Originally Posted by Vicar of Sterling
I served over 20 years as a volunteer EMT on a rescue unit. We were responisible for about 25 miles of I-80 in Eastern Nebraska. We would typically get 3-5 calls each month for accidents on I-80. I automatically fasten my seatbelt before the engine starts. I've never hear the noise. A special response to getting thrown from the burning wreck. In the hundreds of crashes from which I have extraced injurred, dead, and broken bodies I have yet to see one on fire from the crash. It mainly happens in the movies. Your chance of dying in a burning, exploding wreck are very small. Your chance of dying being thrown out is very great. My sermon for today.
Many many moons ago my mom cut out a response from an advice column (either Dear Abby or Ann Landers) where there was a quote from an emergency responder who said that he never had to remove the seat belt from a dead person...somehow that stuck.
Perhaps it's just me, but I feel more secure when I wear a seat belt.
And for me, a seat belt saved my life. I was heading up through PA from VA in my 1986 Nissan 300ZX (which I had purchased less than a week before( when my sleeve got snagged in my stick shift as I tried to change radio stations. I lost control of the car when it swiped against the jersey wall on the left side. I over-corrected to the right and then back straight to the jersey wall, and my car fishtailed and somehow ended up skidding UP ON THE WALL until the front tires ripped off and what was left of my car ended up in the middle lane facing on-coming traffic.
My car was totalled, I was hyperventilating (too panicked to even scream), yet I walked away with a slight bruise on my collarbone. EVERYTHING that was in the hatch of the car...luggage, my laptop, etc, flew past me to crash through the windshield and ended up on the roadway over the jersey wall. Had I not been buckled up, I too would have ended up scattered across that road.
(***shuddering***)
Wearing a seatbelt is not, to me at least, a way for government to poke its nose in my business, as I doubt that 'government' even knows who I am. No one seems to question placing a baby in a carseat, or even a pet in a pet carrier while traveling...I like to drive, and have never considered a seatbelt to be any kind of infringement at all.