Seat belts should be a safety no-brainer

The federal government's latest report on traffic safety is prosaically titled "Research Note: Restraint Use Patterns Among Fatally Injured Passenger Vehicle Occupants." In essence, it identified who the people are who didn't buckle their seat belts and got killed because of it.
And those people are disproportionately males, driving on rural highways in pickups or SUVs, the sort of drearily familiar three-paragraph short in newspaper roundups of weekend traffic deaths.
Seat belts are a safety no-brainer. They dramatically reduce the risk of death or major injury, by about half in cars and by 60 percent or more in light trucks and SUVs.
Still, 18 percent of the nation's drivers don't wear them, despite laws, publicity campaigns and common sense. And most of those 18 percent are men, which is a key reason they account for more traffic deaths, 65 percent, than women, 35 percent. The gory details in bloodless prose are on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, http://www.nhtsa.gov/.
'Click It' campaign
The annual "Click It or Ticket" campaign of stepped-up seat-belt enforcement runs for two weeks starting next Monday in the run-up to the traditional Memorial Day weekend start of the summer driving season.
And a $31 million campaign of national and state ads aimed at young men who watch sports events, including NASCAR races, began Monday. A male who drives a pickup truck on country roads can reasonably presumed to be a NASCAR fan. And you would reasonably presume that this fan knows that the reason racecar drivers generally walk away from horrific wrecks is that they are belted into their cars.
If the feds can convince those drivers to make that last little connection between seat-belt use and their own safety, a lot of lives will be saved. The numbers back it up.
Scripps Howard News Service