Law Requiring Motorcylcists to Wear Helmet while Driving

A19). In response to these laws,, variant pedal groups have banded together in the brass of lobbies. The fight against mandatory helmet laws has been led by much(prenominal) biker organizations as the Ameri bottomland Motorcycle linkup and a group cognise as ABATE (standing either for A Brotherhood Against undemocratic Enactment, or the American Brotherhood Aimed Toward Education).

The precedents for laws requiring helmet use can be traced to the 1966 Highway Safety Act, in which the federal government drum stop start threatened to withhold funds from states failing to pass such laws. Within three years, forty-seven states (as well as capital letter D.C.) had passed mandatory helmet laws, with only(prenominal) California, Utah, and Illinois holding out for the motorcyclist's freedom of pick (Heard, 1989, p. 11). In the late 1970's, the federal government began taking a less active role in the helmet issue. In particular, the passing play of the 1976 Amendment to the Highway Safety Act "gutted the federal power to do the helmet issue, and by 1981, 29 states had repealed their helmet laws or modified them to apply only to riders under a certain age - usually 18" (pp. 11-12). Nevertheless, the controversy over the issue has continued in the heterogeneous different states of the union.

Those who be in favor of mandatory helmet laws assign out that head trauma is a leading stupefy of death in motorcycle accidents. On this basis, it is evident that helmets can help to save lives because the

economic science are also often cited as a intellectual for instituting mandatory helmet laws. In this regard, disabilities caused by motorcycle accidents (rather than deaths) are seen as being an economic burden to society. The medical be of treating headrelated injuries are very high. Often the victims of these types of injuries are uninsured. As a result, the courts involved must be undertaken by the taxpayers of the state. According to the subject area luff Injury Foundation, the lifetime cost of caring for austere head-injured victims is approximately $4.5 million (Sussman, 1991, p. 67).

In the words of the Journal of the American medical examination Association, "disability related to the nonfatal injuries is extensive, and much of the cost is borne by the public" (Sosin, Sacks and Holmgreen, 1990, p. 2398). Because of the large number of motorcycle accidents with head injuries which occur each year, the burden to taxpayers caused by this problem tends to chop-chop add up. Estimates for the state of California, for example, indicate that "it costs California taxpayers $65 million to $100 million annually to treat citizenry for brain damage sustained when they were injured in motorcycle accidents while riding without a helmet" (Sahagun, 1991, p. A19). Thus the general take hold of of the pro-helmet faction is that laws requiring their use "would save society millions of dollars and prevent thousands of deaths" (Heard, 1989, p. 12).

Sosin, Daniel M., Jeffrey J. Sacks, and Patricia Holmgreen. (1990, November 14). Head injury - associated deaths from motorcycle crashes, relationship to helmet-use laws. The Journal of the American Medical Association 264: pp. 23952399.

y help to reduce the risk of head injury in the event of an accident. In addition to deaths, it has been notable that severe disabilities are often caused by head injuries. Statistics are often cited in support of this point of view. For example, a employment published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (coveri
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