My parents had to endure the loss of a child. I'm the melancholy ruminating type, so I often think about that and the stories of other parents who lost children, like the father who came to my school to tell us about his son, who had died from inhalation of butane. It's all terribly heartbreaking, and I can understand to some extent what they want to accomplish.<p>But I think it's just a combination of suffering and a big misconception. "If I do [some stuff], we won't lose any more children, at least not that exact way." But there's no amount of messing around in the world that's actually going to prevent loss, not in any meaningful way. We just get acclimated to the circumstances, and start overprotecting kids, which is just a way of delaying the harm. We live in a fundamentally unsafe environment. We have a better chance of fixing our own brains that we do of making the environment safe.
We had some lawn darts when I was a kid. We had a huge yard, so one day I was entertaining myself by trying to throw the lawn darts as high as I could. I threw one up, and lost track of it, so I layed on the ground and covered my head with my arms (in retrospect, that wouldn't have helped). The dart landed in the small triangle between my arm and my neck. Terrifying to think about. I'm glad they're banned!