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One child almost every year is a staggeringly low incidence rate. If that's enough to get banned then children should also not be allowed near pet dogs, the beach, family members, heavy furniture, inside cars, or outside.
I'm fine with requiring them to be anchored, and you're right that safety laws are pretty strict for toys, but we can't mandate literally-zero-risk-of-harm. "Rare" and "regular" are terms I generally think of as opposed and there's always going to be some cold calculation of "acceptable risk" on a personal and a societal scale.
Playgrounds. Hot dogs. Stairs. Cars (inside, outside, around). Cement. Bicycles.
Ban outside!
Yes, we must not sacrifice precious bounce houses just because one kid every so often dies /s
Just like when Kansas had that boy get decapitated by a water slide net due to their lack of regulations - why change safety regulations because 1 kid died?
And compare how ubiquitous bounce houses are versus dogs or others things. Because there aren't a ton of these, it's easier to regulate.
Easier to supervise, too.
If the design is inherently unsafe and regular use can result in injury, like the Verrückt water slide, then yes regulation and inspection is necessary. If the product is intended for children too young to understand basic safety precautions then strict design rules are important because we can't trust companies to be ethical on their own. But if the object in question poses an obvious minor-to-moderate risk, things like trampolines or skateboards or tire swings, it can be reasonably expected that the object not break from normal use but supervision and safety precautions are the responsibility of the consumer.
There's lots of room for argument about where the lines of acceptable risk are drawn. Personally I'm in favor of helmet and floatation-vest laws for children (and people accompanying children). I think bicycles are an acceptably risky thing for children to ride, but obviously tragic accidents do occur.
It's hard to find data pertaining to bounce houses specifically as there is no official governing body tracking them. It gets lumped into sports or recreation and without usage stats it's impossible to determine injury rate. They might not even be as dangerous as traditional playground structures.
This is a great perspective.
I do actually think the design of bounce houses themselves is indeed what makes them dangerous. They are lightweight and filled with air by design, to be portable. They then can catch wind underneath them, again due to their design and how they are used with kids jumping on them, which makes them airborne. It is THIS specific situation that I take issue with and think they should be banned. Normal injuries from kids jumping into each other are acceptable imo, not a big deal. Even kids falling from a set height with most traditional playground equipment is acceptable risk as long as the structure itself is firmly in the ground as it is designed to be.
However, the design itself of bounce houses is the problem. They very thing that makes them bounce houses, is what makes them unacceptably dangerous imo.
I'm gonna defer to this guy John Knox, who has been studying bounce houses for two decades. https://accesswdun.com/article/2022/8/1123579/uga-study-discovers-132-dangerous-bounce-house-related-incidents
Airborn events are dramatic and awful but rare and preventable, and I think gut reaction legislation is bad practice. I would like to see widespread adoption of laws for securing and operating these things but I don't think they meet "ban outright" danger. Backyard pools are way deadlier and I don't even think those should go away.
They aren't rare according to the article you linked:
So for every injury jumping inside, there is one related to a lofted bounce house. A 1:1 ratio. That's not that rare.
Honestly what you posted confirms what I have been writing.
We should ban drugs because they kill loads of peepo
Yes let's give kids drugs, according to you