ABATE of Michigan President ~ Gary Kopta

Hello everyone, 

  Gotta love Michigan, Yesterday was almost 70 degree, today was mid 40's now tonight may get freezing rain here and snow up north. Man am I ready for summer.

  You may have heard that we had a bit of a victory in court with this insurance fiasco. The fight is not over as anything can happen such as appeals and legislative activities that we are going to be vigilant watching for things to come through Lansing. There will be more to come regarding this issue. If possible make sure you can get to a region meeting as I am sure Bear (our legislative director) will be briefing the legislative officers in your region about what happened.

  Going back to my report from last month when I mentioned that I attended the motorcycle assessment team conference and told you they were going to make a report to turn over to the Governors Traffic Safety Action Committee. Wow did they come up with a bunch of ridiculous ideas. Apparently another organization came in the day after I was there and had a bunch of made up data and ridiculous claims and the team bought it. Now all over this report it talks about a nationwide helmet bill. As you can imagine I will NOT take this lying down. Next week I am attending that Governors Traffic Safety  Committee meeting and I will set them straight on the real stats. This other group claims that they estimate 20-30 lives per year could be saved if we had a mandatory helmet law. There is no data only speculation that this is true. Some people find data that fits their ideals. ABATE of Michigan uses Michigan State Police stats. You can't get better stats than that. Why do people think they need to tell others what they can and cannot do. We are motorcyclists we want freedom. Freedom to choose what we want to wear and freedom to choose what we don't want to wear.

  OK that rant is over. As you can probably tell I get a little wound up when somebody wants to take my freedoms that we fought for 37 years to get. I am 60 years old I do not need a baby sitter telling me I have to strap a piece of tupperware on my head. I have had many friends die wearing helmets. Helmets do not save you if you have been run over by two cars. Helmets do not help you if you are impaled by tree branches after running  off a curve. 

 Just know that a few of us are still in Lansing fighting to keep the laws in our favor. We have Dondi our lawyer and Noel our lobbyist working overtime right now helping us. Thanks to both of those guys. Thanks to all you members. Without you being a member we couldn't do what we do.

   Thanks again and hopefully next month we can get back on the bikes and feel the wind in our face.