New or used, an srs system does not significantly increase the cost of the car
Nonsense. Airbags add hundreds, especially if they need replacing, and they increase the cost of many repairs.
Can this option be applied to all the suspect defective airbags which are capable of killing?
No. For one thing, all air bags can kill.
The required use of seat belts is one of the main motivating factors of their use
And somehow that justifies the law?
It's not even true. The gain in use frequency is marginal - most people who use seat belts do so regardless of the law.
This has caused a fair amount of frustration in local officials near me - they started by rewriting the law to allow police to pull the car over for that violation alone, thereby breaking a specific promise they had made when presenting the original law. That didn't work well enough. So now there are perennial efforts to increase the fines and penalties, use traffic cameras to catch scofflaws, organize roadblocks and pull everyone over to catch the scofflaws, etc.
Again: nannystaters have no limits on their means, and do not keep promises. The only protection is formal, legal, restriction on what they can do to achieve their worthy goals. Or, of course, intransigent political opposition regardless of circumstance - keep them out of power altogether, elect whomever will block them.
Which is no way to govern.
There are few circumstances under which the risk of sitting in front of an active frontal air bag outweigh the safety benefits
That is probably false. Certainly the statistical analyses commonly published in support do not justify any such claim - there is usually not even an attempt to separate out seat-belted from unbelted as a factor, a basic first step in estimating the value of an air bag.
And I have never seen an analysis that included any of even the obvious variations in individual valuation of outcome - how bad is a torn thumb ligament (a common air bag injury), to most people? To those with poor health insurance and laboring jobs? To Hillary Hahn?
Under these circumstances, NHTSA will authorize the installation of an air bag ON-OFF switch. Authorization will be granted under the following four circumstances:
So they cannot be legally disabled unless one those four conditions are met. My short-statured musician friends are out of luck, as are those without the ready cash to spend on obtaining authorizations, certified installation aftermarket, the extra costs of maintenance and repair, etc.
And there is probably no such thing as a child who never needs medical caretaking with bad timing - such as on the way to the ER. But simply having children is not good enough to be allowed that decision, in the wisdom of the State. The citizen can easily lay out the cash for an ambulance, or a cab, or a smartphone to order an Uber, and wait for the ride - right?
For those worried about injurious noise levels, a set of earplugs would suffice.
No, it wouldn't. For one thing, having to wear earplugs while driving carries its own set of risks, problems, and expenses (ear infections, wax buildup, emergency siren and radio and GPS deafness, etc etc). For another, it's a pressure wave as well as a debilitating noise - a car is an enclosed space. It can drive a plug in - why divers don't wear them. You would need headphone style protection, and that's illegal in many places.
Note the bogus reasoning involved in these nannystate justifications - if there is some way to adjust, at the citizen's expense and effort and risk, that expense and effort and risk are not counted against the benefits of the air bag, and neither are the consequences of those adjustments if they are bad.
For example, the air bags are assigned no share of the costs of children out of reach, or even forgotten in the rear seats of cars, where they had to be placed to avoid the air bags.
