A pathologist friend-of-friends often refers to motorcycles as “donorcycles”. See if you can tell me why after reading this.
Motorcycle fatalities involving riders without helmets have soared in the nearly six years since Gov. Jeb Bush repealed the state’s mandatory helmet law, a newspaper reported Sunday.
A Florida Today analysis of federal motorcycle crash statistics found “unhelmeted” deaths in Florida rose from 22 in 1998 and 1999, the years before the helmet law repeal, to 250 in 2004, the most recent year of available data.
Total motorcycle deaths in the state have increased 67 percent, from 259 in 2000 to 432 in 2004, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics.
The article hastens to add that motorcycle registrations are up 87 percent since Jebby repealed the helmet law, and that most fatal motorcycle crashes are actually the fault of careless car drivers turning left. (That last bit comes courtesy of a helmet-hating biker.)
Why, oh why, couldn’t they give the last word to a doctor? Perhaps a specialist in organ transplantation, thanking all those civic-minded helmet-haters for their gifts of life? Would that be too much to ask?
