Fact or Fiction
By Julee Helt
Recently I read an article in a safety magazine spouting numerous statistics. There were statistics about fatal crashes, drunk drivers, seatbelts and child restraints, airbags, and motorcycle helmets. As I read through the article, I began to feel just a bit unnerved by it all. There were plenty of numbers, but what were they really telling me?
What the article said was that lives were saved and deaths were prevented and more lives would be saved and more deaths would be prevented as a result of tougher laws. Lower BAC levels, higher drinking ages, mandatory usage of seatbelts and motorcycle helmets. Nowhere did it say that those lives might have been saved or that those deaths might have been prevented had those individuals not been subjected to those laws. Just because an individual who is not wearing a seatbelt suffers a fatal accident does not mean that that individual's life would have been saved had he been wearing a seatbelt? The only way to know for sure is to observe the same accident twice with the only variable being the seatbelt usage.
My contention here is not with the use of safety devices but rather with the random use of so-called "statistics"Ästatistics that many people view as fact. If every accident report were documented in the same manner using the same criteria with no subjective observations being made, that would be a foundation for establishing comparisons...like apples and apples. I don't believe that any two individuals would view an accident in an identical manner. Therefore, how can we possibly site numbers as fact, if you will, when the very foundations for their comparisons are all variables?
Source: NMA News