Looks like someone’s got the bright idea that cops ought to pull over people who are not wearing their seatbelts as a primary offense. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that some institutionally-important, but realistically-challenged hack explains:
“Enacting this bill is the single most important life-saving and deficit reduction measure you can take this session. It costs nothing, but will save much,” Healing said in prepared remarks to the Senate Transportation Committee.
That’s a bit frank, isn’t it? After all, we could make the world safer if we only made driving without a seatbelt a felony, but that wouldn’t exactly produce revenue, would it? We could make the world much safer by putting private citizens–you know, the only ones who hurt themselves–into straight jackets and feeding them Ritalin.
Jeez, just what I need, the ability for a cop to pull me over because he thinks he saw me without a seatbelt. Speed can be measured from outside the car. Driving without a brakelight, ditto. But seeing whether the people in the car are wearing seatbelts is not something easily seen from someone outside the car. It’s an excuse to pull people over, and a damn lot of work for a cheap ticket.
