Natasha Richardson's death spurs busybodies to demand helmet laws

March 19, 12:49 PMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

Previous Next

8 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Civil Liberties Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Actress Natasha Richardson in happier times.
(AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)

Leave it to the modern world to take the unfortunate death of an actress on a ski slope and turn it into a call to burden people with more intrusive rules and laws. That seems to be part of the fallout of Natasha Richardson's death after a tumble at Mont Tremblant, in Quebec. Officials and other busybodies have lined up to demand that skiiers be required to wear helmets lest anybody else ever again suffer an injury while whizzing at high speeds down a snow-covered mountain.

If no one wears their helmet, do we close the centre? It could go probably that far."
--Michelle Courchesne, Quebec's Sport and Leisure Minister

Quebec's Sport and Leisure Minister, Michelle Courchesne, (a politician with responsibility for fun? Why?) leads the charge, announcing that children will be required to armor their skulls before having fun in the snow. She hasn't yet decided for sure whether adults will be subject to the same mandate. What she has decided is that  there will be no fun allowed if people don't comply with her compassionate commands.

"If no one wears their helmet, do we close the centre? It could go probably that far," she said.

Quebec's emergency room doctors back the dictate of safety from above, issuing their call for such a law even before Richardson's accident.

Helmets for children engaged in winter sports are already compulsory in Italy and parts of Austria, and tighter requirements are now under consideration.

The United States, where motorcycle helmet laws have lost ground in recent years, doesn't seem to have joined the frenzy for mandates, but it's easy to see how the growing flurry of admonishments to wear helmets could turn into a Canadian-style push to require their use.

Helmets almost certainly make many activities a bit safer -- but that's beside the point. People have the right to take whatever risks they please. They then have to suffer the consequences of poor choices or bad bets, of course. But it's a matter for personal choice -- not government mandates.

The idea that people will be punished if they don't do what the state has decided is for their own good -- either directly, through fines and jail, or indirectly, through the closure of areas devoted to skiing, sledding, snowboard and other activities -- is as overt a case of infantilizing the public as can be imagined.

Why doesn't Michelle Corchesne drop the pretense and just say outright that Quebec residents will be grounded if they don't mind her rules? She can send them all to their rooms without supper while she's at it.

Life is inherently risky and always ends at the same point: death. How and when that death arrives and the nature and quality of the life lived up to that point depend on a variety of choices made along the way. Those choices may be wise, or they may be foolish. More often than not, though, they are simply expressions of personal preferences that one person might decide one way, and another person decide very differently.

In a free society -- one worth living in -- decisions like whether or not to wear a helmet are for each individual to make, even if government officials don't approve of the outcome.

email J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com