Posted on 01/20/2008 4:44:49 AM PST by T Ruth
You hain't otter run into thangs.
I realize you are stating an opinion, but I'd really like to see how you would defend your position to Mary and Bob Ellsworth.
The following snippet is from an article in the current Reader's Digest.
Would you be so confident in your opinion if it were your son and not the Ellsworth's?
When Mary Ellsworth awoke one morning, she noticed her son Bobby’s double-cab Toyota was still in the driveway. He must have slept over at a friend’s house, she thought. Mary and her husband, Bob, had always urged Bobby to stay put when he was tired and out late. “Thank God he didn’t drive,” she told herself.
It was July 2003, a mere month after two milestones: Bobby’s 18th birthday and his high school graduation. Mary was pleased that her outdoors-loving son was having a near-perfect summer, fishing and working as a groundskeeper at a golf course.
Her joy ended, though, when she answered the phone at 8 a.m. It was the San Diego medical examiner; Bobby was in the county morgue.
The Ellsworths learned that Bobby and 18-year-old Waylon Blocker had been visiting friends outside San Diego. Bobby was riding shotgun in Blocker’s pickup truck. At 1:50 a.m., they headed home to Jamul, California, on a two-lane rural road. Blocker crossed the center line and slammed head-on into a BMW with a driver and three passengers inside. Everyone sustained serious injuries; only Bobby’s were fatal.
But it was one shocking discovery that “really put the knife in our hearts,” says Bob Ellsworth. “The state police told us no airbags deployed in the truck because there were no airbags. Instead the compartments were stuffed with paper. Everyone on the scene—the police, EMTs, firefighters—couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
In my opinion, the only 'service' these criminals should be doing for society is to be a means of disposing of old ammunition.
Air bags were forced on the public because people didn’t wear seat belts (although I did). Once air bags started tossing people around (and tossing heads around) with people unbuckled, seat belt laws were passed...and people started wearing seat belts.
So consider this: If seat belt laws had been passed first, there would be no air bags, and we wouldn’t be having this debate.
Or smoking. Could have been puffing on cigarettes instead of watching the road.
The reason there is no federal law and few state laws requiring deployed airbags fixed to pre-accident condition is because insurance carriers don’t want it to be law.
At $2500 per pop for a new one, a minor front end collision that might be a grand to fix now becomes $3500. This doesn’t mean it isn’t covered, it’s just one of those dont ask-don’t tell situations.
ALSO, the insurance companies have body shops by the balls with their direct repair facilities and low rates paid to independent shops...if you become a DRP, you are literally kissing boots and making a tiny tiny little profit. But you need the work, so you jump thru the hoops and hope you get enough volume coming your way to make up for the slicing of your jugular vein they just did.
If you “don’t” hop on the DRP bandwagon and voluntarily kiss the boots, customers are “swayed” away from you but if they insist, you are nickel and dimed and beaten up by the adjuster.
I would venture to say the the shops that are doing this are probably direct repair facilities because they *somehow* have to make a profit. Not saying it’s right, believe me - it’s just that as a body shop owner, in order to put out good work, you have to hire talented people.
Instead, the DRP’s hire hacks and put out seriously crappy, unsafe work - and charge the insurance company for a new airbag when one wasn’t put in.
Thank the insurance companies for this one.
***Maybe they think Hillbillies who live in the Ozarks wouldn’t know the difference.***
Many years ago when my dad dragged us kids kicking and screaming from NM to Ark a local cop told my dad never to buy a used car in Arkansas. He never would say why. Many years later we learned.
When ALL the used car dealers have rebuilders for sale and money is tight these people here don’t have much of a choice.
***Southern Missouri,is the name of the city most associated with such stunts the same as a troubled mid-eastern nation?***
Get a copy of the local BIG NICKLE free want adds. You will find page after page of wrecked cars for sale to rebuilders in southern Missouri, all along the Ark line.
These are “Totaled” by the insurance companies and are supposed to be salvaged out for parts. Intead they are cobbled together and sold just across the line in Arkansas.
MacDonald county MO is the crookedest place in america. The LEOs there are in on the car scams.
Ping.
See post #3...
I was thinking of Lebanon. It has been at the heart of shady car dealings in the midwest for years.
Mac county is beginning to boom since Wal-Mart is pumping money into it. Soon it will look like Northwest Arkansas.
Every day, I thank God for my guy. Not only because he is a heavy equipment mechanic who also knows enough about cars to keep me safe and rolling along just fine.
:)
Then you did not follow the link I provided. What you seem to be seeking is there. A reference by a professional about the efficacy of airbags without the use of seat belts.
Read. Understand. Remember. Then post back here
I’d also be interested in whether alcohol was involved.
Immaterial.
If seat belt laws had been passed first
Define 'seat belts'. Lap belts or shoulder belts? Personally, I will not wear a lap belt. If you are old enough to remember them, I dare say you have not been in a serious accident while wearing one. If you did, you probably wouldn't be in a position to be typing on a keyboard today.
If seat belt laws had been passed, would it have been for lap belts or shoulder belts?
Again, this is all immaterial.
The 'debate', as you call it, has been defined by you and you cannot shift it to another subject.
The current subject is whether the human shite that would remove an airbag and stuff the remaining cavity with newspaper are doing a service to society.
You believe they are. I say they should be treated as the excrement they are and expurgated from said society. You disagree still?
I just read your profile page. A good read.
I could not agree more with what I read there and, in fact, had quite a heated discussion with a very well read friend of mine last night on many of the same points you bring up there....along with the same resolutions.
In the end, we agreed to disagree on the whole but were glad we'd both be at room temperature when these eventualities became reality. At least, that was our fervent hope.
I just get upset hearing about my kid’s school friend getting a detached retina from an airbag blast and having another kid (who I didn’t know) getting decapitated a few miles from where I live (with his grandmother driving, who probably had no clue what cars had become).
Sure, there are cases where airbags save lives versus being properly buckled, but there are also cases where people would have been a lot better off without them.
There are a great many stories to support positions on both sides of this coin. Which is what makes this such a heated issue.
Same to you Sam, thanks. Maybe our descendants will get the idea in time that Angelina Jolie’s fate is not the most important thing in their lives.
On airbags, I do get a bit emotional (and maybe somewhat irrational), but I despise them that much. If the mechanic had left the air filter out of the car (like I did once on someone’s car), then I would be MAD as could be. But air bags...should have never been there in the first place.
Very simple solution. Pass a Federal law mandating the death penalty for anyone who removes an airbag which then results in a fatality. I’d bet that would curb this crap in a hurry,
Don't get me wrong. I do agree. Ralph Nader ought be pilloried.
But those that would remove a potentially life-saving device and replace it with newspaper...particularly when the owner of the vehicle is not wearing a seat belt because they believe the SRS to be in full working order...is reprehensible and worthy of no less than a lynching.
I might settle for tar and feathers.
Agree...it’s just that it’s air bags. I can’t get past that (my issue).
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