Posted on 10/13/2020 7:52:20 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The government requires that all kids – almost teenagers – be tied down like furniture every time they are transported in a car. This wasn’t always the case.
Why has it become the case?
Answering that question requires asking the question: What business is it of the government – of other people with various titles – to decree such things? Do these other people own your children? Do they own you? They are implicitly asserting at least partial parental oversight authority.
Where did they get this authority?
Did you, the parent, give it to them? If you did not, how is it that these other people have come to wield it over you?
It is said – by some – that it is “unsafe” for kids to be in cars without being in saaaaaaafety seats. And yet hundreds of millions of them – almost everyone who achieved adulthood before the early 1990s, before the government mandated child (almost teenager) ssssssssaaaaaaaafety seats for all – grew up not being strapped into them without suffering any injury at all.
Some did, of course. Some also tripped and fell. Others fell harder. Some drowned. A few also died from various things, some of them possibly avoidable.
So there is a degree of risk. As with everything in life. We all face risk every day, to varying degrees...
(Excerpt) Read more at ericpetersautos.com ...
And those damn helmets on the m/c.
And the smoke alarms.
And the small pox vaccine.
Life was so much better in the 1920’s.
Tyrants mandated laminated safety glass too.
Great comment. I have some lunch buddies who are Democrats. They think I'm nuts for thinking a restaurant owner should be allowed to decide whether or not to allow smoking in their restaurant.
Motorcycle helmet laws: I think someone is a damn fool for riding without a helmet, but it should be their choice, not mine.
“Well, using that argument, what kind of monster would want a kid to drown in a pool? So that’s it. no more pools.”
Lol! We are not banning pools!
i would love to see all the ancients having to wear plastic body armor and helmets to drive their cars 10 miles under the speed limit.
I a w an article recently arguing th at baby seats and seat belt requirements in cars have contributed birth rate declines since there are only so many children that can now legally fit into a typocal family car at once.
“And boys have even died getting hit by a line drive in the head. so no more baseball.”
you are making the absurd argument that cuomo is. We are not banning baseball.
“We are not banning pools!”
Yet......
“I a w an article recently arguing th at baby seats and seat belt requirements in cars have contributed birth rate declines since there are only so many children that can now legally fit into a typocal family car at once.”
The typical family car is an SUV.
Not in an accident.
But now there is a generation of kids who’ve never sat in the front seat until they were teenagers.
“But now there is a generation of kids who’ve never sat in the front seat until they were teenagers.”
I only got to the front seat when driving or hunting.
Really?
Not nearly so much as modern drivers who expect the car to do their thinking for them!
Which is only getting worse as the “Autonomous driving” chimera is pushed harder every day.
Cars today have features as standard that were the stuff of Formula One only a short time ago. VVT, F.I., All wheel anti-lock brakes, etc.
And what has the result been?
Idiots who blithely pull out in front of heavy traffic in the smug assurance that the other driver will be able to avoid them thanks to AI and “Look Ahead” tech.
And if there IS a wreck, belts and bags will save them, insurance pays!
Same attitude that excuses those who cut and weave in traffic, stop short, run red lights, and many other behaviors that would have gotten them pounded in the face before Gov. Org. made us all so much “Safer” via their edicts!
As for myself, I only drive old “Death Traps” and have survived to 65 YOA.
Please send me all of your old cars for proper disposal, particularly old British and Italian models. The older and more “Deadly” the better.
Before that question can be properly considered one must determine who shall make that finding. The article tends to suggest that parents should dispose of these matters. There are state laws and regulations, of course which means that state legislators, governors and regulators will make the rules. There are federal government regulations, done by bureaucrats as in the states, commissions and, of course, the federal legislature. The feds have an Army of bureaucrats waking up every day determined to "do good."
My guiding principle is that the agent on the ground closest to the matter is the proper agency to set the rules. That of course would be the parents and that had been a tradition in America as long as we were an agricultural nation. Can you imagine the federal government telling farmers that their children had to be seatbelted in the hay wagon? But we are now on the downslope of the Industrial Revolution and well into the digital world. Inevitably, government steps in. Certainly the state is closer to the needs of children than the feds but our notions of federalism have been inverted in the last 100 years so our national reflex is to look to the federal government to deal with every fart, burp, or hiccup especially if they are emitted by children.
As our educational establishment has failed us, as the influx of culturally and legally ignorant alien immigrants have spread across the land, my confidence in the moral and intellectual properties of parents properly to care for their children has been fatally diminished. What could be more distressing than the contemplate a cocaine addicted mother neglecting a child? What could be more depressing than to note the statistics?
So we turn to schools to feed children whose parents fail them, institutions to medically treat them, and an increasingly draconian and fascistic childcare bureaucracy to intervene on their behalf, often with terrible counterproductive results.
Our society is breaking down, our parents are failing a large number of our children, our government entities are overwhelmed and often damage the very children they are trying to help. Our court system has not the capacity to sort individual cases out at the rate required. Our children are suffering at an increasing rate.
Throwing more money at the problem is unlikely to solve it and the bureaucracies thus created might even make it worse. When we come to the end of our analysis we have to go back to first principles, our society, or at least a large segment of it, is in moral collapse which must be repaired with a moral awakening.
I miss pop up headlights.
A pedestrian safety issue.
“And what has the result been?”
Better performance and fewer deaths.
I agree with you, in that it is a matter of indivual choice when it comes to only your life. Without question, helmets save lives. I rode motorcycles for decades. Did alot of stupid stuff. I didnt wear a helmet except for the last three years I rode. My reasoning? It was my life, I
loved the feeling, I had long hair, and many ladies absolutely loved my attitude. Now, older, wiser, I take a very much more practical approach to life.
How many parents paint their walls out of paint buckets that can drown their little ones?
I have one like that across the bridge of my nose. I was about six years old and was getting out of the barber’s chair after a haircut. I tripped over the big metal footrest and fell face-first into one of the metal chairs facing it. I never saw so much blood. The barber and my dad both ran me to the hospital, and one butterfly bandage later I was OK. No stitches, fortunately.
If that happened today, the poor barber would be sued out of existence. Trying to make things safer is good, but leftist fragility is causing our society to become overly risk-averse. Like the “everyone gets a trophy” nonsense, it’s causing our kids to grow up believing that nothing should ever go wrong in their lives, and that if it does it must be someone else’s fault.
Today’s kids (and likely their parents as well) would lose their minds if they saw some of the things we did as kids. Yet we survived, and I believe have a much healthier perspective on life as a result.
You’re right.
The market would dictate how well it works out.
He’d get a lot of smokers :)
I notice they don’t try to ban cigarettes or alcohol. Because they bring in a lot of tax dollars.
Hypocrites to the end.
Now I’m in the mood for a drink :)
“You’re on the wrong site.”
—
There’s a site that promotes toddlers flying through auto windshields? Wow, I had heard there were places on the internet for every conceivable interest group - now I believe it! Kind of an odd kink - but whatever floats the old boat, I guess!
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