WHEN YOU GET IN your car today or tomorrow or next week or next month, and you decide whether or not to snap on your safety belt, remember this: Your Legislature doesn’t care whether you live or die. Your Legislature thinks it’s more important to protect your “rights” — and therefore actually encourage you to disobey state law — than it is to allow police to enforce our state’s laws, and thus greatly increase your chance of living if you have a wreck.

Actually, a number of legislators do care whether you live or die, and so they consistently try — without success, because too many don’t care — to change state law to allow police to enforce the law that already requires you to wear your seat belt. They do this not just because preventing police from enforcing the law undermines respect for the law; they also do it because the facts are so very clear:

If you live in one of the 20 states where police are allowed to enforce the seat belt law, the likelihood of your wearing a seat belt goes up by 15 percentage points. That’s especially important in South Carolina, where our 66 percent buckle-up rate is 10th worst in the nation. And here’s why it’s important: If you’re wearing a seat belt, your chance of surviving a wreck goes up by from 45 percent to 60 percent, depending on the type of vehicle.

This isn’t news to the legislators who continue to insist that police not be allowed to ticket you for wearing a seat belt unless they’ve already pulled you over for violating some other law. This is stuff we’ve known for years. It was reinforced last week, in yet another study.

This one, by the National Safety Council, reviewed eight years of traffic data from all 50 states. It concluded that if all 50 states had passed real seat belt laws in 1995, when the National Transportation Safety Board first recommended that, 12,000 Americans — 525 of them here in South Carolina — wouldn’t have died in traffic wrecks. If all of the states enacted those laws tomorrow, they’d save the lives of 1,400 Americans next year. About 60 of those people whose lives would be saved next year are South Carolinians.

Ultimately, of course, it’s your fault if you’re killed or severely injured in a wreck because you weren’t wearing your safety belt. But unless you die at the scene, the rest of us pay, either in taxes if you’re on Medicare or Medicaid or in higher insurance, and higher product costs, if you’re on private insurance or not insured.

The good news is that somebody cares whether you live or die. The state Highway Patrol, and most police in our state, kicked off their annual Thanksgiving safety blitz last week; it will run through Sunday. They’ll be targeting high-risk areas across the state for extra enforcement of all the state’s traffic laws; and they’re having prize drawings for people who sign a pledge to buckle up (sign up at buckleupsc.com). They put on a similar effort over Memorial Day, and increased seat belt usage from 66 percent to 73 percent. Unfortunately, that increase was temporary. The police are powerless to increase it permanently.

Police are to be commended for continuing to use the insufficient tools they have been given to save lives. We only hope our Legislature will eventually care enough to give them some better tools.