[Sethomas]

Wearing a seatbelt is a good idea. People pay far more attention to anomalies than to statistical generalities. I have a friend whose life was saved because his airbag had a mechanical failure in an accident--had the airbag gone off, it would have killed him. I've seen many stories of people who survived because they didn't wear their seatbelts, and one exemplary story where a kid I knew barely survived a car wreck and another kid in the car had so much forward momentum that the seatbelt dismembered his head and arms. Did the seatbelt kill that kid? No, the fact that he drove 80 mph into a tree did. Two other kids in the car that sat in the rear passenger seats had to be scraped out of the trunk compartment.

It's still important to not allow exceptions to statistical rules garner more attention than the actual lessons of those statistical rules. There are countless situations where a seatbelt or airbags will ADD danger to a crash, but in the business of garden variety crashes that represent 98% or more of the accidents people encounter, a seatbelt will be a vast improvement in one's safety. I mean, seriously, how many people PLAN on having an anomaly crash situation versus wanting to have the most comprehensive protection against the most likely dangers? And for the record, fires occur in something like less than 5% of deadly crashes. The car wreck I was in 7 years ago seemed like a perfect candidate for burning me alive, but car engines are very well designed to avoid that in crash scenarios. It's still a good idea to try to turn the ignition all the way off so there's no electrical current after a wreck, but that's just extra protection.

Take your own story: an uncle survived because of no seatbelt. He was a kid, so that happened thirty or so years ago? Because it was an argument against the status quo, it was so memorable that it seems relevant many years later. If your family is like most families in terms of driving history, it's probably witnessed multiple situations where a seatbelt saved someone's life in such a way that it was so taken for granted that people felt more anxiety about the financial damage to the car than the new lease on life.

Seriously, look up some basic equations from high school physics and apply them to a human being moving at only 25 miles per hour. It's pretty scary if you compare the slight momentary discomfort of a sudden stop when it's distributed across your torso by a belt than when it propels your face toward the windshield. A generation ago, when over-the-shoulder straps weren't standard, people would get bruises across their sternum because someone pulled out in front of them, they slam the brakes and their body gets slammed into the steering wheel.