There has been a scary trend over the past few years. Inanimate objects are going on a rampage. Guns, knives, SUVs, and many other things are taking the lives of innocent people day after day. And now I have learned that there are murderous cribs about, seeking to kill and maim our children.
“There’s a great urgency here. We have to make sure that no parent is unaware that drop-side cribs could kill their children,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said in an Associated Press interview.
So, in order to try to get control of these renegade cribs, there is a push to ban them. That’s right, we must outlaw them. Because, we all know that the government making an item against the law is the answer to everything.
Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairman Inez Tenenbaum has pledged to ban the manufacture and sale of the cribs by the end of the year with a new standard that would make fixed-side cribs mandatory.
According to the AP article from which I am quoting, at least 32 children have been strangled or suffocated in a drop-side crib since 2000. That is 32 over a period of about 10 years. I have done some other research, and I am convinced that we should not stop with banning these drop-side cribs. There are a lot of dangerous things out there. I mean, besides the obvious cars, airplanes, buses, motorcycles, and four-wheelers, there are other objects that kill people much more frequently than 32 in 10 years. Did you realize that just in the year 2000, there were 650 people who died in a fall involving a chair, bed, or other furniture? There were 341 who died in a bathtub, and 567 died in a pool. What is Congress thinking, allowing us to still have furniture and bathtubs in our homes? People are being killed by these things! We really must get this epidemic under control. These inanimate objects have to be stopped.
I hope you can detect the sarcasm in my comments, and I want to clarify that I certainly mean no disrespect to those who have lost their babies in these tragic accidents. It is so sad when any baby dies in any way, and I feel so sorry for every parent who has had to suffer that grief. But are we really going to be able to ban every item that could possibly lead to an injury or death?
I am all for having laws that govern safety to a certain extent, and I pay attention to safety recalls put out by companies. However, I believe that the biggest part of the answer lies in just that–manufacturing companies and the natural course of the free market system. If an item is really unsafe, people will stop buying it. Sales will decrease, and the company will stop producing it. Companies are often looking for ways to make products safer because they know it will increase their sales. It is impossible to ban everything that can cause a death, and even trying to do so is simply not the answer.
In addition, objects do not kill people on their own. There is usually human error involved somehow. Someone dies in an SUV accident? Guess what–it is the fault of a driver, either of that vehicle or another one. A child drowns in a bathtub? It is the fault of a parent who did not supervise the child correctly. Sometimes the fault may be on the manufacturing end; someone used faulty parts or did poor work in constructing something. Or, perhaps whoever assembled a crib or other piece of furniture did not put it together properly. But blame is really not the point of this discussion. The point is that the government cannot step in and ban every object that “kills” someone. I think they have enough other things they could be doing.
–quotes from “Senator Moves to Ban Drop-Side Cribs, Associated Press, May 23, 2010
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