions on individual liberties and expensive to enforce. "It is my choice what type of safety precautions I take," he wrote.

Derek made his "personal choice", didn't he...

If you had actually read my response, you would have seen I was talking about health insurance.

In my state, many people enjoy ice-fishing. Yet, every year some people defy the posted warnings about dangerous ice conditions and fish anyway. Sometimes the fire department or the coast guard has to rescue them. Upon making it back to land, they are quite often fined for violating a no-fishing ordinance. It's not some conspiracy against freedom. Rescuing those people takes time and money. The fine is meant as a deterrent against people acting foolishly, endangering rescuers lives, and costing the tax payer money. Seat belt laws are no different.

Of course states and cities use seat belt laws as a revenue generator. Same with parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. If you think you're above the law, and don't want to follow the rules, be prepared to pay. If you're stupid enough to engage in behavior that is wildly reckless, and puts you in a higher probability for requiring emergency services, you should be fined.

If you think the bicycle helmet laws are too strict in your city, rather than coming to RAMFM and writing about it, why don't you get involved in your city government and work to change it.

Follow the rules. Obey. The law is the law. Be controlled or suffer. Ahh so much for land of the free home of the brave. If our so called governments did not act in their self interest and the interests of those in power we wouldn't have these problems. But since they do, the 'rules' the law, is set up in their favor.

Going the speed of traffic, well you're speeding and not obeying the rules. Going the speed limit or less, but oddly 10+ mph below the flow speed of traffic, you're suspicious. Not following that 20mph school zone speed limit at 3am on sunday morning, well you're a violator. Following the 20mph school zone speed limit at 3am on a sunday morning, well you must be hiding something trying to avoid being pulled over. (there is such an actual court case where reasonable suspicion was based in part on a driver obeying a school zone speed limit in the middle of night. The fact that cops often enforce these and issue tickets for not obeying at nonsensical times is the catch 22) Follow all the rules and have someone cut you off while going considerably slower and immediately slam on the brakes causing a collision... cops need to make revenue, you're ticketed too. Damned if you, damned if you don't. 'following the rules' won't keep you out of their grasp, that's the point being made.

The more laws they get to make, the tighter the noose gets. The more that can be subverted for other purposes. Not to mention, with so many laws there isn't enough man power to enforcement them all, let alone fairly. So enforcement is very selective. This is why we should have as few laws as possible. Simple, easy to enforce, and enforced universally. Not a bunch of ticky tacky laws enacted by and/or for control freaks to be enforced against people we don't like and not against those we do like.

The Martha Stewart case is a prime example. She didn't do anything worse than countless CEOs and well connected people in those sorts of circles do on a daily basis for 100 times or more money. But she isn't -liked- and selective enforcement kicks in. That's how it is in the USA. The rules are for some people, not for others.

Does usenet not help to inform and convince people as well as many other forums? Is that not the primary method to change things and/or prevent bad laws in the first place? The readership may be small, but it's better than a soapbox on a street corner.

Not quite. Don't forget personal safety and reduced health care costs (therefore lower insurance premiums).

You should have quit with "They have saved many lives;" The rest is either an urban myth or you neglected to mention that the poor fellow who was ejected died a slow and painful death, since being ejected is physically one of the worst things that can happen to a body.

I'm also concerned with my personal safety, and you not wearing a belt puts my health at risk. In a collision, not wearing a seat belt makes recovery and avoidance of subsequent collisions (possibly involving me!) nigh on impossible since you're going to be somewhere besides firmly planted behind the wheel.

Now that's a scary thought.

I agree. Also, they should target other dangerous behavior, like failing to keep right except to pass, tailgating, and weaving.

As it is, they're perfectly happy going after the things that are less dangerous, more profitable, and easier to prove in court.

Yes, because an intelligent person would already be wearing their seat belt, law or no law.

And my personal safety.

Washington State.

For once, I applaud the police. He deserves tickets for all those things.

Time for you to find a new insurance company. Mine doesn't. I've had two tickets in my life, and my premium has never gone up.

I actually agree. Though every man, woman, and child should wear their belts whenever the vehicle is in motion, I don't think a seat belt violation should be a primary offense. A better system would be where any unbelted occupants (or their relatives) forfeit any claim to compensation for their resultant injuries and/or death.

So? They could *always* do that anyway. There isn't a single thing you can do to avoid being pulled over if the officer feels like it. Even if you drive to the letter of the law, it can be seen as an attempt to avoid police attention.

Good. If they're going to wear it at all, they better wear it properly. It doesn't do one darn bit of good tucked under your arm.

They should be, but often they aren't. You've proven that with your stance on wearing a seat belt.

No, they're not.

Amen.

Absolutely.

Given your position on wearing your seat belt, I doubt it.

That describes the Bush administration perfectly! Thanks for the great analogy.

And the 'old man' doesn't? That was his point. He could drive the same car with all the same faults and not be ticketed. Not that the tickets/stops weren't deserved, but that enforcement is _selective_.

This is a _problem_ for a free country. That is why we shouldn't allow laws that can be used to grow the power of police and their abilities to by pass the bill of rights.

I must have misread. You're absolutely right, selective enforcement is a serious problem.

That's why, though I am fully in support of both the use of seat belts and legislation requiring their use, I don't like seeing them as a primary offense.

Why is there a law to make you turn on your headlights on at night? If I choose to drive in the dark then it's my personal choice? You're on a slippery slope. Your correct, it is all about the money. More specifically about liability. The seatbelt fines are really a red herring. If there is a law then when you get injured/killed in the accident the insurance companies can point at you as being at fault for not "adhering" to the written laws. It's all about blame.

Regardless of the law anyone who won't buckle up is stupid. Could I state it any plainer.

StuK

----- Original Message ----- From: "Garth Almgren" Newsgroups: rec.autos.makers.ford.mustang Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 11:02 AM Subject: Re: The Irony is simply delicious!

I'm quoting you:

At least Jim S. implied his scenerio as being hypothetical:

I'm quoting myself: I have no problem with paying fines (and just for the record I wear a seat belt at all times) but I don't need government to tell me that I have to wear a seat belt.

Garth's reply accuses me of abusing the seat law when I clearly stated I wear one at all times. I don't recall referring to you as a liar so I would appreciate you showing me the same respect. These are all topics of discussion and not pointed directly at anyone in particular. I'm not against laws and I try to abide by them at all times. I'm merely pointing out that there are inadequacies in how they are applied and enforced and all laws need enforcement from the personal safety aspect and not from the revenue raising avenue. My personal losses or safety are just as important if not more important than traffic enforcement. Being the victim of theft or assault should be more important than traffic enforcement. Often times "priority" police attention is focused around traffic enforcement because it raises revenue rather than followup investigation of crimes against property or person.