Government Overbearing in Its Impulse To Be Motherly

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At last they’ve made it official: The federal government has become Mom. And you won’t be surprised by what Mom has to say: “Be careful with that thing, you might shoot your eye out.”

Actually, that’s a paraphrase. What Mom is really saying, word for word, is this: “Wherefore, in the public interest, Complaint Counsel requests that the Commission Determine that Respondent Daisy’s Powerline Airgun presents a ‘substantial product hazard’ within the meaning of Section 15(a)(2) of the CPSA.” That’s how Mom talks these days.

Our government’s maternal impulses have most recently taken shape in the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and most energetically in the commission’s former chairman, Ann Brown, who stepped down last week after six tireless years in the job.

Brown resigned much as she reigned, straining for publicity. Her last significant act made all the big newspapers and even the evening news. She engineered a lawsuit against Daisy Manufacturing Co., famed for half a century as the maker of Red Ryder BB guns, compelling it to recall millions of high-velocity airguns on the grounds that “someone might get hurt.”


Fifteen deaths

Sorry, I’m paraphrasing again. The commission’s staff has found that since Daisy’s Powerline Airguns were introduced in 1972, “at least 15 deaths have been attributed to alleged design defects.” The major problems: the safety lock is manual rather than automatic, and a BB pellet might lodge unseen in the gun’s magazine, making it appear empty when it isn’t.

Now, in nearly 30 years, 7.5 million of the Powerline guns have been sold, many to young people. Given the vagaries of life, and the unpredictability of teenagers, a layman might be surprised that the number of deaths “attributed” to the “alleged design defects” is so low. Indeed a layman could be forgiven for assuming that since 1972, at least 15 people had broken their necks tripping over them on the basement steps.

But that’s why we’re laymen. To Brown and her professional staff, the number is intolerable. In one of those sadistic spectacles often staged by consumer advocates, Brown appeared at a press conference with the grieving mother of a boy who suffered severe brain damage in a BB gun accident in 1999.

“We don’t want one other child, one other family, to go through what we went through,” the mother, Becky Mahoney of New Hope, Penn., told the assembled reporters.

This exploitation of victims is a time-honored tactic meant to bully potential critics into silence, lest they appear insensitive to the suffering of others. And I suppose it is important to stipulate that any such casualty is, for those involved, a catastrophe beyond words.

Inevitably, though, public policy is set according to a bloodless balancing of costs and benefits. Even the professionally compassionate consumer advocates do this. On average, for instance, more than 250 children under 15 are killed each year in accidents associated with bicycles. Yet even the disciples of Ralph Nader reckon those lost lives acceptable, given the convenience and pleasures bike riding offers, and thus bicycles remain miraculously unbanned. (So far.)

The exploitation of the injured serves another purpose, too. It distracts attention from the weakness of the specific case. “This complaint is highly politicized,” wrote commissioner Mary Sheila Gall in a dissent to the Daisy decision.

“In the long run, it’s a disservice to consumers, to tell them they have no responsibility, that it’s not their fault if anything goes wrong,” says Frances Smith, executive director of Consumer Alert, a “free market” consumer organization. “You start to lull them into complacency.”

That does seem to be what’s happened over the last 30 years, since the birth of the regulatory leviathan. There’s another way to put it: A government that thinks like Mom tends to breed citizens that think like kids.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.

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