[mylife]

Amen

[LouieFisk]

I agree - a seat belt to keep 4 year old Sally from flying through the windshield is nothing short of Nazism!

[adorno]

Even walking on the streets, people will get hurt and many will die.

Should people have to wear safety gear for walking (or running)?

[hanamizu]

My parent’s first new car was a 1949 Buick convertible. No seat belts, and a good sold metal dash with a radio with metal knobs sticking out. If Mom or Dad hit the brakes, an arm would be thrust out to keep me from flying into the dash. Lot’s of long rides in the bed of my uncle’s pickup truck. The 50s were a great time to grow up.

[JohnBrowdie]

I think the Corvair beat it by a few years, and (very definitely) in terms of overreach by the central government.

[cherry]

I want the govt to make the elderly sit in safety seats with helmets too.....

[Williams]

It doesn’t start with the seat, it starts with a mandatory air bag system which will literally decapitate your kid if you sit them in the front.

There was a story some years back where exactly that happened to a baby.

[HapaxLegamenon]

Why undermine your credibility by misspelling ‘safety’?

[Deaf Smith]

The "Soccer Mom Law" went into effect 2009.

The Soccer Mom Law is that all vehicles 10k lbs and under have stability control (active shocks & struts)

The law was the result of a suite for a soccer mom aggressively driving her SUV and rolling it.

The term was coined prior to 2009 by various automotive magazines.

[pigsmith]

I have an almost imperceptible scar dead center on my forehead where I hit the rolled-metal dash in our new 59 Willys Wagon as I was sitting on the front seat next to my mom when somebody cut her off. She did the “mom” thing with her arm to catch me but I went right thru that, and bounced my head off the dash, right below the windshield. I can still see that dash coming at me..

~sigh~... I wish I had that Jeep today. Cool old wagon; four shift levers.

[Atticus]

When I was a kid and our family sedan only had front and rear lap belts, my parents used to call the front passenger seat the “death seat.” Fortunately, we never got in a serious accident.

[Dr. Sivana]

I was put in a special car seat back in my parents' 1961 Dodge Lancer. Of course, it didn't get strapped to anything, and the car had no seat belts. It had hooks that went over the front bench seat, so I could see my mother, and she me.

Most importantly, it had a steering wheel with a horn in the middle. Great fun. The safety is that it kept me in my seat and notg bothering my mother or father.

[TheDandyMan]

Give me a break. Old cars are death traps. Steering column like a spear, solid metal dash with metal knobs, no airbags, no crumble zones, etc. Unlike gun control and mandatory masks, increased safety standards in vehicles have saved lives, with fatalities per hundred thousand less than half of what the number was in the 50s and 60s, even as more and more people are driving faster and faster and our collective IQ shrinks.

Seatbelts...I know libertarians can be whacky but what bizarre hill to die on.

[aomagrat]

When I was a kid seat belts were those annoying things that you stuffed down in the crack between the seat and the seatback so they wouldn’t poke you in the back when you sat down.

[Vermont Lt]

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.

[Phillyred]

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.

[nathanbedford]

The article asked the reader to ponder what is reasonable in terms of imposing safety regulations, especially focused on safety regulations concerning children in automobiles.

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.

[Celerity]

I miss pop up headlights.

A pedestrian safety issue.

[jonrick46]

How many parents paint their walls out of paint buckets that can drown their little ones?

[Fiji Hill]

I’m glad that I experienced my childhood in the days when, in the words of Michael Savage, “the chrome was thick.” We had diving boards, teeter-totters, metal slides, swings and jungle gyms—and I not only survived but knew of no one who was killed or hurt by these things.