Figures Don't Lie but Liars can Figure..
Senator Carrie Hicks is a do gooder, always looking out for “the children” or her fellow teachers. Last year she attempted to get a law passed mandating kids wear seat belts in the back seat of vehicles, using scare tactics and inflated statistics. Last year Senator Hicks saw the bill she supported, HB1936, pass committee 7 to 4 in the House but leadership was wise enough to ignore the virtue signaling puffery so the bill languished unsupported and unheard outside of the one committee hearing. Hick's own SB785 died on the Senate floor with a vote of 19 to 27.
I, like most parents, had always made the kids buckle up after traveling too many miles on business and seeing way too many wrecks. But that is a choice, not a mandate by the state, and therein lies the rub. But the nanny state and the do gooders like Hicks aren't gonna allow parents to use their own common sense when they can gin up a good emergency and claim kids are dying by the dozens due to not wearing seat belts in the back seat. Some of the stories that are slobbering on the effort like to cite Oklahoma crash data so it was time to do some research. The story in the link above claimed that 16 kids were killed in 2017 while ignoring how many of those deaths would have happened if the kid was buckled in and covered in bubble wrap.
The reality is much different that what Senator Hicks wants us to believe. The 2018 Oklahoma statistics show that only eight kids died in vehicle crashes of all types and only two of those kids were not wearing restraints like seat belts or a child safety seat. Without digging into the exact type of wreck it is impossible to determine if any of these two fatalities would have been avoided had they been wearing a seat belt. And the other six were wearing restraints. Sounds like Senator Hicks likes to whip a good frenzy and doesn't mind lying about the statistics.
Once you look at the actual statistics, starting with the actual number of unrestrained child fatalities in 2018 at the top of page 15 in this report, you realize that while seat belts are a good idea, it remains to be seen if forcing everyone to comply is going to save a single kid. And take a look at the annual trend right below that top chart with the unrestrained fatalities, 2017 shows only seven fatalities instead of the 16 that Senator Hicks would like us to believe.
The back seat is between 30 and 6 times safer in a crash, one of the reasons why the state has refused to mandate seat belts in the back of a car. And of those eleven deaths in the back seats in 2018 there is no data on how many were kids and how many were adults. But at the top of page six of that same Oklahoma crash report you can find that there were two passenger fatalities age three and younger and one fatality that was 14 and younger. Three actual unrestrained fatalities of kids as passengers and we still do not know if those three crashes were survivable or not. And how many were drunk drivers crashing into a family in a car?
An interesting point is on page four, consistently around one third of all fatalities were unrestrained, meaning you are two times more likely to die wearing a seat belt than not wearing a seat belt. And the majority of fatalities are on the highway and handled by OHP.
I get it, politicians love to stir up controversy and fuss, cause a problem then get credit for “fixing” the problem, and nothing they love more than targets that can't or won't fight back. No one is going to stand up for drunk drivers so they are a favorite target, but this time they are targeting the parent that is taking their kid to school that is six blocks away or writing a ticket that will cost the already stretched parent hundreds of dollars in fines and fees because they were distracted or they had a kid that was rebellious. Or is it the idea to prosecute the parents where a child is killed in a traffic accident?
And another huge lie told by Senator Hicks in pursuit of forcing an ever expanding nanny state is that the leading cause of child fatalities is car accidents. That is a lie.
Child fatalities under one year of ages were mostly suffocation, two thirds of the fatalities happened this way.
For kids between one and four, drowning is the leading cause of death.
For kids five to nineteen, being an occupant in a vehicle crash. Note the word “occupant”, not passenger, then refer back to that Oklahoma crash data report and learn that the vast majority of deaths under 19 years old are the drivers of the cars, not passengers.
So following the madness of Senator Hicks, we first ought to force parents to remove anything that might suffocate a child including food, then not allow them near water and bathtubs, then put an age restriction on drivers so no one under the age of 21 is allowed to drive.
