Bill Burr has a great joke about air bags…

It’s fucking funny, but it’s wrong.  No, not for the image of dead children and a grief-stricken father.  That’s what makes it funny.  The pronoun is wrong.  It’s not “why would you  just save me…”

It should be: “Ohh shit, why didn’t I pay for airbags for everyone.”

Sure, sure, no one sat in the dealership and put a line through airbags for the kids, but we all made that decision every time we refused to pay the $2k to upgrade to the “LX” edition.

We don’t even think about how fucked up and scary we make things — just to save a few bucks.

Ever see seat belts on a Greyhound bus?  Fuck no. That might cost $2 a trip (I have no idea of the actual cost).   In effect every passenger is saying: “I’ll take my chance on the road with these lunatics and this lowly paid, overstressed driver, so I can get a Twix out of the machine before we go.”

Most school busses don’t have seatbelts.  Is it because we don’t give a fuck out about kids? We say no, but school busses are $100k each.  It’s probably another $10k to fill them with seatbelts.  But then who is going to enforce that shit?

You gotta hire a seat belt monitor to make sure the kids buckle up, or the first accident where little Sarah and Jeremiah go flying around the cabin, their parents, Karen and Ken, are going to sue your ass off because you didn’t have an adult there to tuck them in.

It’s the same story with planes, trains and guns.  Yeap, there’s trigger technology that would only allow a gun to fire when the “owner” is holding it — kinda like phones and computers use your finger or face to figure out it’s you.  Spend a few bucks and maybe we could save the 8 kids a day who are accidentally shot by a family member.

Yeah, I know. You can’t make everything perfectly safe. We could spend ourselves into oblivion to “save” stupid people from every potential danger. Maybe these choices are just Darwinism thinning out the herd… but they aren’t. These are accidental and random deaths that kill just as many people with potential as they do dumb asses.

We can’t cover the world in bubble wrap, but we could be fucking honest about our choices.

We could demand that manufacturers lay out the cost/benefit analysis. You know they are measuring every potential litigation against their profit. Those Ford Pintos didn’t all blow up by mistake. After the first few exploded, Ford carefully calculated the casualties — the death rate, the burns and broken bones, and the cost of litigation — figured it was not worth fixing.

That shit would be nice to know at the dealership.

Dealer: “You could buy the ‘base model’ which has a 20 percent chance of exploding and catching on fire. Or for $200 a month, you could get the ‘safety package,’ which doesn’t explode.”

Most of us: “No Thanks. For $200, I’ll try not to get hit.”

I’d bet the vast majority of people would go “cheap” — but at least we would know. It’s our risk to take.

My airbags, my choice.