THE SENATE’S OVERDUE and overwhelming approval last week of a bill to let police enforce our state’s seat belt law was a serious blow to selfishness, irrational arguments and obstructionism. More importantly, it was a much-needed victory for commonsense, responsibility, majority rule and the protection of innocent lives.

And not a moment too soon.

Last year, South Carolina’s already-low seat belt usage dropped so much that we ended up in a virtual tie for dead last nationally. Our highways are consistently among the nation’s most deadly. That’s no coincidence.

Wearing a seat belt increases your chance of surviving a wreck by 50 percent. Letting police enforce a seat belt law increases seat belt use by 10 to 15 percentage points. So the bill the Senate passed could save 100 lives a year — in addition to preventing 1,700 injuries, reducing the severity of other injuries and reducing the severity of some accidents, by keeping drivers belted in place and able to control their cars after a crash.

Everybody knows this, which is why everybody from police and paramedics to doctors, insurance companies and Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been working for years to convince the Legislature to do what 21 other states have done: Treat our seat belt law the same as laws against speeding, running a red light and failing to yield the right of way, by letting police stop and ticket people they see violating it.

Unfortunately, a handful of opponents in the Senate — cheered on by motorcyclists and anti-government, anti-authority contrarians — held fast to the notion that individuals somehow have a right to violate the law, to endanger others’ safety and to increase insurance and government costs for the rest of us. (A real seat belt law is projected to cut those costs by $200 million a year.) And so they spent the last year refusing to let their colleagues even take a vote on the measure. Little wonder: 33 of the 46 senators voted for the bill.

The House and the governor still must approve the measure, and there are pitfalls at both steps.

The House has worked hard in recent years to improve our seat belt laws; it is to be commended for its commitment to public safety. There’s no reason to think representatives will change their minds this year. There is, however, a danger that the House could play the bragging-rights game we see all too often in both the House and the Senate: One body passes a bill and, rather than passing that bill, the other body passes its own bill, which the first body then has to pass; it’s not unheard of for good legislation to die this way, because neither body is willing to pass the other’s bill. House leaders must resist the temptation to get drawn into that destructive pattern; lives are, literally, at stake.

Gov. Mark Sanford, on the other hand, has been unwilling to state a position on the seat belt law. Worse, his spokesman last week suggested that the bill isn’t tough enough. We’d love to see tougher penalties and the provision the governor wants to let juries consider seat belt use in lawsuits — if the Legislature is willing to pass that. But all indications are that the Legislature is not, which is why avowed opponents of public safety have been so eager to attach such provisions.

We’ve worked and waited too long to have a governor veto a life-saving bill because he doesn’t think it will save enough lives. Whether or not that’s not our libertarian governor’s real objection, lawmakers should not hesitate to overturn any bad decision he might make.