HIGHWAY-SAFETY advocates have been focusing in recent years on one of the biggest reasons too few South Carolinians wear their seat belts — the law that prohibits police from enforcing the seat belt law just as they enforce the speed limit and other traffic laws.

But while this is one of the biggest reasons our seat belt usage is among the lowest in the nation — and our highway death rate is among the highest — it’s not the only one. It’s not even the only one that is within the power of the government to change.

Another problem, which too many of us have overlooked for too long, is a special provision in our law that protects people who don’t wear a seat belt from having to take any personal responsibility for their irresponsible and illegal decision, even when that decision has disastrous results. That special protection, like the provision that prohibits police from writing a seat belt ticket unless they stop you for some other violation, was part of the compromise that was necessary to get opponents to go along with a law requiring everyone to wear a seat belt. Taken together, those two compromises have led to widespread disregard for the law.

Taking away that special protection would simply bring the way the seat belt law is handled in lawsuits into line with the way other traffic laws are handled — but it would mark a sea change in our state’s approach to this crucial highway safety law.

Usually, when a wreck victim files a lawsuit, his own contributory negligence, as it’s called, can be held against him if it plays a greater role in his injuries than the actions of the other driver. But there’s one special exception to this standard: If the victim isn’t wearing a seat belt, that fact can never be held against him, even if that was the main reason for the injury. That’s particularly galling since there is hardly anything a wreck victim can do that is more certain to cause or worsen an injury than to be unbelted at the time of the collision.

Gov. Mark Sanford is zeroing in on this problem as part of a larger effort to reform the state’s lawsuit rules. In addition to his primary goal of lowering the cost of doing business in South Carolina, the governor argues that “the possibility of being held liable in an auto accident and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees” will have a much greater impact on drivers’ behavior than the fear of getting a $25 fine for violating the seat belt law.

We have no idea how often it would make a difference in lawsuits or insurance payments if this special exception to the contributory negligence law were eliminated, but we have no doubt that as word got around, more than a few people would think twice about violating the seat belt law.

Objections to toughening the seat belt law traditionally have come from people who insist that individuals have the “right” to endanger their own lives by not wearing a seat belt, and that the government has no right to tell them otherwise. The beauty of this approach — over and beyond the fact that it will save lives — is that it turns such libertarian arguments back on themselves. There’s no way to object to this change, unless you believe that people who obey the law and make responsible choices should be forced to pay for the irresponsible and illegal choices of others.