| Its a choice that effects others. When you get ejected from the crash and hit someone else's car. When we have to shut down the interstate north and south bound for 3 hours to do a full reconstruction. When we have to do a death notification. Dealing with a dead body isnt a big deal. Your mind kinda puts it in the pile of "just evidence". Working the fatality is easy. The hard part is the death notification. Having to find the family member, either waking them up at 2 am or knocking on the door in the middle of an otherwise normal afternoon. Its not like brain surgery gone bad. There was 0 warning of this happening. Noones prepaered for it. Death notification is a full day of training in our academy. Noone deserves to learn their loved one died on the news or thru a rumor or over the phone. You have to tell them in person. And you have to be blunt. Anything less just makes it harder to cope. "There was a crash, he didn't make it" leaves their mind to fabricate a weak lie, like maybe he didn't make avoiding the crash, and he's just hurt. This just makes the pain last that much longer "Sir, I'm sorry to tell you that your son was killed in a motor vehicle crash". If you want to make dumb decisions, that's fine, but don't try to justify it with this isolated "well it's my choice" nonsense. Your choice effects others, and I can still remember the reaction of every single death notification I've done. The viet nam vet trying to pass a tractor trailer on his motorcycle, and the way his wife screamed. Having to tell a Dad who's son was touring a college, that his sone was the only one in the car not in a seat belt. Having to wake a mother up at 2 in the morning to tell her her son is dead, and not having an answer to "How do I tell his little sister" Individual choices generally effect more than the individual |
One of the fundamental principles of this country is that individual choices are up to the individual unless they present onerous effects on others. Simply, any choice can be construed to have externalities, much like anything can be considered interstate commerce if you squint at it strongly enough. To say nothing of the logical incongruity of allowing people to ride motorcycles.
Of course if you don't wear your seatbelt you're an idiot, but this doesn't feel like an epidemic reaching a reasonable threshold, e.g. being deleterious to national security.