If drivers get any worse I might wear a helmet in my truck.

 

When I first bought my Shoei GT Air, it was as tight as a squirrels ear. The guy at Cyclegear told me to just wear it around the house for 1/2 hour for a week. Instead of doing that I just wore it to work in the truck going back and forth. It was summer time and very hot. Should have seen the looks I got from other motorists.

 

My state says I can choose to wear a helmet or not. That's good enough for me.

 

This is in no way argumentative: Earnhardt suffered a basilar skull fracture due to the sudden deceleration of his body combined with strong forward inertia of his head. His body stopped suddenly...before his head...and the unequal forces produced the injury. I'm 100% sure the weight of his helmet only added to the probability of the injury. I'm not so sure he wouldn't have suffered the same fatal injury without the helmet. An average male adult's head weighs 10-11 pounds. At a sudden stop from 150 mph that 11 pounds (no helmet) exerts a huge amount of force against the neck. Add in a several-pound helmet and it compounds the inertial energy which tries to keep moving forward.

There are probably scenarios where a motorcycle helmet would contribute to additional neck or basilar skull injury from sudden deceleration, but it likely wouldn't happen in any similar fashion to Earnhardt's injury, where his body was adequately restrained but his head was not.

 

University Of Texas Medical School San Antonio

 

Oh yeah and Governor's Task Force on Repealing Texas Mandatory Helmet Law 1997.

 

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Please share the law making it illegal to wear a helmet while driving a car.

 

I will try to get the exact statute this up coming week. This will be for Fl only. This law pertains to street vehicles only, not vehicles on closed courses. I'm a little busy right now as a good friend died night before last and another going in for cancer surgery in the morning. Not sure as to why my friend died but I can say he was not a rider. While you are waiting for my reply check your own state and see what their position is concerning this matter. You may be surprised at what you find!

 

The last time I got involved in this kind of discussion, it was in a thread that was started in 2011 about loud pipes, but morphed in and out of including helmet law legislation throughout the next four years until I joined the site and the thread in Oct. of 2015. By the end of Nov. that year, the thread was locked. Never totally understood why, but there ya go.

In all things where the only potential "victim" is the injured party, I am four square in favor of letting that party decide for her/himself how best to protect themselves from other parties. As such, my entire argument came from the perspective that helmet laws are the main injury, maybe really the only injury, to those who would otherwise not choose to wear a helmet if they indeed, had a choice. That injury has limited my freedom to choose since 1991 when CA passed a helmet law. In '92 shortly after the embers of the Rodney King Riots were extinguished, we decided to leave CA for good and moved to AL where a helmet law had been in place since like '62 or '63 if memory serves. I say I have been a "victim" of, for me, what amounts to an extreme intrusion by government into my personal decision-making authorities and rights, because 1) whether right or wrong, I do not believe that helmets do much at all to save lives, and 2) In all my years of riding nothing but Harleys (since age 19 - I just turned 64 this past Friday), I have never laid down my bike(s), not even in my own driveway or lawn while cleaning 'em. Not saying it can't or won't happen someday, but my record of accident avoidance is 100% successful since 1974, as well as the five years before that when I was riding OTHs (Other Than Harleys) from my learner's permit on forward to a ~200 mile ride just yesterday.

I can argue stats and the efficacy of helmets themselves, and I did extensively in that locked thread a few years ago, but my is and always was, if government is the answer to any freedom issue, then people are asking the wrong damned questions. Let those who ride decide, period. I can't imagine that anyone actually would argue with that position, but that thread proved succinctly that many will, which is the main reason I won't go through digging out all the stats and research again...... Well, at least not in this first post in this thread. It's possible that someone could spew some uninformed crap about why my right to decide for myself should be made legally inferior to his/her right to decide for themselves, and I'd just simply have to show them how valid points are made. Let's hope that doesn't happen...... Again!

Blues