Reality check: Does it make sense to enact safety measures that create danger?

If fire extinguishers began exploding, routinely killing 10 or 12 people per year, would our government mandate having them in every home?

Fire extinguishers that kill: That’s no bargain, you say. But what if the fire extinguishers sometimes saved lives by putting out fires; would they become more acceptable because of their potential benefits?

Who would advocate buying a device with a history of such failings?

But that is precisely what bureaucrats and politicians have done by mandating airbags in vehicles. They force consumers to pay extra for these devices, and in many cases, they have made it illegal to disconnect them.

According to statistics released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 1999 — the latest figures available — air bags had saved 4,758 lives, with 3.8 million air bags deployed since the late 1980s in the 89 million cars and light trucks equipped with the devices.

Meanwhile, over the same period, air bags themselves were determined to be the cause of death for 146 people — 84 children and 62 adults.

A study by Transport Canada revealed in 2002 that air bags reduce the risk of injury to men by 11 percent, while increasing by 9 percent the risk of injury to women, for an overall risk reduction of only 2 percent for adults who wear seatbelts.

Another Transport Canada study in 2002 showed that air bags actually increase children’s risk of death by 21 percent.

Should bureaucrats and politicians force people to use devices proven to kill? Assuredly not.

According to the federal Department of Transportation, air bags deploy at up to 200 mph, propelling a chunk of hard plastic from the vehicle’s dashboard or steering wheel or door panel directly into whatever — or whoever — is in the way.

Imagine being hit in the face or chest by an object moving twice as fast as a major league baseball pitcher’s fastball, and you’re approaching the right picture. Broken ribs, broken necks, even decapitation of small children have resulted.

Safety belts — and later, air bags — became a serious issue in the 1970s, when the government instituted Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency laws, requiring car manufacturers to build smaller, lighter cars that are necessarily less impact resistant, in an effort to save fuel.

That’s why large SUVs are so popular: In large part it’s a safety issue. The size and weight of the large vehicles makes people feel protected and safe — which they are, compared to the protection provided by a government-mandated tin can with explosive, potentially lethal air bags.

A new Ford Explorer, for example, weighs just about 5,000 pounds, compared to the 4,500-pound weight of a 1975 Ford LTD — a land yacht by anyone’s definition. And the Explorer isn’t one of the heavier SUVs. A Suburban 2500, still not the heaviest of them, weighs in at 8,600 pounds.

People like these vehicles because they are safe in ways that can’t be had in a light car with seat belts and air bags.

For airbags to function as close to properly as possible, the victims must also be wearing seat belts. But even harsh enforcement of seat belt laws doesn’t necessarily lead people to buckle up, according to Linda Gorman, a senior fellow at the Independence Institute.

“As the 20-year experiment with artificially low speed limits demonstrated, laws designed to regulate individual risk do not necessarily enjoy high rates of compliance, and low compliance with one law may erode general respect for all laws,” she wrote.

And even though states that treat seat belt violations as a primary offense have seat belt use of 12 to 14 percent higher than states where it’s a secondary offense, this has not proven to decreases traffic injuries and fatalities.

“In fact,” said Gorman and Dwight Filley — also of the Independence Institute — “no jurisdiction that has passed a seat belt law has shown evidence of a reduction in road accident deaths,” in part because drivers who are forced to wear seat belts often drive more aggressively.

Reinforcing this claim is a 1993 study by the University of Missouri, which revealed that seat belt laws don’t save lives. Rather, the laws “merely determine who will live and who will die,” says the study, appropriately named “Reshuffling the Death Certificates.”

Because people who wear seat belts feel safer, they drive more recklessly, killing more pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists — while remaining safer themselves, the study notes.

“In other words, people who are naturally cautious voluntarily choose to wear seat belts, and voluntarily drive safely,” Gorman and Filley concluded. “When reckless people are forced to wear seat belts, they ‘compensate’ for the increased safety by driving more recklessly.”

According to the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, in 1998 there were 575 children under 5 killed in car accidents. Of them, an estimated 293 (or 51 percent) were unrestrained.

Seat belt law proponents use this statistic to illustrate their pet point:

“Look how many lives were lost because those children weren’t buckled in,”ignoring the facts that half of those killed were restrained, that buckled-up children can be killed and that sometimes they are actually killed because of — not in spite of — the safety devices.

