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Despite the vital role automobile seat belts have played in saving thousands and thousands of lives over the last several decades, there is still a group of drivers and passengers who are determined not to wear them, for any number of reasons: because they find them too uncomfortable or confining, because they don't believe in their efficacy, because they've heard that wearing seat belts might actually cost them their lives in certain types of accidents, or because they resent as an unwarranted intrusion of government into private life the plethora of laws now requiring motorists to buckle up. In this vein, we note with a sense of both sadness and irony a couple of articles recently called to our attention. The first is a 17 September 2004 editorial published in the Daily Nebraskan and entitled Individual Rights Buckle Under Seat Belt Laws, by Derek Kieper, a 21-year-old senior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in which the writer inveighed against mandatory seat belt laws, opining that Uncle Sam is not here to regulate every facet of life no matter the consequences, and that Democrats and Republicans alike should stand together to stop these laws that are incongruous with the ideals of both parties. In the midst of his editorial he noted: Evidently his words were far more prescient than any of us might have wanted, as an article in the 4 January 2005 Lincoln Journal Star reported that Mr. Kieper not only died in a car crash, but the tragic mishap that claimed his life was the very type of accident in which seat belts have proved so effective in saving lives by preventing passengers from being ejected from vehicles: In a similar vein, in July 2011 a helmetless motorcyclist participating in a ride to protest mandatory helmet laws was killed when he was thrown over the handlebars of his motorcycle in Onondaga, New York:
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