> > > However, I do not believe the law has any right to make me wear a seat belt when I'm driving. Laws have no business putting their noses into a personal decision on my part that can affect only me. Fortunately this ridiculous seat belt law coincides with my personal belief on what is sensible to do anyway, so I comply with that particular law, as I would anyway, and differ with it only on principle. (This is not to be confused with laws requiring minors to wear seat belts, and for parents to be responsible for their children wearing seat belts -- introducing minors into the discussion opens a whole new can of worms, but, in a nutshell, that's a law I quite agree with.)

I still don't quite follow this logic. It's perfectly *okay* to temporarily remove the "freedom of movement" from children ONLY, by making them wear seatbelts in cars "for their own good"... But it's NOT okay to insist lazy and stupid adults should adhere to the same sensible rules and do the same?

Out of curiosity, I wonder how that particular wrinkle to the New Hampshire driving code came about (i.e. no primary enforcement of seat belts for adults whatsoever). No other state or province in North America has such a lack of provision.


> > Well, if you drive the car, unstrapped, and your family are
> > passengers, strapped, your death will certainly affect your
> > surviving family.
>
> Doesn't matter. I still have more of a right to my own life than anyone else.

This idea is dangerously close to the argument that you equally "have the right to take your own life, too." The difference is that making a law against suicide has no deterrent value in preventing such a death. Creating a law about seat-belt compliance, on the other hand, has the direct result of saving lives.


> If I'm selfish and stupid enough to kill myself for lack of making a trivial safety precaution, and it leaves my family high and dry, that's stupid and grossly irresponsible of me. But it's not something we should legislate. If you're going to legislate against the *ability* to be irresponsible, well, we'd all be in jail for life, except that the no one could possibly manage to write down all the resulting laws before the heat death of the universe. Just because it makes sense to do something, like wearing a seatbelt -- even if the potential consequences of not doing so are calamitous -- doesn't mean we must jump right in and make a law. That's stupid.

I should point out that Sam already agrees that wearing a seat belt is a sensible precaution and does so himself. It is true that one cannot legislate common sense; in an *ideal* world, we would never have to do so. But car accidents and collisions in America cause more deaths every year than all diseases and health-related problems combined. Wearing seat belts is *directly* related to a reduction in the number of fatalities and serious injuries. Your average driver, however, probably does not know about these facts -- or doesn't care. So seemingly annoying, restrictive laws such as this exist to ensure that the driver and the passengers do what is necessary to assure their own safety. Like many other things, using a car is a privilege, not a right. Buckling up is thus a very strong method of ensuring that all passengers *continue* to enjoy that privilege.

Wolf "feels strongly about this; has had a friend in a car accident that rolled over and over, who was in the back seat and went through the window and nearly died. The other 3 passengers wearing seat belts only got a few bruises" spirit