In 1998, an Ohio man was actually sentenced to jail time because his 2-month-old son was killed by an air bag in his pickup truck. Manufacturer’s literature warned that the air bag should be disabled if a child was in a car seat on the passenger side. Dwight Childs didn’t do so, and he was sent to jail for negligence — jailed for not disconnecting a government-mandated device.

Some have suggested that all politicians who favor air bag laws should be sentenced to jail for negligence in the deaths of those who have died due to the decision.

In 1999, the NHTSA issued a statement saying that children should always be seated in the back seats of cars, away from airbags, unless the manufacturer determined that the devices pose “no significant risk to children.”

They admit that airbags are dangerous, that they can kill, yet they continue stressing the importance of these devices of death.

The federal DOT even reported that, in air bag killings, “proximity to the air bag has been the issue in nearly every death.”

Really? No kidding.

Every year, hundreds of items are recalled by manufacturers and distributors, when it is determined that something went wrong with the item.

For example, a toy manufacturer was recently pressured by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to recall hundreds of thousands of baby doll tea sets that included a piece that small children could choke on. No children had been injured or killed by the items; the mere possibility of harm was enough to get the toys pulled off the market.

Doubtless, many of the owners of the recalled items did not return them, believing that the chance of choking was very slight. And they were fully in their rights to do so: If you are willing to ignore warnings, you should have that right.

In 1995, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, 16.8 percent of all public school students reported that they knew there were guns in their schools. According to a study by George Washington University’s Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence, approximately 80,000 high school seniors carry guns to public schools every month.

Even with all those guns at school, there were only three school-related shooting deaths last year, and only five the year before, according to the National School Safety and Security Services office Web site. In contrast, air bags have killed — on average — seven children per year since the late 1980s. Air bags kill more children per year than guns in schools do.

Does this mean that it’s safe to send eight-year-old kids to school with handguns? No one is even suggesting such a thing, because the government school officials would blow their lids.

Maybe it’s time to start locking airbags in safety boxes, registering them with the government and ensuring that they are incapable of going off when they are needed. We need a “zero-tolerance policy” regarding air bags.

Solutions:

People should be allowed to use only seat belts if they want. Car manufacturers shouldn’t be forced to install air bags. Politicians could even admit they didn’t know what they were doing, and take themselves completely out of the automotive safety business.

We should be given the choice of whether or not to participate in the air bag and safety belt program, to be able to tell the car dealer, “No, I don’t want the air bag, so remove it and deduct $1,000 (or more) from the price.”

Some people are convinced that air bags offer desirable benefits without negative impact, and they should be able to purchase one as optional equipment on a vehicle — like four-wheel drive or a “sports package.”

No one is saying these devices are inherently evil, or a waste of materials, money and effort. Rather, we would argue that they are dangerous, and that people should be allowed to decide which danger they prefer to face: injury in an accident, which may occur even with a properly adjusted, functional airbag and seat belt, or injury from the bag itself.

Some will protest that everyone’s vehicle, health and life insurance rates will go up, to compensate for the deaths, injuries and accidents that are sure to follow when safety belts and air bags are no longer required.

But insurance companies routinely charge more to cover people who engage in high-risk activities, such as mountain climbing, motorcycling and hang-gliding — or even smoking.

If insurance was only available from private companies — with health insurance not provided at taxpayers’ expense — there would be a simple private sector solution to this problem. If insurance companies find that people who don’t wear seat belts cost them more money, they could charge those people more for insurance coverage.

Let people pay for the privilege of making a personal choice, instead of criminalizing them under an ineffective government mandate.

Conclusion:

By insisting that vehicles be lighter, to save fuel, our government began killing thousands of people, as cars were no longer sturdy enough to protect the occupants. So they required seat belts, then air bags — in the process killing even more people.

Although air bags and seat belts can save lives, individuals are better able to decide whether they need these devices. People forced to use seat belts end up killing other people instead of themselves, by driving more aggressively, while air bags actively kill children and adults who would otherwise have been safe.

Private insurance companies are much more qualified than politicians to determine what behaviors and activities are high risk — whether not wearing a seat belt or not having air bags will cost them more money. They already assign insurance premiums on a host of other factors that don’t cause other people’s insurance bills to go up: Let them do the same in this instance.

Instead of killing people every year through negligent approval of air bag laws, American bureaucracy could offer people a choice of risks, save millions of dollars saved in “Click it or Ticket” campaigns, and either allow taxpayers to keep some of that money or use it to fight actual crime.

Americans no longer need to function as crash-test dummies. It’s been proven that air bags are dangerous. Now let us make the decision of whether or not to accept that danger.