Helmet Laws

I read this post on the NPR blog August 5th. The British cycling star Wiggins pretty much got lambasted for his comments on legislating helmet use. Helmet laws are a big deal in Michigan where the legislature just recently repealed our long-standing helmet law for motorcyclists. We don't have helmet laws for bicyclists-- not even for kids.

It strikes me as odd that people are forever discussing helmet laws in the context of saving lives. When you die, your guilt, your worry, your responsibility, your pain, your material and spiritual poverty -- it all dies with you. You're dead. Plain and simple. It's not dying that the parent or cyclist has to worry about. It's not dying.

I always ask parents of youngsters if their kids wear helmets when they ride. And when I see riders who've been injured on their bicycles I always ask if they wear a helmet. Perhaps I'm a bit too harsh but I always tell them that what you really want from a helmet is protection from injury, not death. I mean, protection from death is a reasonable objective as well, but head injury is the culprit.  Spending the rest of your life absent a significant chunk of your memory, or a precious sense like taste, or your cognitive ability, or your motor function, or all of the above, is just not an attractive option. In low speed impact (e.g., falling off your bike) helmets can significantly protect your -- or your child's-- cabeza. Simple. (One can probably argue, though, that at speeds much above 30 miles an hour the protection offered will be minimal. In fact, if you're really interested read this article.)

The argument for helmets is similar to all manner of health related arguments: Smoking, excessive eating, excessive drinking, living in an urban area-- that sh#t'll kill ya! Like the helmet, I never worry about getting knocked off. I worry about the bad stuff: stroke, shortness of breath that tethers one to an oxygen tank, debilitating heart disease, de-conditioning to the point you can't walk to the mailbox and back. (The what??)

Ultimately it's a personal choice for any adult-- helmet, rotten diet, sedentary lifestyle, smoking. And, like the author argues in his blog, it can't be legislated so much as socially enforced. I would like to think the fear of permanent physical and mental impairment should be motivation enough. Such logic does, however, require one to assume fully competent mental capacity at the start.