Chalk up another victory for the asininity department…
Someone much smarter than all the rest of us, as we all know, determined some time back that it was possible for babies to be injured in car accidents. This, of course, was simply unacceptable, and called for a solution. As fate would have it, someone much smarter than the rest of us was actually selling just such a solution – the baby car seat.
After many hours of posturing, prevarication, and, quite possibly, plunder, “important safety laws” were passed – which have increasingly constricted people’s ability to operate motor vehicles containing children not ensnared in one of these devices. The result? As this story makes clear, parents (and others) now find themselves overwhelmed by a maze of complexity, requiring the service of ever-multiplying yet increasingly hard to find installation & certification “experts,” just to put some kids in the car. Parental car-pooling is now a logistical nightmare if anyone has kids under 9.
And the seats themselves? They are so dangerous, you can’t give them away. Seriously. Apparently, it’s so difficult to keep track of all the product safety recalls that it is impossible to give away used ones. We tried to give away two last spring, and nobody would touch them. And to think: I didn’t even know I was supposed to have experts install them, or at least inspect them, before I used them!
All this rubbish, and yet the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that car crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.? A report from the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us one study found that 72% of nearly 3,500 observed car and booster seats were misused in a way that could be expected to increase a child’s risk of injury during a crash? 72%!!!
These moronic safety regulations are precisely the type of crap that passes for morality and responsible citizenship these days… Does that make anybody else angry?
And then there’s these ding-dongs, who rated a bunch of car seats on the basis of a “concern” level over (drum roll, please) potentially harmful chemicals used in their manufacture! Is there no end to the tomfoolery?