Zen Magnets Wins CPSC Case
zenmagnets.com
zenmagnets.com
https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/federal-advoca...
" Although these products are labeled and designed for adults, they can easily find their way into the hands and mouths of children."
Also a fact sheet from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition - http://www.naspghan.org/files/documents/pdfs/advocacy/2013/N...
I mean nobody keeps rat poison in the open on the desk. If you look at statistics (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24791640 - quarter of the cases require intervention, and half of those cases are small magnets) the swallowing of those magnets somewhat comparable to swallowing of a rat poison (out of about 10K+ cases/years, about 1/3 is treated medically).
And there are those fury curious vacuums that only look like a labrador or a poodle - one can only hope that their owners pay enough attention.
By that argument, any and all potentially dangerous products must be banned. No power tools, firearms, knives, lighters, or small pieces of matter may be legally sold or possessed in the United States.
And this one http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/florida-mom-face... . Not for debating the 2nd (i myself think that the language of the 2nd is clear in actually granting one freedom to have even nukes). Just find it very illustrative that while firearms should be available (as 2nd states), some people just shouldn't have it. Again, have no idea how to implement it.
24 incidents per year [0] (or -assuming only one million sets are out there- one incident per ~41,600 sets out there) doesn't seem like much of a danger. For comparison this [2] leads me to calculate that there are ~141 serious accidental poison exposures per 41,600 children out there. [3]
By all means, levy a serious penalty for the importation, production, or sale of inadequately or improperly labelled SREM magnet sets. But the actual danger of said sets really appears to be overstated by the CPSC.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/10/03/2014-233... [1]
[1] Remember that the ALJ didn't find the CPSC's much larger injury estimates to be credible.
[2] http://www.poison.org/poison-statistics-national
[3] Poison control centers report 42.6 exposures per 1000 kids 6 and younger. NPDS reports that 8% of all reported poison exposures resulted in a moderate, or major effect. So, 42.60.0841.6. This isn't the right way to answer the question "How many young kids are seriously injured by poison exposure?", but it's certainly not a bad way to get an estimate.
These things are not marketed as toys to small children.
Why do people make tools, knives, or corrosive chemicals inaccessible to those who don't have enough sense to take care when handling such objects? Because they are forewarned about the dangers of said objects.
Moreover, the ALJ failed to find any significant evidence that the adults who are purchasing these magnets are being any more reckless with them than they are any other hazardous object they might have in their house. From the article:
> “The Agency was unable to sufficiently and credibly correlate any SREM injuries directly to Zen Magnets or Neoballs. The lack of credible evidence here is telling.” And regarding the CPSC’s (Epidemiology) Elephant in the Room, that easily disproven (yet commonly repeated by media) CPSC injury estimate of 2,900 “magnet set” ingestions from 2009 to 2013: “These numbers are insignificant to show any specific, identifiable population, particularly given the mass amount of magnets purchased and already on the market.”
EDIT: Packaging did not include "keep away from all children" and had "age: 13+" and "toy" on the packaging, and were sometimes sold in stores that exclusively sold toys for children.
After regulation the manufacturers changed the packaging several times, changing word "toy" to "desktoy", stopped them being sold in children's toy shops and told retailers to keep them away from children's toys, removed the "13+" age limit, included "keep away from all children", and included stronger warnings.
Anyway, do you have access to complete photos of all of the various revs of the packaging? I'm interested in seeing if there was ever a point at which a reasonable person would look at the packaging and accompanying instructional material and get the impression that either
* These would be okay things to give to children who would be unable to understand that swallowing them might be hazardous.
or
* There isn't any significant hazard posed by swallowing the magnets.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. They were careless with the packaging and didn't make clear the risks, until they were regulated, and they resisted the regulation until they were faced with a ban.
> It's abundantly clear that the CPSC has chosen to take actions that are substantially out of line with the actual level of hazard posed by such products.
I'm not sure it is abundantly clear.
Toys have very strict standards requirements. These items are sold as toys, alongside other toys, albeit (more recently) sold to adults not children.
But even though they're not sold to adults there were many children being injured by these magnets - more serious injuries than other toys. You can't (and shouldn't) eliminate all risk, but you should take some effort to reduce risk of death or surgery.
I expect that some manufacturers were. Until we see the packaging we can't determine if Zen Magnets was being careless.
The responsible distributors that I've seen all have the same story: "No amount of packaging changes have satisfied the CPSC. They won't be satisfied until noone is permitted to manufacture within or import SREM magnet sets into the US.".
I've looked at the rejected packaging from responsible distributors. The packaging makes it abundantly clear that those are not children's toys. I've read the documentation shipped inside Buckyballs magnet sets. It makes the dangers of ingestion of the magnets in the sets very clear.
