Target: Lawn Darts
Michelle Snow would have been 8 years old on Sunday. She died last April when another child tossed a toy lawn dart that hit her head and penetrated to the brain. Since then her father, David Snow of Riverside, has waged a costly, exhausting and so far unsuccessful campaign to ban the darts. He is on the right side of the issue, and if the Consumer Product Safety Commission continues to dodge its responsibility, Congress should do the job itself.
Regulatory agencies must, of course, study all aspects of relevant issues, weigh the economic and social consequences and exercise their great authority with restraint. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which was launched in the 1970s with high hopes that it would make manufacturers and the public more conscious of safety, has in general been more dilatory than diligent. Thus what David Snow thought was an open-and-shut case involving a hazardous dart that has sent nearly 5,000 children to hospital emergency rooms in the last decade has instead brought him squarely up against a door closed against government action.
A federal law already says that these heavy, metal-tipped darts cannot be sold in toy stores, and they have to carry labels warning that children could get hurt. Many stores and manufacturers ignore the law. The dart that killed Michelle Snow in her own front yard came in a package containing other, safer, toys; her father hadn’t seen the small warning label.
Last fall the safety commission put off any decision about banning the darts. People familiar with the commission told Snow that the best that he could hope for would be a pledge from dart makers that they would tighten their marketing standards. The debate last week proved that this belief was right. The votes weren’t there for a ban; they weren’t even there for requiring manufacturers to redesign the product so that it can’t cause penetrating wounds.
All that did happen as David Snow sat in the audience was agreement that lawn-dart manufacturers should improve the warning labels and that companies violating the regulations more than once would face criminal prosecution. One violation is enough, however, when the life of a child is at stake.
Snow obviously thinks that voluntary compliance is not enough, and he has won support for his point of view from his congressman, Rep. Al McCandless (R-Bermuda Dunes), and his senator, Republican Pete Wilson. Congress shouldnot have to do the job that it assigned to an agency of its own creation, but there have been too many delays and too many injuries to allow such indifference to continue. If Congress, too, fails to act, the David Snows of this world will be quite right to hold government in low regard.
