this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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I've even seen people try to say it's somehow more dangerous because of ridiculous anecdotal experience like "Well I knew this guy who got into a massive roll over accident while drunk and he couldn't escape because of his seatbelt". Yeah man the seatbelt was the problem here...
There are some extreme scenarios where this is true, and it gets inflated and conflated when arguing against seat belt laws.
It's all a game of numbers at the macro level, and seat belts save far more lives than they potentially damage. The math has checked out and been backed up over and over and over again for 70+ years and the result is always the same: Seat belts overwhelmingly increase your chance of surviving a car accident.
The edge cases, while there, are not worth risking a surefire death or dismemberment under the vast majority of conditions.
Not that these extreme scenarios are always told from the perspective of the idiot that survived despite not using a seatbelt.
First responders and ER doctors disagree on these accounts. Vehicles are literally designed to collapse around the passengers. That doesn't work if the seatbelt isn't keeping them in the safety zone.
I'm not disagreeing with you in any way, but things like ejecting a person out of a vehicle before it bursts into flames, where they woke up and the vehicle was on fire, and they would have been unconscious and burned alive in other scenarios.
Same with the drowning argument of being unable to get out of the seat belt due to panic.
In every one of these scenarios, it's extreme and the possibility of it happening is so remote it's not worth considering. But it still comes up in the "argument" (speaking from experience arguing with someone who was anti-seat belts for years).
All I was highlighting is that if we're going to be able to argue with the people who believe this stuff, we have to acknowledge the extreme edge case view they hold as theoretically possible under the most absurd conditions; and then that allows us to move forward in the conversation to convince them that the odds of something like that happening to them vs the seat belt saving them are so remote they may as well plan to win the lottery 8 times in a row.
I say this from experience, that's what finally allowed me to break down the walls of my anti-seat belt acquaintance over months/years of arguing. He's wearing a seat belt now, even though he still snarks about it. But it keeps him safe, and deep down, he understands that now because I took the time to acknowledge that his concerns, while theoretically possible, were not real concerns for anyone in the world to think about on a day to day basis anymore than worrying about getting struck by a meteorite would be.