Seat Belt Laws: At Any Cost

"If the unnecessary law had not been in place in the first place, there would have been no problem with the police and he would still be alive."

And if his parents hadnt had sex he never would have been born, so it'd be moot.

He made a series of bad decisions - Whatever happened to personal responsibility? He made a series of decisions, he is responsible for their outcome.

And am I the only one who finds it ironic that Peru is complaining? It wasnt that long ago their police had death squads
 
That article lacks some serious details. Like how the hell did he end up dying from getting pepper sprayed? What behaviour led to his being pepper sprayed? Was he asthmatic and did he have a reaction to the pepper spray? We are making some huge assumptions here. Regardless, I think issuing a warrent for a seatbelt violation is bogus. The nex step should have been a suspended license for not paying the fine. The if he was caught for driving with a suspended license, you can arrest him. :barf: :rolleyes:
 
He made a series of bad decisions - Whatever happened to personal responsibility? He made a series of decisions, he is responsible for their outcome.
Click to expand...
Ummmmm, he made a decision not to timely pay for a seat belt violation. I hardly consider that worthy of death by asphyxiation, regardless of the circumstances.
Rich
 
Seat Belt laws

Like many here I am against any law that tries to tell me what to do when i am the only one effected.
I have no problem with say.......a law requiring glasses, goggles, or a windshield on a motorcycle for instance. If that driver is blinded he can cause anothers death.
If I am in an accident I am the only one hurt if i am not wearing a seat belt.
People need to mind their own business. :D
 
Cops need to grow some fur, and stop allowing the nanny state to use them for the "automaton enforcement unit."
Click to expand...

Cops are a mirror of society. As the populace in general becomes less educated and less interested in the Bill of Rights, so does the police force that draws its personnel pool from that society.

You want to know what the next generation of cops is doing right now? They're over in the sandbox, getting hands-on training in curfew enforcement, traffic checkpoint duty, weapons confiscations, and urban counter-insurgency warfare.

What bothers me more than the willingness to write tickets and citations for victimless crime laws is the disturbing tendency to handle every situation with any sort of risk potential with overwhelming force. The Cookeville dog shooting incident is a good example....here you have a family of four, spread-eagled on the pavement during a felony stop, pleading repeatedly with the officers to close the doors of the car so the dog won't get out of the car. Officer response? "SHUT UP! GET DOWN! DON'T MOVE!"

So the dog gets out, approaches an officer, and gets blown to kingdom come via shotgun. To the officers on the scene, there was absolutely no room for discussion or any other course of action than to gain immediate and unquestioning compliance by overwhelming force.

Damifino an answer to this conundrum, but that's why I am *not* a police officer. I could not in good conscience enforce laws that I deem immoral and contrary to the Constitution.
 
And if the penalty for not paying was asphyxiation you'd have a point, but it isnt. If, and that still remains to be seen, his death was proximately caused by OC, then the only issue is whether that level of force was justified by his resistance.. You cannot claim he was killed because he didnt pay, that is an inferential leap not supported by facts in evidence.

Just out of curiousity, all of those who disagree with seatbelt laws, if you live in a jurisdiction that requires their use, what measures have you taken to get the law repealed?
 
I agree that there's not enough information in the story. We don't know if the seatbelt violation is the only problem he's ever had, or if he's had repeated traffic violations and the seatbelt violation was just the latest which he chose to ignore. We laso don't know what he did to resist arrest and how the pepperspray killed him.

On the subject of seatbelts, I wear mine all the time even though I'm not required to by law (at least the last time I checked). As far as nobody else being effected by the decision to not wear a seatbelt, I have to ask who exactly will be paying your medical bills when you go through the windshield? For most people it will be an insurance company that pays, and they'll pass their costs on to their customers (they wouldn't last very long if they didn't) which means everybody pays in the long run.
 
As far as nobody else being effected by the decision to not wear a seatbelt, I have to ask who exactly will be paying your medical bills when you go through the windshield? For most people it will be an insurance company that pays, and they'll pass their costs on to their customers (they wouldn't last very long if they didn't) which means everybody pays in the long run.
__________
Click to expand...

Be careful with that argument...the exact same line of reasoning can be used to argue against your ownership of guns, perhaps more convincingly so.
 
sendec said:
You cannot claim he was killed because he didnt pay
Click to expand...
Correct. And I didn't. I simply stated that, were it not for the laws and tactics of the Nanny Statists you continually support, this father of two would have been left alone after presenting identification rather than arrested, sprayed, jailed and hospitalized for failure to timely pay a fine on an action that, in the first place, affected nobody in the world but himself.
Rich
 
ATW,

I know this is a strange (EDIT: morbid, but true) way of looking at it, but a counterarguement often used is that a person can be badly injured with a seatbelt when in a serious accident. If this same person was not wearing a seatbelt, they have a better chance of flying through the windshield or otherwise suffering a hard enough hit off the windshield/steering wheel to cause death. An instantly dead person is cheaper on the taxpayers than a person recovering in a hospital bed.

