Here's an author from Chicago reporting on the issue of Seat Belt Laws.
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While such laws had been proposed before 1985, they were rejected by most state legislators since they knew the vast majority of the people opposed them. “The Gallup Opinion Index,” report no. 146, October 1977, stated: “In the latest survey, a huge majority, 78 percent, opposes a law that would fine a person $25 for failure to use a seat belt. This represents an increase of resistance since 1973 to such a law.
At that time 71 percent opposed a seat belt use law.” “The Gallup Report” (formerly “The Gallup Opinion Index”), no. 205, October 1982, report showed that a still-high 75 percent queried in June of that year opposed such a law."
Read more:
The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
According to the Associated Press, Brian O’Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said, “People have been talking about seatbelt laws and there have been attempts to pass them for well over 10 years. It’s been a snowball effect,
once the money poured in.”
Read more:
The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
That sudden flow of money began in 1984, when then-Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole promised to rescind the rule that required automakers to install passive restraints by 1990 if states representing two-thirds of the U.S. population passed seat-belt laws by April 1, 1989.2
Passive restraints included air bags, which automakers bitterly opposed because, they claimed, the high expense to develop and install them would raise the price of autos way beyond what the average auto buyer would pay.
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The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
While seat-belt use might save some people in certain kinds of traffic accidents, there is ample evidence that in other kinds, people have been more seriously injured and even killed only because they used seat belts.
Some people have been saved from death in certain kinds of accidents only because a seat belt was not used. In those cases, the malicious nature of seat-belt laws is further revealed: such persons are subject to fines for not dying in the accident while using a so-called safety device arbitrarily chosen by politicians.
Read more:
The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
Seat-belt laws have also failed to reduce highway fatalities in the numbers promised by supporters to get such laws passed.8 According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 51,093 highway fatalities in 1979.9 Five years later, 1984, the year before seat-belt laws began to pass, there were 44,257 fatalities. That is a net decrease of 6,836 deaths in five years, which represents a 13.4 percent decline with no seat-belt laws and only voluntary seat-belt use. In 1999, there were 41,611 fatalities. That is a net decrease of 2,646 deaths, a 6 percent decrease over 15 years of rigid seat-belt law enforcement, with some states claiming 80 percent seat-belt use.
If the passage of seat-belt laws did anything, it slowed the downward trend in highway fatalities started years before the passage of such laws.
Read more:
The Fraud of Seat-Belt Laws : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education
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