Seat belt law a bit overzealous
Published 12:39 am Friday, October 3, 2008
As is typically the case, any time that a law is created to regulate common sense it comes under fire. The seat belt law is no exception.
I have often questioned whether police officers should be spending time pulling people over because they are not wearing a seat belt. With limited financial resources, would the time spent enforcing the seat belt law be better spent capturing thieves, patrolling for speeders or working on drug arrests?
Recently the law has been challenged in several counties around the state. Many of those counties are finding that judges agree with them and have seen the law labeled unconstitutional and thrown off the books. On the other end of the spectrum, agencies and officers are being rewarded financially for the number of tickets written for seat belt law offenses. Somewhere there is a disconnect and unfortunately in this case, it sounds like it is in the state Legislature.
If you asked 100 people whether we should be spending legislative time regulating common sense, they would probably say that time should be spent on more urgent issues such as school funding, transportation or even reducing state expenses.
Every year elected officials try to regulate common sense. Maybe it is a way of procrastinating on the larger issues. I would hope that is not the case, but I also feel that the general population is tired of trivial laws that should not be created by legislative bodies. Heck, if we continue down the current path of regulation, some environment like the one shown in the movie “The Matrix” – an innocuous world where humans are bit players in the grand scheme of a super computer – would seem more practical than living life. That might be a bit extreme, but so is the continued fascination with control over common sense.
So we have decided to do a nonscientific poll on our Web site. Go to cmg-northwest2.go-vip.net/valleyrecord and look for the poll box on the front page that asks: Do you support a seat belt law? Simple enough question, but it does beg many more questions about regulating common sense. We will post the results of the poll in three weeks.
