End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JUNE 14, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'There Oughtta Be A Law,' Chapter 417 ...

Some terrible things have happened when kids were left alone in cars.

Over the past decade, 82 children have suffered heat-related deaths in vehicle passenger compartments, while at least 20 have died after being locked in car trunks, according to the advocacy group Kids 'n Cars.

Five-month-old twin sisters from Missouri died after being left in a parked car while their grandmother helped a friend with a garage sale. A 9-month-old Virginia boy died after his father left him in the back seat, forgetting to drop him off at day care.

In February, 6-year-old Jake Robel of Missouri was dragged to his death when a man stole his mother's car. The boy had been left in his mother's sport utility vehicle while she ran into a store.

"What does it take for people to wake up and understand that leaving kids alone in a car is a tragedy waiting to happen?" asks Michele Struttmann of Missouri, one of the group's founders, whose 2-year-old son Harrison was killed two years ago when toddlers aged 2 and 3 were left alone in an idling van as their parents stood outside talking. One child shifted the van into gear and ran down Struttmann and her son as they sat on a park bench.

The Kids 'n Cars group launched a media campaign in the nation's capital last Tuesday, warning parents not to leave a child unsupervised in or around a vehicle. The group says it plans to send public service announcements to 2,000 radio stations and 10,000 newspapers.

Well and good. But will the activists be content to leave it there? Or will we soon hear the increasingly inevitable cry, "There oughtta be a law"?

At the group's June 6 press conference, researcher Anara Guard was already noting some states have laws against leaving pets unattended inside hot cars ... but not children. "The animal welfare activists have done a very good job," Guard said. "Sadly, the same cannot be said of most of the major child health and child welfare organizations."

We can hear the engine chugging. Hear the whistle 'round the bend. Can that be ... yes! Get on board, little children, here comes the bill-draft express!

Problem is, while eight deaths a year due to cars left running are of course individual tragedies, the Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service reports 30 children drown each year in mop buckets, and 150 die from fires they start with cigarette lighters.

The Centers for Disease Control report that between 1979 and 1997, 1,839 young children drowned in bathtubs.

Yet no one would seriously propose banning cigarette lighters or bathtubs or mop buckets. (Well, to be strictly accurate, a federal safety agency did consider mandating a national mop bucket redesign for a time, but finally gave it up.)

Pass laws against leaving children in vehicles? What if dad gets stuck in a snow drift and decides to leave his disabled child in the car while hiking through the blizzard for help? A tough call, but does anyone imagine we can guide him in his decision by passing some one-size-fits-all law?

Not to mention the law of unintended consequences. Outlaw everything, and eventually even the formerly law-abiding will throw up their hands and cry: "Heck, since I can't get through the day without breaking a dozen laws, I might as well just do what I damn well please!"

But the underlying problem here is the assumption that we can literally ban one-in-a-million tragic accidents by passing some enormous bank of statutes and ordinances which, in effect, require the use of common sense.

We already have laws against child abuse, and willful neglect. Nor do they sit unused -- if anything, the tendency these days is towards overzealous enforcement, under what amounts to the presumption that the state owns our children, and will leave them in our care only so long as we're on our good behavior.

Leaving the car running while opening the door to check the mailbox is a very different thing from leaving infants locked in a car for hours in the summer heat. Such laws would stand little chance of actually preventing accidents before the fact. They can only be used to satisfy our vindictive hunger to punish someone -- even someone who has just suffered the worst real-world penalty imaginable for a momentary lapse of judgment: the loss of a precious child.

Spread the news, by all means. Patronize manufacturers who provide inside trunk latches and other safety devices. (Though -- just as government-mandated airbags have killed scores of kids -- it would be interesting to know how many of the cited deaths resulted in part from "safety devices" which prevent kids from unlocking and opening rear-seat doors from inside the car.)

But pass a law?

Don't forget to include "leaving the iron plugged in while answering the phone"; "leaving the toilet seat up"; "no padlock on the knife drawer" ...

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Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224.

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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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