Hospital statistics regarding people who go to the emergency room after roller skating accidents indicate the need for more protective equipment. Within this group of people, 75 percent of those who had accidents in streets or parking lots were not wearing any protective clothing (helmets, knee pads, etc.) or any light-refl ecting material (clip-on lights, glow-in-the-dark wrist pads, etc.). Clearly, these statistics indicate that by investing in high-quality protective gear and refl ective equipment, roller skaters will greatly reduce their risk of being severely injured in an accident.

At first glance, protective equipment does reduce the injuries suffered in accidents by scaters. After all, this is what all this expensive gear does, it smothens the athlete's fall, so that no serious damage could be done, and works for prevention of any accidents. However, when looking at the notion more carefully, someone could realize that this is not the whole truth : other problems may occur, other injuries or financial problems from the burdain of the expensive gear.

Firstly, as noded by the argument, there are two types of equipment a skater could obtain : protective equipment, that smothens the athlete's fall in case of an accident, so that no serious damage could be done, and preventive equipment, so that accidents could be prevented from happening. The above survey does not, however, discrete those two categories of equipment. It would have been better to know how many accidents actually happened while the skater was wearing preventive equipment, so that their efficiency would be measured, and which of them had severe damages while not wearing any protective equipment. In that case, a more fact-based argument could be excluded by the survey on the actual usefulness of the preventive and protective equipment alltogether.

The statistic above does not include other parameters as well, such as the experience or self-confidence of the skaters that participated in accidents. Usually the more experienced skaters do rather dangerous tricks, so they kind of get self-injured, they are the only ones responsible for their accidents. So, no difference could any preventive gear make in those occasions. On the other hand, less experianced skaters could be involved in accidents more easily, even if preventive gear is used. For example, the upcoming cars can see the preventive-gear-wearing skater, but if they are inexperienced, they could panic and have an accident on their fault.

Also, the severity of the accidents and wounds is not mentioned in the survey. Sometimes, wearing protective gear could be fatal for the skater, because the gear itself could under circumstances injure them. In the case, for example, that a skater is hit on the knee and their knee-pads are not of a good quality and break, the wound would be a lot worse than the one the skater would have suffered if they did not wear any gear at all.

But on the other hand, the survey does not conclude that finest quality gear does save lives. Maybe some glossy clothes could save the skater a whole lot of money they would spend on preventive gear. So it would be the best if everyone that cares to be equiped with this kind of gear, understood the benefits provided by every piece of it.

It is common sence and generally admitted that protective and preventive gear makes skaters feel safer on the streets. But in order for these surveys to save people's lives, they should be more accurate and precice and cover a larger scale of possible situations, so that our confidence in such equipment would be based in facts, and not beliefs.