Helmet Nazis

Hopefully you'll forgive my title's blatant polarization of the debate. Apparently the city of Toronto is considering imposing mandatory helmet use laws for tobogganing. Don't even get me started on mandatory bike helmet laws, because I think they're actively corrosive to the health of our society; this proposal, though less destructive, rivals them simply because of its utter Orwellian inanity.

Andrew Coyne lays it out much better than I can.

"So as you stand at the top of the hill, toboggan at the ready, consider this: your odds of giving yourself a serious head injury by the time you get to the bottom are 1 in a million. If you take eight runs in a year, chances are you can toboggan for the next, oh, 125,000 years or so without cracking your skull. And your chances of killing yourself? Next to none. According to a report in Tuesday's National Post, “tobogganing accidents have killed at least seven people in Canada since 2003.” That's seven people -- make it eight if you like -- in four years. Two per year. Out of, what, 50 million tobogganist-runs nationwide?

Three of the seven, moreover, died when they were hit by cars. Stay away from any hills that empty onto roads, then, and your chances are something like 1 in 50 million. This is, in short, not a particularly risky activity, which perhaps explains why so many children and adults enjoy it in safety every winter, as they have done for centuries.

But because two children were killed tobogganing in the last month, one in Quebec and one in Manitoba, and because one of the children died of a head injury, instantly the cry goes up: we must have helmets. More than that, we must have mandatory helmets: helmet laws, to be enforced on every hill in the country. For tobogganing.
...

The only thing that's changed is our neurotic obsession with insulating ourselves from every conceivable risk, no matter how small. Or rather, not every risk, since we blithely ignore all sorts of others -- you're far more likely to be killed on the way to the hill than on it -- but only the ones that occur to us. Such as when two children die doing the same thing in the space of the month. As we say in the business, two's a trend.

Each new intervention only justifies the next. It started with seatbelt laws. Then bicycle helmets came into vogue, though cycling is, objectively, only slightly riskier than tobogganing (one head-related fatality each year for every 100,000 cyclists). Then it spread to the ski-hills: grown adults, pretending they're downhill racers. At the time, I used to joke: what's next, tobogganing? And so I should perhaps avoid anticipating the next recommendation to issue from some coroner's jury run amok or city councillor on the make. Helmets in cars, anyone? Do you know the number of preventable head injuries to passengers in sub-compact vehicles?

Every needless death is a tragedy, every child's death even more so. But a sane approach to life understands that some risks are inevitable, and that if there is anything worse than death it is to spend every waking moment consumed with the potential for mischance. Accidents will happen, our parents used to say, as they pushed us out the door to ride our bikes unchaperoned or play shinny till dark. Were they child abusers?"