Because what I can see with my eyes differs so wildly from what the CPSC is asserting about manufacturer's packaging, and because (as the ALJ found) what the CPSC is asserting about injury rates and the like isn't actually credible, I take what the CPSC has to say about the topic with a very large grain of salt.
It's one thing to prohibit the sale of inadequately or improperly marked SREM magnet sets. It's another thing entirely to ban the production and/or importation of all SREM magnet sets, regardless of how well marked they are.
You dig?
My problem is that they'd updated the warnings as required and then were hit with a blanket ban that applies regardless of how and where they are labeled and sold. It's not even about punishing a particular company that was misbehaving; it applies to all potential sellers.
That's stupid. There's no good reason why an informed adult should be forbidden to buy little magnets.
Edit: This [0] is linked to elsewhere in the discussion. It seems to support the assertion that there's an import ban.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/10/03/2014-233...
What you find happens is that kids start off making ear rings and then graduate onto making tongue rings and the tongue is just thick enough that the attachment is weak and it presents a high risk of swallowing.
Here's the second thing that most people fail to appreciate: The CSPS's main concern was not the absolute level of danger, it was the how non-obvious the threat model is. There are plenty of things that are far more dangerous on an absolute level but are allowed because most people understand the risk model and can take appropriate steps to mitigate.
If you asked a thousand people who previously knew nothing about the magnets, what they thought the main danger was, people would talk about the potential choking hazard or the chemicals in the lining maybe being toxic but I bet virtually nobody would ever think about intestinal pinching. You could have your child swallow one of these magnets every week and see them come out fine and be completely blase and then the one week they swallow two, they're suddenly in need of life threatening surgery.
I don't have any strong opinions on whether these things should be banned or not but I think the CSPSs case is a lot stronger that what's commonly presented.
87 toddlers drown in the bathtub in the bathtub every year. 350 drown in swimming pools. That accidents happen doesn't mean things are defective and should be banned.
The child wasn't even small — school-age. Made a bet with friends that he'll be able to swallow a magnet, and did. Then repeated the same thing next day (this is what's fatal, as it leads to intestinal pinching). Nobody knew. When symptoms started appearing and they got to a hospital, it was already too late.
While I wouldn't go as far as preventing the sale of magnets, education is definitely important. People should be aware of the extreme and silent danger that small, spherical, and easy to swallow magnets pose to their children. As your comment shows, many are not aware.
Good thing that every reputable seller of such magnets plasters the outside of the packaging with warnings like "Not for children!" "Not a child's toy!", and includes very frank, easy-to-understand language about the potential hazards of ingestion of said magnets.
That story about that kid is a tragic story. It's more tragic that the warnings attached to and included in the packaging surrounding the magnets didn't make their way to the kid who chose to swallow the magnets and the friends who took him up on his stupid bet.
> As your comment shows, many are not aware.
That's reading a lot into his comment. If you read the last couple of sentences of his comment, it's clear that he's talking about dangerous stuff. One can infer from this that he understands that strong magnets can also be dangerous under certain circumstances.
Just because you're unaware of any deaths from a hazardous activity doesn't mean that you're unaware that an activity is hazardous. You dig?
If anything, it's more a signal that the fatality or grievous injury rate from that activity is rather low.
In the USA, where in 2015 43 children under three years old shot someone or themselves with a gun.*
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
Someone needs to take a long hard look at themselves.
Very few know that swallowing two or more small magnets can result in death in a few days, even with medical treatment, especially if the treatment is "too late". That's very much unlike other "small bits of metal", to which I'd include small ammunition (although the commonly unplated lead bullets in .22 LR ammo would add a lead exposure threat).
And then there's the little matter of the 2nd Amendment, we have no Constitutionally enshrined right to keep and bear small magnets, which are also fantastically less useful than guns.
For that matter, in the 1970's heyday of US gun control, the CPSC was explicitly banned from the area of firearms and ammo. This is not unique, there are many other things like "tobacco, motor vehicles, pesticides, aircraft, aircraft engines and boats" (http://www.nssf.org/newsroom/writers/guide/regulations.cfm) where the regulation is done by other units of the government, generally ones with domain knowledge. E.g. pesticides touch on at least three areas, safety to those handling and using them, plus food and environmental safety, that's more like the remit of OSHA (which can cover the much smaller consumer uses) plus the FDA and EPA.
An increase in the number of guns owned is deceptive. The percentage of Americans who own a gun and the percentage of households that contain a gun have been decreasing, I think from about half of households in the seventies to about a third today (NRA point to different research that shows less of a decline). The number of guns owned has increased because some people who already have a gun buy more, sometimes many more.
