There are a handful of situations where the seatbelt kills you. It’s a sad reality, but the seatbelt isn’t a perfect tool.
The problem is that people don’t understand the idea of harm reduction.
The odds of getting injured or killed in any severity of accident goes up without a seatbelt. Even slamming your breaks becomes more dangerous if you’re not strapped in. People have been killed in cars, without impact, because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt during some sort of high-velocity maneuver.
The few cases of strangulation, or getting trapped in a burning vehicle because you couldn’t reach the buckle, are so rare, and there’s no way to measure actual lives saved, people don’t properly calculate the risk.
But I think some people just don’t like being told what to do and will be obstinate about things like safety requirements…
Yeah, a good example is how the injury rate skyrocketed when seatbelts were introduced. Anti-seatbelt people (yes, they exist just like antivaxxers and anti maskers do today) used this to point out that seatbelts were harmful.
Injury rates skyrocketed because fatality rates plummeted. People who would have died were now only injured. But the anti-seatbelters conveniently ignored that second half of the statistic, and only looked at the increased injury rates.
Seatbelts do cause injury (bruising, hematoma, etc) with hard impact but it’s usually a better outcome than being ejected from the vehicle and then having brains ejected from your skull…
There are a handful of situations where the seatbelt kills you. It’s a sad reality, but the seatbelt isn’t a perfect tool.
The problem is that people don’t understand the idea of harm reduction.
The odds of getting injured or killed in any severity of accident goes up without a seatbelt. Even slamming your breaks becomes more dangerous if you’re not strapped in. People have been killed in cars, without impact, because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt during some sort of high-velocity maneuver.
The few cases of strangulation, or getting trapped in a burning vehicle because you couldn’t reach the buckle, are so rare, and there’s no way to measure actual lives saved, people don’t properly calculate the risk.
But I think some people just don’t like being told what to do and will be obstinate about things like safety requirements…
Yeah, a good example is how the injury rate skyrocketed when seatbelts were introduced. Anti-seatbelt people (yes, they exist just like antivaxxers and anti maskers do today) used this to point out that seatbelts were harmful.
Injury rates skyrocketed because fatality rates plummeted. People who would have died were now only injured. But the anti-seatbelters conveniently ignored that second half of the statistic, and only looked at the increased injury rates.
Seatbelts do cause injury (bruising, hematoma, etc) with hard impact but it’s usually a better outcome than being ejected from the vehicle and then having brains ejected from your skull…