Stay inside, hide under the bed and play video games

Because life is just too dangerous to live!

Really, this is the safest time to live in the United states there has ever been and I'm guessing that's true of  the civilized, "first-world" in general. Your kids are more likely to grow up big and strong and to live longer than you do, just as you're likely to live twice as long as folks did a hundred or so years ago, but you'd never know it to listen and to read and to feel.

Have you seen the recent car commercials where the distracted young mother with child in the back seat ( kids can't ride in the front seat any more) nearly rear-ends another car but is saved by automatic braking? Last night I saw another one where Young Mother gets into oncoming traffic on a bridge but the car saves her at the last moment.  Self-driving cars are being tested now and self parking cars are a reality. Cars warn you of other cars in your "blind" spot you would have seen anyway if you were looking and we're supposed to be as giddy and elated about it as an American who just worked "selfie" into a sentence for the first time. We're in terrible danger because learning to drive safely is beyond us and the future must be about cars that drive themselves without participation from you. Driver training?  What?

 Oh, brave new world that has such cowards in it!  What a wonderful world where no risk of any kind is permitted or tolerated outside the world of video games, where a woman can be arrested for letting a 7 year old walk to the park.  Yes, arrested, not scolded or cautioned -- and she faces 5 years in the slam. Maybe she should tke the kid with her -- it's safer behind bars.

No, the joy of driving an open car, a sleek powerful masterpiece of engineering down a country lane, the joy of riding a bicycle unsupervised when you're 7, of walking to the park on a Summer day -- there are parents who won't let their kids play in their own suburban yards unsupervised, whose every moment is scrutinized, analyzed and proscribed lest there be any danger at all of any kind.


How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

Stupid, stupid, STUPID

It's probably true in most states:  leaving your keys in your car is illegal as well as irresponsible.  Ohio statutes for instance, state that:

  "No person driving or in charge of a motor vehicle shall permit it to stand unattended without first stopping the engine, locking the ignition, removing the key from the ignition, effectively setting the parking brake, and, when the motor vehicle is standing upon any grade, turning the front wheels to the curb or side of the highway." Ohio Revised Code 4511.661(A)

One might think the same logic would apply to leaving a loaded gun lying around and particularly where unauthorized people and children might get to it. One would be right, at least in Homestead, Florida where Juan Manuel Martinez, Jr. described as a hard working truck driver and part time volunteer youth baseball coach handed his father a loaded AK-47 at a party and just to show it off.

For no sane reason, here was a 7.62X39 round in the chamber and the safety was off  when Juan Sr. put it down on a picnic table where his six year old grandson saw it and pulled the trigger. Grandpa Juan Sr. was dead before he got to the hospital.  According to the news, alcohol and perhaps some other drugs were involved as one so often hears when idiotic and ignorant things pertaining to firearms and cars are done.

Yes, this is a huge country and one in a million is a big number,  but one still hears too many stories like this.  It's not superfluous to say that according to the time honored principle of always treating any firearm as loaded even when you know for damn sure it isn't, the thing never should have been anywhere near a minor or displayed where there's a party and people are drinking -- or displayed at all in the opinion of this writer.

Again, Florida law holds Martinez Jr. responsible and he now faces charges of culpable negligence of a firearm with easy access to a minor.  I'm sure he wasn't aware of the law and wasn't thinking about it, if in fact, he was thinking anything beyond "hey look at my cool toy"  Which makes me wonder how effective laws are when practically no one reads or understands or knows about them.  We constantly hear there aren't enough of them and simultaneously that there are too many of them but the most heated proclamations of that sort rarely involve specifics.  Neither side of the great gun divide really likes specifics because those lead to reason and interfere with the zealotry.

Now Martinez didn't need any kind of permit to own that weapon and wasn't required to take any kind of training or pass any kind of test.  If he had, perhaps he might be surprised like so many are, by how difficult the laws are to understand even for lawyers, but he would, even with the meager level of education for a permit in Florida, been aware that to do what he did was illegal even if he didn't realize it was massively stupid.

In fact although I'm licensed to carry a concealed weapon, I'm scared to do it because of laws that can make it illegal to use a gun to frighten an assailant or to display it in anger -- but not to kill him with it.  You'll recall the Florida woman sentenced to 20 years for using a gun to warn off someone against whom she had a restraining order.  Is it so awful to think that requiring someone to learn the relevant laws and rules of safety might not really run afoul of the second amendment -- and might just increase public safety? 

But I'm not going to get into the need for more or less in the way of legislation, I'm going to argue against ignorance and for teaching the public about what they can and cannot do, about what they should and shouldn't do with a dangerous thing like a gun.  The people who used to make it a business to teach safety have gone rogue and turned paranoid -- the other side is also often so paranoid that it fears safety education will interfere with their mission and in a nation so well armed and poorly informed there is a need no one is there to fill.

Of course there is far less sturm und drang when it comes to the equally tragic weekly stories of kids left in hot cars to die, strangled by pet snakes, drowned in pools and swimming holes, beaten, neglected, poisoned and starved.  Our concerns about guns are too choreographed and involve so many stereotypes and straw men and political shibboleths to leave us room to consider that child safety has so much to do with informed and responsible adult behavior.  Reducing the stupid factor might just be an effective way to reducing such tragedy whether it's about pools, hot tubs, hot cars and hot lead and it is something we can start to do right now and without having to resolve our passionate differences.  Can't we all agree?

Death in Dhaka

Bangladesh.  If you wear clothes, you probably own some that were made there and you probably paid a whole hell of a lot less for them than had they been made in the US and odds are you have more than one change of clothes too. You probably don't spend much time feeling bad that the people who made them can't afford them and are far more likely to die of poverty and disease than collect a pension or social security or Medicare. Whose fault is that anyway?

Odds are as well that you won't even know about and aren't likely to be in a state of shock and obsessive mourning -- won't be seeking healing and closure or holding moments of silent prayer -- if you're an American, that is. Americans have time for that sort of thing: time to run marathons, time to feel sorry for themselves if a few are killed by something other than an industrial accident, time to feel oppressed by taxes.

We'll pretty much ignore the building collapse that killed at least 244 in Bangladesh and we'll pretty much ignore the accident in Texas too, because to question the wisdom or more importantly the expense to industry of safety standards or building codes or zoning, just isn't the sort of thing we devoted Capitalists like to do. We're not Muslims, after all.