We in the gun community believe it is much more likely that the willingness of Americans to honestly answer a random voice on the phone asking us if we own guns or having one in our household varies depending on the Zeitgeist, and that's been bad for a long time until, again, turning around only recently.
This seems to be driven by 9/11 and the government's feckless domestic response to it, and the increasing ability of Americans to carry concealed, especially in combination with a rapidly aging population. WRT the latter, the vast majority of those in my Missouri concealed carry class were older types, middle aged at minimum.
With Wisconsin and Iowa moving to shall issue voluntarily, and Illinois forced by the courts, we're down to only 7 slave states, and in many populous California counties it's allowed (Massachusetts towns too, but it's a small state). And 2 more states have been added to no licence required Constitutional Carry in the last few days, WV and Idaho; we're pretty sure this is resulting in a lot of first time gun owners, and this has really taken off since the last time I believe those estimates were made.
The numbers are amazing to this gun owner who grew up when that was generally impossible; 8 million licenses nationwide 2 summers ago, 12+ in the last accounting a few months? ago, Texas just passed 1 million, Pennsylvania hit that long ago, etc. etc. etc.
That said, new immigrants don't tend to be gun owners, but it doesn't take long for us to lead them down the path of temptation ^_^.
You think that is even in the ballpark of acceptable?
Again. You need to take a long hard look at yourselves.
There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870
There were 64 school shootings in 2015
Some 13,286 people were killed in the US by firearms in 2015 and 26,819 people were injured (excluding suicides)
A seriously long hard look.
"How many children are we willing to let die?"
"Every single one of them."
Let me assure you we're very bit as callous as those who think that "a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own pantyhose is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound."
You're just not going to disarm us, heck, we're winning at the state level more and more, as mentioned in another comment Idaho and WV are going Constitutional Carry, and they're not the only states where that's in play this legislative year.
Why? Well, we think these bad outcomes are more than outweighed by the good ones, like the ~2.5 million uses of guns in self-defense per year. Even in terms of raw numbers of dead and injured our approach probably wins, and we think the value of having this defense for the lives of our families and ourselves is of inestimable value.
At the extreme, we look at longer time frames, including the 20th Century, where substantially more than 100 million previously disarmed people were murdered by their own governments, or conquerors like in the bloodlands between Germany and the USSR.
As for your specifics:
There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870
That "study", if you can call it that, is grossly fraudulent, you know you're in trouble when anti-gun Mother Jones calls you out: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/no-there-were-no...
Ditto the "school shootings", that redefines the term to include gang sorts of crime.
As for how many killed and injured, we're an historically violent people, and an obsession on one particular instrument we use to express that violence is misplaced.
If someone shot at multiple people, then its a mass shooting. My stats are verbatim from a Jan article by the BBC and I think they are fine.
Is there any hoop you won't jump through to justify tens of thousands of deaths?
Not as it's officially defined by the FBI. It requires, in a single incident, 4 people being murdered. You can of course change the numbers by redefining the words of art as the "study" did, but so what?
Did you even read the Mother Jones article? I can't recall exactly what it said, but I myself picked apart some of the "study's" cited incidents, like the infamous one where couple of reporters were killed, one was wounded, and the killer later took his own life. Which obviously doesn't fit the FBI definition. Others were reported to simply not exist, or at least no one could find any verification.
Is there any hoop you won't jump through to justify tens of thousands of deaths?
"We don't care."
Are you from the U.K.? (A guess based on your comment history, word choices, Commonwealth spelling, etc.)
Who cares about an FBI definition. If someone attempts to kill multiple people and fails, it is still a mass shooting. Perhaps the terminology needs a definite glossary and we can give different names to these things.
Either way you are jumping through hopps to defend a personal freedom that, over time, has a negative impact on more people.
UNless of course you think some population reduction by way to gun is a positive thing for a population
Even if ratified today, I doubt Zen could use it as it was not law at the time of the action.
When it comes to suing the US (or a state), just remember the default answer is "you can't sue the US" (or a state), and every other case is an explicit congressional exception, like the federal tort claims act, etc.
(see, generally, https://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/art3frag41_user.html...)
Surprisingly I can't find much on the case online (Some links below), and my Grandfather doesn't like to talk about it too much (though I have a box of legal documents from the case plus some articles). You can find more by looking up Edward Sohmers and the Marlin Toy Company.
https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal75...
https://books.google.com/books?id=cyU_fdnWhD8C&pg=PA22550&lp...
I think the manufacturing part wasn't mentioned because it's not really feasible to mine neodymium in the US.