What are the pluses?

Some people will receive fewer injuries in car crashes, there is raised awareness of the safety possibilities for safety belts and police departments and judicial departments all over the U.S. are enjoying higher revenues from reasonably low-risk stops.

Now for the negatives!

Years ago when I was a Mechanical Engineering student, one of my classes analyzed seat belts in one of the sections...we were taught that seat belts were really only designed to withstand one hard hit...after that they should be replaced, and, in the nineties, when I was on the road up to 70,000 miles a year, I would talk to EMT's who told tales of having to cut traffic accident victims out of their belts to get them out of their vehicles.

You would think that seat belts should be replaced after every accident that has stressed them. As important as the government and insurance companies tell us seat belt usage is, you would have thought that at some point they would have been concerned with the quality of the belts we are being forced to use. In their cart-before-the-horse program, the first move should have been to ensure that as many of the devices as possible be in as good a shape as possible i.e a ten year or so program in which the insurance companies were required by law to replace the seat belts after a crash(we're all required to have insurance anyway...right??). Instead they have made us all guinea pigs hoping that those of us who are in wrecks have pristine belts so the statistics will bear out their decision.

Let's face it, we have been told that we should all expect a traffic accident in our lifetime(if you don't have one, someone else probably had more than one). That means that, without seat belt replacement, there could be tens of millions of vehicles out there with defective seat belts. I have never met someone who mentioned their seat belt was replaced after an accident!!

Think about it. There would not be so many companies like Smith and Wesson and others offering emergency seatbelt cutters if there wasn't a use for them. You can click here to view a website that sells these cutters.

The other aspect is that, in accidents such as side impacts, being "strapped in" can actually increase your injury. I know of people who could have been killed in their accident if they had been in seat belts...the passenger door of the car ended up only inches from the center of the car. I've been trying, all afternoon, to find the government statistics on the number of side impacts and fatalities involved with them but the information is no longer easy to find and I have even been referred to websites that do not exist. Let's say 30 to 40% of crashes are side impact(I'll correct this when I am given the correct information)..For pictures of side impact crashes click here...decide for yourself if a seat belt would have helped.

My opinion is that the government's role should be that of informing us of the possible advantages of wearing seat belts( or any other safety equipment for that matter), but to leglilate the use of a device that does not work in all circumstances and could, in fact, cause death through its use, is against our better interests.