In fights over face masks, echoes of the seat belt wars

A legislator in New Hampshire called it constricting. A Michigan man said it messed up his look. A sailor in Massachusetts argued that the government has no right to force him to wear it.

The fight over seat-belt laws in the United States was fraught with trying to strike a balance between individual and public interests. Those concerns have also been reflected in similar matters of health and safety, including vaccinations, helmet laws — and masks. Since 1984, when New York became the first state to have a seat-belt law, they have continued to be an uneven patchwork. Some have made it a primary violation, meaning officers can pull over a driver only for not wearing a seat belt. Others made it secondary, meaning a driver stopped for another reason can also be given a seat-belt citation. Only 31 states extend the requirement to adults in the back seat.

Their partnership began in 1985, the year of the state’s first seat-belt law. Ford had dropped out of college, sailed and restored boats, and turned to sign painting. One day, he was working in Beverly Harbor when he turned on WRKO. Alan S. Tolz, a former producer of Williams’ show, said the host devoted most of his airtime in that period to encouraging people to petition against seat belts.

“You choose to wear a seat belt, and you are only hurting yourself if you make the wrong decision,” he said.More than 30 years ago, David Hollister, a legislator representing Lansing, was working on budget and social services issues when Richard H. Austin, the secretary of state and chairman of the Michigan Safety Council, asked him to work on the state’s first seat-belt legislation.

“It was the force of a head hitting the windshield at 5 mph,” he said. “People were sitting around eating sandwiches at lunch hour.”“The thing that really did it was we started arguing that the opponents were arguing for the right to go through the windshield,” Hollister said.

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