I agree.
I quit riding when my passenger got badly hurt. Minor, Sunday morning, pillar of the community hit us. Couldn't read the ticket he got because his eyes were bad.
You deal with your wife, your insurance agent, and your NCOIC on what safety gear you wear. Everyone else can pound sand.
But I'm not know for slavishly following laws.
/johnny
Me either. I am waiting for a cop to pull into my farm & say you need a helmet when riding that horse. I need a permit to cross the road to get on the trails. I am tired of permits for everything too.
I liken this to seat belts. I was so opposed to seat belts that I actually removed them from cars until they were required to be worn.
I didn’t wear them until I was nearly rolled over by a semi on an Interstate. The older state trooper asked me if I was wearing a belt (again, not required at the time). He told me that most of the time vehicles rolled over in that type of an accident, and that he had never pulled a living person from one.
So, then I started wearing them.
There is a personal freedom issue here, but there is also a societal cost issue. I don’t want to pay for anyone’s “freedom” to get a quarter of a million dollars of reconstructive surgery, or lifetime disability care. You may say “my insurance pays for that”, but it really doesn’t.