Every day defense

[JusticeZero]

Maybe. There are freak accidents that turn safety equipment against people. Nonetheless, they are just that - FREAK accidents.

A bit like saying "My grandfather's skin cancer was cured by the radiation exposure from the Nagasaki nuclear blast! Therefore, we should drop lots more nuclear bombs!"

Seat belts save a lot of lives, and worsen a vanishingly small number of crashes. On the average, they're a huge help. Not enough to pull cars from their crowning position as number one killer of children and adults, though.

[bushido_man96]

My grandmather would have died if she was wearing a seatbelt

This is often the exception rather than the rule. I've seen several fatality accidents where drivers or passengers have been ejected and killed because the vehicle rolled on top of them. Not pretty.

Like JusticeZero says, they save far more lives than they are responsible for losing.

[JusticeZero]

I'll post this here in order to not clutter someone else's thread too horribly...

Nothing to worry about unless you are the one eaten by the shark.....

And a line I hate, too..

There is a constant static of minimal risk. You can't avoid being exposed to it at all times. Something can always kill you at some very low level of risk. If you stay home to avoid the shark, you might die of radon poisoning, or a house fire, if you go outside you might die from an allergic reaction to something accidentally mixed in your sunblock, and so on so forth.. there's always a tiny chance that something unlikely will pop up and kill you at any given time. So what you want to do is to compare the risks and minimize your exposure to the big ones that are much more likely than the rest.

Worldwide, the biggest hazard anyone is exposed to is cars. With infants, things like birth defects are king, and once you get older then there's a lot of things associated with age that can reap you, but between 3 and 30, the car is king of the killers worldwide.

After 30, you start getting hit with some things that are related to inactivity and obesity, which by the way is strongly correlated to having driven everywhere for the past twenty-seven years.

As a comparison, if one presumes that the Iraq and Afghanistan military action are all connected, along with 9/11 and the 2007 fuel price spike, then 9/11 SAVED thousands of American lives. The fuel price spike got people to drive slower and less, which in turn resulted in a lower rate of car crash deaths that year. That dip in that year was equivalent to all of the U.S. military and civilian deaths in Iraq through the entire action, all of the U.S. military and civilian deaths in Afghanistan through the entire action, all of the deaths in 9/11, with thousands to spare.

The car death rate is similar to two or three fully loaded jumbo jet airliners plowing into a mountainside with no survivors every week. If that were to happen, the outcry would ground every commercial air flight until measures could be taken to stop the bloodshed. But the U.S. seems to utterly ignore that same rate of deaths in a car, and even has people convinced that they should forgo substantially safer activities in favor of driving.

[LittleW]

One always ignores what is most dangerous, JusticeZero, at least, if one can't ignore it.

As for me, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't have to drive often. And if so, I use my seat belt.

That said just to make sure, somebody else stumbles across these thread, as I find it very good.