I worked with a biker dude who was vehemently against the helmet law. When you asked him why he was against helmets he would not hesitate to tell you his story. It seems that this guy had a motorcycle, but this motorcycle was old and beat up. He was perpetually working on it. One night, after a hard day of drinking he decided he should take it for a ride. According to this biker guy, it was about 1:00 AM when he decided to take the bike up on the highway to see how the motor would run at high speed. It was getting onto the highway that he had his accident. The motorcycle had no headlight or running lights, but that didn’t matter. The guy in the car the hit him should have known that he was there because, well after all, the bike didn’t have a muffler either, so the driver should have heard him. Stupid car drivers. Anyway, getting onto the highway he got broadsided. The car knocked him and the bike into the guardrail. This guy woke up in the ICU a couple of days later with serious head injuries. The injuries were from the helmet. You see, the helmet broke apart when he hit the guardrail and pieces of it imbedded in his skull (I know, yick). He had no other serious injuries to speak of.
So why was he against helmets? To his point of view, since his injuries were the result of imbedding the helmet in his skull, if he wasn’t WEARING the helmet, he wouldn’t have sustained the injuries. Ergo, if there were no helmet, there would have been no head injury. Logical, no?
This guy hit the guardrail so hard that he shattered his helmet. But to him, the issue was the helmet. And no amount of arguing with him could get him to realize that without the helmet, his head would have been the thing shattering.
Everyone who heard this story would try to explain it to him. Eventually, to a person, all would stop arguing. Yeah Bob, if you didn’t have the helmet, you wouldn’t have a problem. Of course, everyone else interpreted that statement differently than Bob.
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