Don't quote "death" but "casualty".
And much like that topic, those who try to refute the "need" to wear a helmet come up with all sorts of fairy-tale nonsense to support their viewpoint, one often driven by fear and ignorance. Thus the use of card-stacked cherry-picked statistics mated to an endless stream of irrational lies.
Wizard's First Rule folks: "People are dumb. They will believe a lie because they want it to be true, or because they are afraid it might be true."
You'd THINK that fear would make people put the bloody things on, but they "small number fallacy" themselves to prop up and sustain a more important fear. A fear of "I'll look stupid" or worse, "I'll look like a {sexual orientation slur omitted}". Far too many people are more concerned with appearance and tribalistic bigotry than common sense. Quite literally preferring to do something stupid, than be caught looking -- to their mind and the nonsense "society" has filled their heads with -- stupid.
Thus so much of the anti-helmet idiocy is nothing more than testosterone poisoning, or as a lady friend calls it "BMS". Big Man Syndrome. These little epsilon males trying to compensate for their lack of testicular fortitude by trying to PRETEND they're alpha's, showing how little 'fear' they have by not wearing the helmet.
Likely why there's so much overlap between the die-hard anti-helmet nuts and the jerks who can't go to Walmart without open carrying their penis extension and a half dozen high capacity mags. But sure, those of us wearing masks, social distancing, and putting helmets on to ride bicycles are the ones living in fear.
Sure, there are places where few if any riders wear helmets on bicycles, but those places also tend to have a lot less drivers who think they own the road and have blindness to anything smaller than another automobile. Riders in such places -- like the Netherlands -- have far more infrastructure and locations where bicycles are as numerous as pedestrians and more common than the car. You live in America where you have jackasses screaming at you to "Get out of the road" right next to the sign that says "no bicycles on sidewalk" and 15 yards from the sign with a picture of a bicycle and the text "share the road", you wear the bloody helmet.
True story bro...
,,,And maybe a vest with back armor like many motorcyclists do... and maybe even some knee and elbow protection too. I wish to hell I had padded up 24 years ago when I shattered an elbow in a crash! At least that was the worst of my injuries since without having worn a helmet that night, I likely would have busted my head open.
Sure growing up my generation and older never wore them, but half our cars didn't even HAVE seatbelts either. We sure as shine-ola never went out on the rough paths mountain bikers do. For us a 4" ramp made out of a plywood sheet and two cinder blocks was "being dangerous".
That's part of the issue too IMHO, this ridiculous absurd rosy fiction about "how great things used to be." A nostalgia seen through rose-coloured glasses tainting nearly every aspect of society; that for the most part is in no way, shape, or form based in reality. At BEST it's a mix of confirmation bias and the survivorship fallacy. Ideas deeply rooted in "I was ok, so it couldn't be a real danger", and worst of all, willful denial in the form of "It could never happen to me".
Too many of our behaviors as a species is based on the sociopathic idea of "me, me, me, **** everyone else", whilst at the same time using that narcissism to in fact screw ourselves over -- again out of fear. Bad things can happen to ANY of us at ANY moment. But you mix in the confirmation bias of going long periods without a disaster, and the end result is people getting sloppy or making irrational choices. Much less a willingness to believe almost any lie that supports the false idea of "Safety without precautions.".
You take poverty. The simple fact is the vast majority of normal people are one bad week away from being broke, homeless, and just plain destitute. That's the REALITY nobody wants to admit, so we bullshit. We blame the poor for being poor, the homeless for being homeless, etc, etc. Anything to avoid the fact that -- as Picard told Data -- "It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That's not a failing, that is life!"
The same
mentality
(emphasis on the mental) is applied to things like safety equipment. "Well I don't ride in a way or places I need it", or "I've been riding for years and had plenty of falls, I've been fine". ANYTHING to maintain the narrative that "it could never happen to me".
A natural result of spending the past 40 years promoting narcissistic sociopathy as a virtue, whilst casting empathy, compassion, reason, and even just plain reality as some sort of evil to be cast out at every opportunity.
