The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it - Henry David Thoreau

Light Me Up

by Hal_10000

This sort of thing drives me crazy:

It has all the makings of a holiday toy: a miniature Santa Claus that lights up, chuckles “Ho, ho, ho” and sings a Christmas carol.

Novelty lighters, like these that Columbia fire Battalion Chief Steve Sapp uses to educate parents, can be a temptation for children. A state lawmaker is proposing that they be banned in Missouri.

But there’s a catch: To activate those cool features, a person has to flick the lighter switch and spark a flame. And that is why there’s an effort to ban it, along with other novelty lighters.

State Rep. Ed Wildberger, a Democrat from St. Joseph and a former firefighter, has pre-filed a bill that would make it illegal to sell novelty lighters in Missouri. The proposed law would specifically prohibit lighters that look like cartoon characters, animals, vehicles or food products. Lighters that play music or have flashing lights also would be outlawed.

Fire groups across the country support such a ban because the entertaining lighters pose a risk to children. “One of the things that concerns us about novelty lighters is they look like toys, and that causes children to treat them as toys, increasing the potential for accidental fires to start,” said Battalion Chief Gale Blomenkamp of the Boone County Fire Protection District. “When you see a lighter that looks like a football or a toy, kids are going to be more apt to play with them.”

I would be in favor of banning these things because they’re tacky.  But safety?  To propose this ban, they must have done some careful studies of just how dangerous they are, right?  Right?

Wrong.

There aren’t a lot of data to illustrate just how dangerous novelty lighters are because fire departments don’t separate them from standard lighters when tracking causes of fires, Missouri State Fire Marshal Randy Cole said. The state does track fires set by children, though, and last year 26 of the 76 fires caused by lighters were set by juveniles younger than 16. In 2006, 29 of 75 fires blamed on lighters were started by juveniles, Cole said, noting that not all fire departments report incidents into the state’s system.

They site a handful of horror stories.  But horror stories are not data.  How dangerous are these things?  How many of those 55 fires were set deliberately?  How many as a result of lighting farts? If the six million people in Missouri can only have 55 fires in two years started by juveniles with lighters (and I would hazard that very few were started accidently with novelty lighters), there are far greater menaces to deal with.  These resources might be better invested in checking smoke detectors, cleaning chimneys and charging fire extinguishers.

This is a reflection of our approach to terrorism.  We don’t make society safer by wandering through stores, seeing items on the shelf, creating fantasy scenarios about how they could be dangerous and then acting.  We gather data. We find out what dangers actually exist and are causing the most death, injury and destruction.  And we deal with them in order of how dangerous they are and how effectively we can mitigate that danger.

It’s called thinking, people.

Comments

Posted by on 01/01/09 at 12:54 PM from

Maybe this ban was started by this guy.

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