{"id":7586,"date":"2004-03-02T22:49:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-03T04:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/02\/7586\/"},"modified":"2011-12-17T14:44:43","modified_gmt":"2011-12-17T20:44:43","slug":"7586","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/02\/7586\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe They Ought to Make It A Felony"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Looks like someone&#8217;s got the bright idea that cops ought to pull over people who are not wearing their seatbelts as a primary offense.  The <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/i> reports that some institutionally-important, but realistically-challenged hack explains:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> &#8220;Enacting this bill is the single most important life-saving and <b>deficit reduction<\/b> measure you can take this session. It costs nothing, but will save much,&#8221; Healing said in prepared remarks to the Senate Transportation Committee.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s a bit frank, isn&#8217;t it?  After all, we could make the world safer if we only made driving without a seatbelt a felony, but that wouldn&#8217;t exactly produce revenue, would it?  We could make the world much safer by putting private citizens&#8211;you know, the only ones who hurt themselves&#8211;into straight jackets and feeding them Ritalin.<\/p>\n<p>Jeez, just what I need, the ability for a cop to pull me over <i>because he thinks he saw me without a seatbelt<\/i>.  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&#8217;s an excuse to pull people over, and a damn lot of work for a cheap ticket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Looks like someone&#8217;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: &#8220;Enacting this bill is the single most important life-saving and deficit reduction measure you can take this session. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-overreach","category-missouri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10651,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586\/revisions\/10651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}