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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

1. I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.

2. Emotional harm is a very difficult thing to protect against. In no way am I waving it off as unimportant, but people can be emotionally harmed by literally anything. We can care about that, but we can't easily regulate for it.

3. There is much lower hanging fruit if you are concerned with the societal cost of an unhealthy population. If we get to body disposal as top of the list I'll feel pretty damn good about where were at.

4. Isn't 4 the same as 1?

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>>I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.

Unfortunately, no :-( in crashes it's common for the person with a seatbelt to be killed by the body of the person without the seatbelt flying across inside the car like a cannonball. Bodies tend not to fly straight forward except for perfect head on collisions, and even in those cases the person sitting behind you without a seatbelt is going to kill you as they go through your seat. If you're alone in the vehicle I can maybe buy the argument that it doesn't matter, but even then there's plenty of examples of people being literally ejected out of the car and into harms way.

That's a fair point, a person without a seat belt may be more of a danger to other occupants of the same vehicle than they are of those outside the vehicle. We don't have seat belt laws that only apply for vehicles with multiple occupants though, and unless I'm mistaken some states only require seat belt use in the front.

1. What if you hit a barrier? They are literally designed so that a person behind the barrier does not get hit, but normally they are lower than the car, so you would still hit them.

2. Proving my point that it is not a victimless crime.

3. What is this lower hanging fruit? Putting on a seatbelt seems very simple.

4. No, this is not your body as a projectile hitting someone, but you being unrestrained prevents you from staying seated and so can't brake or steer effectively. This can even happen even when do not hit something, but just hydroplane or skid.

1. Yeah that's a good example when it could happen. I expect that is rare enough that it would reasonably fall to insurance rather than regulation. We simply can't regulate every small chance event that could impact others.

2. Victimless here matters in context of regulation. It seems reasonable to consider someone emotionally harmed is a victim, though its important to decide whether emotional harm felt by one is a direct action caused by the other. For example, if someone emotionally responds to seeing my dead body I didn't directly force that reaction on them and I wouldn't say there is direct responsibility for it.

3. We aren't talking about the act of wearing seat belts, everyone should choose to because it is easy. We're talking about regulation and government authority. Regulating sugary drinks, for example, would almost certainly be more impactful.

4. Brakes aren't the problem if the vehicle stopped quickly enough to make me a projectile.

And to be clear, I to wear a seat belt and want everyone to choose to. I just don't want a government to have the authority to require it and fine us if we don't do it.

This is why no one can trust libertarians to analyse risks rationally.

You're "not sure how that would happen" but there are decades of studies showing exactly how it does happen, who the victims are, and what the quantified risks.

The primary risk is to other people inside the car, then side ejections. Front ejections are a footnote.

You decided only the last of those is a problem without considering the other possibilities.

When considered as a whole, the evidence is absolutely clear that set belts save lives.

It's the same story with vaccinations and other mandates. "I don't like being told what to do" turns into "Well, obviously, the real problem is..."

The people die unnecessarily in large numbers - far larger than if the measure really did cause mass harm.

But how frequent are those events? I'm happy to be wrong, I just never saw it as a likely or common occurrence and for me it falls below the level of risk with which I want to empower the government to regulate it.

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