I'm just pointing out that it's hard to accept the forced seatbelt law by saying it is the cheaper route for the taxpayers, because I bet it would not be in many cases. Just something to keep in mind.

Also, I found this site amusing. Seems there is a way around everything nowadays: http://www.buckleoff.com/?referrer=ovtsbt
 
Last edited:
"were it not for the laws and tactics of the Nanny Statists you continually support, this father of two would have been left alone after presenting identification rather than arrested, sprayed, jailed and hospitalized for failure to timely pay a fine on an action that, in the first place, affected nobody in the world but himself."

Nicely put, Rich. That's exactly what I was trying to word correctly in the first place.
 
Mark,

Wouldn't it be so easy if life was that simple. If you paid for your own health care 100%, then I'd say do whatever the hell you please as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. The truth is that the law requires hospitals to treat you (to the point you are stabilized) regardless of whether or not you can pay for it. How about you get a special permit proving that you are 1. individually wealthy enough to pay for your own heathcare, 2. have enough insurance to pay for medical treatment, or 3. they can just have the road kill crew clean you up or leave you to rot. Now buckle the hell up and quit your whining. Seat belts saves lives!

I'd like to add one more thing. What if you get into a bad accident and don't die? How would you like to spend the rest of your life crippled... WHEN YOU COULD HAVE AVOIDED IT??? I'm not saying seat belts will ensure you are not going to get injured or even die in a crash. The laws of physics can not be broken. You do have MUCH LESS OF A CHANCE OF INJURY with seat belt NO MATTER WHAT THE CIRCUMTANCE!!! Don't make stupid excuses like how it will trap you if you drive into the ocean or how getting ejected saved your life because the car blew up. Those excuses are bunk.
 
Stephen,

I don't think anyone here is arguing with the fact that wearing a seatbelt is the smart thing to do, and that it will save you from death or disfigurement in an accident. I think the main problem is that laws are being made to protect us from ourselves, and most people are sickened by this. When looking at the guy who died from the pepper spray, he wasn't injured or probably even involved in an auto accident the day he wasn't wearing his seatbelt and was given a ticket. He probably got it along with a speeding ticket. It's just that now he is dead, and over a stupid law that was put in place because 'he should have known better and worn his seatbelt.'

It's common sense to wear sunscreen (for most people, anyways) when you are going to be exposed to the sun for 8 hours straight, but some people may not listen to common sense and get skin cancer. Who knows, they may even somehow cost us taxpayers money. That doesn't mean we should be required by law to apply SPF 15 or greater just because we're going to be in the sun for a few hours.

I'm more arguing with the fact that the law is pointless, rather than directly addressing this particular situation. If he pulled a gun on the officer, he should have been pepper sprayed. We just don't have enough info to debate that.
 
What it is going to eventually boil down to is this:

Do you condone the govt forcing you to protect yourself, or

Do you believe the govt should stay out of your personal life if you are not harming anyone?

Then you get to argue about if you belive that wearing seat belts protects anyone other than yourself.

Then you can apply those questions and responses to the continual erosion of personal liberty.

Ultimately the question is, does the govt have the right to remove any portion of our personal liberties for the good of the whole?

Just trying to save time here.....

Someone brought up the question of whether or not he was an illegal alien - I say it is irrelevant because we know that the LEOs do not bother to even minimally enforce the immigration laws. Had he been an illegal alien without a warrant for a seatbelt violation he would still be alive.
 
If you paid for your own health care 100%, then I'd say do whatever the hell you please as long as it doesn't affect anyone else.
Click to expand...

What a perfect way to ensure control over the populace. Make them opt for "free" health care (after all, who could argue with that?), and then you have a solid base for every nanny-state law you want to put on the books, because "it affects everyone if you hurt yourself."

Guess what? With that line of logic, you have no leg to stand on when someone else tells you that you cannot own guns, smoke, skydive, fly a plane, or stuff your face with Big Macs.
 
If he pulled a gun on the officer he shoulda been shot - would that be a seatbelt law related death?
Click to expand...
Nope, that woulda been a firearms related death. What's your point? The man is dead. The sole reason for his arrest was failure to wear a seatbelt. Whether he resisted or not is under investigation.

Is .gov now inadvertently killing people for what they "might" have done?
Rich
 
"Moral of the story? This father of two would still be alive today if we didn't insist that our LEO's enforce every single minor infraction thought up by every pinhead bureaucrat."

BS. He had a warrant out for his arrest. That's an order by a judge to any and all peace officers to arrest him if they get a chance. It's not the cop's fault that the guy didn't have sense enough simply to mail a check to the court clerk or fight the ticket. I only hope he didn't try the "Me no savvy" routine.

Tim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top