What does the rest of the world think of America on days like today?
After 20 people were shot and killed by a white nationalist gunman in El Paso, another shooting by a “masked gunman in black with an assault rifle” is developing in Dayton, Ohio — about an hour ago (as of 3:00 a.m. August 4). If you watch the coverage on international news outlets, you start to get what this looks like from the outside.
Imagine if there were one county on earth where cars didn’t have seatbelts. It had substantially identical laws to the rest of the developed world on every other basic safety issue… but in this one odd area, a unique legal/political framework made seatbelts and seatbelt laws a nonstarter.
The results were obvious to everyone. Thousands upon thousands of additional people died there from car wrecks every year. The rest of the world knew it, the citizens there knew it, and their leaders knew it. Despite the staggering death toll — and to the continued amazement of the rest of the world — a contingent of the population adhered to something like the following:
“Seatbelts and seatbelt laws take away our freedoms. If the government starts telling us how to build our cars and how to drive them, it’s a slippery slope into a mass removal of our rights. We need to fix our DRIVERS not fix our cars. Drivers kill people. Cars don’t kill people. Keep seatbelts out of our cars.”
Adding to it all, the powerful Car Lobby devoted millions to keeping seatbelt regulations off the table. Every politician had an “anti-seatbelt rating.” Anything less than an “A” would kill a candidate’s prospects in certain regions. Car Rights groups were top donors to campaign organizations and would host the nation’s leaders at national conventions every year.
The Car Lobby and Car Rights Groups carried such weight in the county’s politics that the government actually passed a law prohibiting central government health agencies from even measuring seatbelt-preventable injuries and fatalities.
Despite most of the people in that country wanting even a few basic reforms (the country always measured public opinion after particularly bloody car-death weekends), nothing ever changed.
Proponents of reforms would point to data from every other developed nation showing a staggering decrease in car-related deaths attributable to adding seatbelts. But ultimately even small seatbelt reforms would be dismissed as “not politically viable,” “an easy way to lose the election in State X,” or “against our values,” “against the Constitution.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the world continued to find the unique obsession with opposing seatbelts utterly bizarre, as the bodies continued to accumulate by the hour.
Every few days the newscasts would read again, “Another deadly day in County X, as 40 people were killed in car-related violence — an epidemic which continues to plague that nation.”
(Update: Here’s just a few examples of how we’re being covered internationally after the El Paso and Ohio attacks.)
