Every year at the beginning of summer here in Michigan, we’re bombarded with “click-it or ticket” campaigns:
here’s one. and another. And just for good measure, one more.

“If we can get more people to buckle up we will save lives,” said Michael L. Prince, OHSP division director. “This advertising campaign serves as a warning about the upcoming enforcement effort and encourages motorists to save their lives and their money by simply fastening their safety belt.”

…the ads are designed to reach young men, the group least likely to buckle up.”

These alleged safety campaigns typically coincide with the memorial day weekend – a revenue generator for the various localities who collect the $65 fine. This of course requires one to conveniently ignore the millions of “schoolchildren” who each morning are forced by law to attend a public school, many of whom depend wholly on publicly funded school-buses which except for very rare instances, do not have seatbelts. Except for the driver, of course – he gets to wear a seatbelt. Now, I know this is humorous, but there is a boulder-sized grain of truth to it.

It’s especially peculiar that kids can ride the school bus w/o seatbelts, even as more parents are urged by public service announcements to purchase child-seats and safety harnesses for their children – that they should always sit in the back seat, and should always wear seatbelts. In michigan, a non-driver in the back seat is exempt from the seatbelt law if he’s over 16. Schoolchildren, the last time I checked, are mostly under 16.

Either way – one set of regulations (or lack thereof) is at permanent odds with the other: Either it’s perfectly safe to not wear the belt, in which case all seatbelt laws should be repealed, or it’s not safe to leave it unbuckled, in which case all school buses should be retrofit with seatbelts. Would it be too costly to implement seatbelts in this manner? Costlier still, to employ additional aids to monitor the children and make sure they’re in compliance? This is surely the first time I’ve heard a nanny-statist fall back on economic inefficiency as justification for not “protecting” people. Come on now, don’t let your protectionist, nanny-state rhetoric fail you this time: “Won’t someone please think of the children!”

If you’re an enlightened one – and can think of any reason why we don’t require 7 year olds to wear a seatbelt on their way to school in the morning, but we do require 36-year olds to wear one, in their own car, with airbags, on their morning commutes – please convert me.