One grieving father got lawn darts banned (2012) | Hacker News Reader

One grieving father got lawn darts banned (2012)

mentalfloss.com

4 pointsputzdown8 comments

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.

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.

I don't think banning lawn darts is overprotective. I think they're a foolish "toy": one might as well toss throwing knives in the game. Unfortunately, the appearance of lawn darts does not convey how deadly they can be.

As for the father: he prevented many injuries and deaths that would have occurred had he not stepped up. He'll never get his daughter back but he has saved countless children from being maimed and killed.

> I think they're a foolish "toy"

Well, I might agree with you, but that's reason not to buy them, not reason to ban them.

> he prevented many injuries and deaths that would have occurred had he not stepped up

Well, it's likely he prevented deaths via lawn darts. But we cannot know how many lives we lose due to the cumulative effect of prevention of dangerous games. What I mean is, a lot, if not most, of the play that young men do is preparation for a dangerous world. Do you think there are no consequences for preventing dangerous play? Is it possible that the deaths just happen later in different, unanticipated ways?

>We live in a fundamentally unsafe environment.

Except it really isn't:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...

Oh, I'm very aware how safe things are compared to the past. This does not actually change the fact that the environment is fundamentally dangerous. Nobody controls whether they'll still be alive in ten seconds. I think it's the type of thing people will either accept or not, based on their wisdom, not an argument.

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!

Never got hold of lawn darts but my teenage brain did come up with the similarly brilliant idea of shooting an arrow straight up in the air while laying on the ground and seeing how close to me I could get it to land. That game ended abruptly one day when the wind caught one, causing it to land a few inches away from a sunbathing neighbor.

I also did this, although I'm pretty sure the terminal velocity and mass of the falling arrows wasn't enough to do any serious damage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com