Beck crashes and burns with NASCAR safety claims

On Fox & Friends this morning, Glenn Beck argued against regulating banks by comparing such regulations to NASCAR's efforts to increase driver safety following Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash at Daytona 500 speedway in 2001. Beck said: "Look, when Dale Earnhardt had a crash, they changed all the cars to make it safer for [the drivers]. Car crashes in NASCAR went up. OK?" He then claimed that "NFL injuries for head and neck injuries" are "higher than rugby," even though NFL athletes wear helmets. Beck's point was that "the safer you make something, the more the players, the bigger the risk they take." Despite the fact that, by his own analogy, Beck appears to be arguing that NASCAR shouldn't have increased safety standards so that the drivers (like bankers) could "feel the consequence of their own action," he's also flat out wrong in his suggestion that the improvement in safety standards for NASCAR has done nothing to improve safety. In fact, it is undeniable that the safety improvements NASCAR implemented following Earnhardt's tragic death have saved lives. Yes, the NASCAR drivers still have accidents, but the drivers are now walking away from accidents where they would have once likely sustained life-threatening injuries.

NASCAR has made dramatic safety improvements in the years since Earnhardt's 2001 death. For instance, within months of Earnhardt's death, NASCAR began mandating the use of the Head and Neck Support (HANS) device, which was created to help stabilize a driver's head and neck in the event of a crash, thus preventing fatalities such as Earnhardt's. As Popular Mechanics reports, "the weakest link in a crash is the one between the driver's head and his body. In a wreck, inertia (the tendency of mass to continue moving at a sustained velocity) keeps the body moving forward in the car. The driver's safety harness (a six-point system of lap and shoulder belts) first stops the pelvis and torso. Unrestrained, the head continues to move forward. Once the neck has extended as far as it can, continued forward momentum causes the fragile bottom of the skull to crack, killing the driver almost instantly. The Head and Neck Support, or HANS, device was created to help eliminate such fatalities." The official cause of Earnhardt's death was reported to be from a basilar skull fracture which occurred during the crash.

Other safety changes that have been implemented following Earnhardt's death include the switch to Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) track wall barriers and the creation of the "Car of Tomorrow" -sometimes referred to as the "Car of Today"-- which boasted increased safety features. These improvements, some of which were in development prior to Earnhardt's death, have been credited in avoiding tragedy resulting from crashes at countless NASCAR races since 2002. NASCAR has not had a single fatality in any of its top three series since Earnhardt's death. Comparatively, Earnhardt's 2001 death was the fourth fatality from a NASCAR crash in 18 months. Each of the four drivers died of from a basilar skull fracture.

It's hard to figure out what Beck was thinking when he compared the banking industry to NASCAR. Is he arguing that NASCAR shouldn't have improved its safety standards because it would have resulted in less crashes overall, but more with deadly consequences? The only thing that seems clear from this analogy is that in his attempts to describe his libertarian theories of deregulation in terms he thinks the common man would understand has left him grasping at straws.