Seat Belts

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A seat belt is “a restraining device used to secure passengers in motorized vehicles” (“Seat Belts F”). Some people believe that the government should not be able to control if a passenger wears a seat belt; it is their personal right and decision. Others believe that to keep everyone safe, the government should require all passengers to wear a seat belt, no matter if you are an adult, teenager, child, or an infant. Seat belts were invented in the 1930’s when physicians decided that they were needed for safety and less injuries (“Seat Belt F”). Although the seat belt was invented in 1930, the 1960’s was when the number of driving-related deaths increased, causing many countries, including the United States, to create laws for seat belts that were loosely enforced (“Seat Belt F”). In 1966, Congress passed the Highway Safety Act that created the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) (“Seat Belts A”). The seat belt laws were increasingly enforced first in the 1990’s (“Seat Belts F”). As of 2009, 49 out of 50 states required passengers to wear a seat belt (“Seat Belts A”). New Hampshire was the only state who did not have a seat belt law for adults (“Seat Belts A”). However, in all 50 states, laws declare that children must ride in certified seats such as car seats, booster seats, or backwards car seats, depending on their age, and when they outgrow those, an adult seat belt is required (“Seat Belts A”). Highway crashes cause more than 90 percent of transportation-related deaths, and exactly 19 percent of passengers in our nation choose not to wear their seat belt (Roeber). That means that 19 percent of America’s population is at risk of losin...

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...way to increase the amount of people that wear seat belts (Tilton).
You cannot put a price on life. Would you rather be a little uncomfortable in a seat belt or dead? Would you rather have a minor infringement of personal rights or be dead? It’s true that seat belts can cause severe damage, but most likely, if you didn’t have a seat belt on at all, you could be killed instead of being injured. Ever heard the phrase ‘better safe than sorry?’ I think that best defines my opinion. I agree that more lives are saved by seat belts than the amount of lives lost or injured by a seat belt. As I said earlier, from 1996-2003, there were 77,084 passenger vehicle driver deaths, but 5,390 lives would have been saved with the use of seat belts (“Strengthening”). That is enough lives lost to convince me that everyone should wear a seat belt and that it should be enforced by the law.

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