Check it Out!    
RideCamp@endurance.net
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
[Date Index] [Thread Index] [Author Index] [Subject Index]

Re: RC: Re: Helmets



At 11:29 PM 2/11/00 EST, BMcCrary27@aol.com wrote:

>I agree with your statement.  I was opposed to making wearing seatbelts 
>mandatory, too.  My theory is that it is the riders' (or drivers') choice 
>whether they want to or not, but my husband told me that not wearing a 
>seatbelt COULD result in causing another's injury in a wreck. I'm not 
>completely swayed by this theory, and I believe in freedom of choice.  

If you were in a back seat, you could injure the person in the front.  In a
side accident, you could possibly get the person on the other side of the
car.  Since I've lived through a severe accident without a seatbelt, and
the experience is indelibly etched into my memory, none of this is theory
to me.  I don't go past the end of the driveway without a seatbelt.  You
also do not have a choice whether to wear a seatbelt in a vehicle I'm
driving.  You either put it on, or the vehicle stops until you do.

Something else that can be a problem (and nearly was for me - my wreck was
just a couple of weeks before a mandatory seatbelt law kicked in), is that
if seatbelts are legally required, and someone then causes an accident,
they may not be liable for all of your injuries, since your own failure to
take due caution (and violation of the law on your part) caused your
injuries to be worse.

The whole question of taking ones own risks is tricky, particularly here in
the US where we value the rights of an individual so strongly. Only problem
I see is that you cannot remove yourself from the fabric of society, and if
you choose not to wear your helmet one day, and then end up disabled for
life, then the rest of us get to pay for you once you've bankrupted
yourself and your family.  There's a lot of fine points here, and we could
debate it forever - you have to somehow strike a proper balance between
society trying to protect people, and still allowing freedom.

>Of 
>course I persuaded him to wear a helmet, partly because of his accident
about 
>6 years ago and partly because I didn't want to find myself a widow, 
>prematurely.

I was checking out the web site that Sue pointed to, and found one study
done in the Netherlands where out of the people who went to the hospital
with horse-related injuries, 57% wore helmets.  If you didn't wear a
helmet, 1 out of 6 had a head or brain injury.  If you did, 1 out of 11 had
a head or brain injury.  There's lots of variables that aren't accounted
for in this, and I'd suppose that different types of equine activities have
different risk levels, and incur different types of injuries - for example,
in this study, people taking group lessons accounted for a lot of injuries.
 Even so, there's a very high risk of getting hurt around horses, and if I
can cut my chances of a head injury by nearly 1/2 by wearing a helmet, that
looks like a better bet to me.  I get paid to think, so...

My $0.02, and if you're tired of this thread, why didn't you hit the delete
key before now? 8-p


David LeBlanc
dleblanc@mindspring.com



    Check it Out!    

Home    Events    Groups    Rider Directory    Market    RideCamp    Stuff

Back to TOC