We hear that cloying bleat from the advocates of “safety” (at gunpoint) befehls all the time. If it saves even one life, it’s worth it! They use it to justify helmet laws for motorcyclists and seatbelt laws for drivers. Air bags, etc.

But how come their logic is never applied to the source of all Safety itself?

I mean, of course, the government.

Defective Takata air bags have injured and killed at least 130 people so far that we know about – and the potential mayhem could involve literally millions of people. Because millions of “defective” air bags (34 million, to be precise) have been installed – per befehl – in cars made by a number of major car brands since the 2004 model year. These cars are in circulation – and probably many more people will be injured and killed before 34 million of Battlefield America: T... John W. Whitehead Best Price: $10.95 Buy New $18.80 (as of 10:15 UTC - Details) these steering wheel Claymores can be defused.

Many thousands of them probably never will be – their owners blissfully unaware of the ticking time bombs positioned just inches away from their faces and the faces of their loved ones. Not everyone gets their mail. Or watches the evening news. People move, records get lost. Thirty four million cars – built over a period of more than ten years.

That’s one hell of a mop-up operation.

But what about the not-defective air bags?

A Government of Wolves... John W. Whitehead Best Price: $1.16 Buy New $2.99 (as of 10:15 UTC - Details) The ones that worked as designed? These have also killed and maimed. No one knows the precise number, but it is not zero.

Since the dawn of the Air Bag Age in the mid-1990s, air bags have broken bones, ripped out eyes, burned skin and ended lives.

It is a fact.

Every car made since the late ’90s has these devices installed, per befehl. That’s not 34 million cars. It’s on the order of 200 or 300 million of them. And every single one of them could maim or kill someone.

This, too, is a fact.

How America Was Lost: ... Roberts, Dr. Paul Craig Best Price: $5.35 Buy New $2.99 (as of 10:30 UTC - Details) But where is the outrage? Why do those lives not matter?

Oh, there is gabbling about the “greater good.”

Whose good, though?

And who gets to decide?

That’s what’s not being talked about, Takata-wise or otherwise.

It ought to be.

If I wreck my motorcycle and am badly injured as a result of not wearing a helmet – which I chose not to wear that day (assuming I had the free choice) then I can at least take comfort in the fact that I made the choice and now bear the consequences for that choice. But when I am forced to wear a helmet – and wake up in a wheelchair, paralyzed but my face unscathed – I am a victim of someone else’s choices.

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