On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 17:27:44 GMT, "Gregory W. Blank"
wrote:

In article ,
J C wrote:

In the 1990s the government changes the laws. Now you can be pulled
over for simply not wearing one.

Are you offering to pay the car insurance rate hikes for all those accidents where people
were not wearing them ?


Nice flippant comment. But let's consider that a moment ... if you
examine it then you find that there's actually only anecdotal
evidence that seatbelts save lives. This is because there's always
that bad crash in which the person survives and everyone says, "Lucky
he was wearing a seatbelt."

Unfortunately, there's no way to scientifically prove that had he not
worn it he would have died. To prove it you'd have to have two
identical crashes where one person wore a seatbelt and the other did
not. And when I say identical, I mean exactly identical.

Further... it is interesting how the seatbelt advocates, those that
say they save lives, ignore all the other confounding variables that
lead to their statistics.

There are a lot of confounding variables that also could reduce the
accident rate and/or injury rate. These include:

-- In the last 50 years, the road system has gotten better
-- In the last 50 years cars have gotten structurally better
-- In the last 40 years tires have gotten better (anyone old enough to
remember the fanfare of steelbelted radials)
-- In the last 30 years the systems in cars have become better
(anti-lock brakes is a good example)
-- In the last 30 years there has been a big push to raise awareness
of drunk driving (so presumably there's less of that happening)
-- In the last 30 years many states have also raised the drinking age
-- in the last 20 years many states have also increased the driving
age or placed increased restrictions on young drivers.

AND there are other factors that can contribute to an increased
accident and injury rate, such as the increased conjestion leading to
all that road rage.

SO, the problem is that all those variables cannot be scientifically
eliminated from any experiment. The statistics on seatbelts are flawed
and have to be looked at from that perspective.

Now I realize that you are foaming at the mouth over the intuitive
guess that seatbelts save lives. It does seem reasonable to guess at
that. However, an intuitive guess, is not proof.

Proof requires a higher standard.


-- JC