When you buy an item marketed and sold as a toy you have a reasonable expectation that it's not going to cause the death of your child.
All toys are not appropriate for all children. I wouldn't give my daughter magnets to play with. I also wouldn't give her silly putty or dice or a chemistry set. She's too young. Eventually she can have all these things and a gallon of bleach under her bathroom sink. But not for quite a while.
These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery. They knew there was a risk that young people were eating the jewellery, and they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.
But choking on a wad of silly putty definitely can. Hence the fact that it's labeled as a choking hazard and not for young children.
I don't think the bar for "should be banned" is "small amounts are dangerous". A "small amount" of Scrabble can kill your kid, despite there being "no reason" to eat Scrabble tiles, but we don't ban it. Toy stores sell balloons and jacks and dice and all kinds of things that pose real dangers to kids.
> These magnet companies knew that teenagers were using the magnets for fake piercing jewellery.
Shrug? Car manufacturers know teens are racing cars and snowboard manufacturers know teens are riding down black diamonds with little skill and no helmets. Teens do stupid things and we don't ban entire categories of product to attempt to protect them from minor dangers.
> * they resisted putting warnings on the packs and resisted moving the product off toy shelves.*
Did they actually resist labeling them or just resist the ban? If they resisted labeling, that's pointless and dumb and it's perfectly reasonable that they be required to label clearly and appropriately.
Did quite a lot of people ignore the warnings? Yes? Is that the manufacturer's fault? No, it's the fault of the people who saw a warning and didn't bother to read it or take it seriously. No doubt they are some very unhappy people because their kids ended up in hospital, but their opinions are worthless because they had the safety information and put their children at risk because they chose to ignore it.
That's not the manufacturers' fault.
Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
Speak for yourself - you don't speak for everyone else and I see no reason to use your standard as the default.
I have no such trust because I have always looked at safety warnings and taken them at face value. I always loved playing with Lego, but I was also aware that Lego bricks have sharp edges and are a choking hazard for small children. I knew this when I was a kid too.
Finally, I see no reason for you to lump these magnets in with all other 'toys for kids'. The buckyball magnets came with a very clear warning that they were for people 13 and over, and that you could get injured or even die by swallowing the magnets. When an item comes with a clear and unambiguous written warning of specific dangers and your idea of 'living in a trusting society' is to ignore such explicit warnings then yes it does make you guilty of something - negligence.
It's simply not fair to demand that other people accept liability for your actions when you are literally refusing to read clearly written warnings
This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
It's not subtle at all, it's easy to observe the risk from playing with the magnets for a couple of minutes and seeing how powerful they are. When the physical forces involved are self-evident then at some point you have take responsibility for paying attention to what your own senses are telling you. You're literally complaining that this is somehow too hard to think about it for ordinary people, and if you think that then you should be up in arms about the accessibility of gas stations, things make out of glass, and all sorts of other 'subtle' hazards that people navigate on a daily basis.
What happens when the packaging is discarded? The person doing the discarding takes responsibility for leaving the magnets in a safe place where they can not be got at by unsupervised children. I have clusters of neodymium magnets in several places around my house, out of the packaging. I know where they are, I know that I may need to move them if my friends who have kids come to visit (just like I need to move some other things I don't want them getting into), and I know that if I show them off or anyone expresses an interest in them that I have an obligation to point out that they are powerful and dangerous. And just in case, my home insurance policy covers me against financial liability if someone does suffer an injury while visiting my home.
Stop telling me it's a 'subtle risk.' That's complete BS when I can see and feel for myself that the things are really powerful. A subtle risk would be a lump of attractive-looking material whose radioactive nature isn't apparent without some kind of special measuring apparatus. I cannot understand why you are arguing that people should literally disregard the evidence of their senses rather than accept even a modicum of legal liability.
I don't agree with this. I think the risk isn't obvious to many people and we should therefore demand clear labeling. But not a ban.
It's actually not. It's panic about perceived risk. Balloons kill about 8 kids a year, which is 16 times as much as magnet sets (1 death in 2 years). We don't ban balloons, and few people would consider such a ban reasonable despite a clearly worse risk/reward tradeoff. Balloons are definitely not 16x more fun than magnet toys.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2239860
> Most of us trust that toys for kids will be essentially harmless. We choose to live in a trusting society, yes. That doesn't make us guilty of anything.
I don't agree with this at all. There are many toys I still won't give my 2-year-old, and even more that I'll only let her have under supervision. And she's actually an easy kid who doesn't tend to stick random stuff in her mouth.
> This is such a subtle risk, its arguable that a printed warning on a paper container is insufficient. What happens when the packaging is discarded? Another kid enters the house? Your kid gives the toy away?
I actually agree that the risk isn't obvious, unlike some people in this thread. The solution is labeling and education, though, not a ban. Kids die from random toys at a much higher rate that 1 every two years but we don't ban everything (just Kinder eggs, inexplicably).
http://www.poison.org/articles/2012-oct/toy-magnets-are-dang...
> Avoid the use of magnetic beads as fake body piercings.
How about teenagers who play with fireworks and die? Do we need to ban fireworks? Or do we just need parents to educate their children that fireworks are dangerous.
This whole debate is symptomatic of some bigger cultural problem. It reminds me of when some kid shoots themselves with a gun and then the community is all 'too bad, so sad' and no charges are brought against the parent because they've been through the 'tragedy' of losing a child. Well that's tragic for them but it was fatal for the child, and dead children are not getting any justice when their negligent parents are let off the hook for causing the death of another person.
I mean, if I as an adult was hanging out with you and then I died because you handed me something that looked like a can of coke but was actually a hand grenade, then you'd be charged with manslaughter for failing to apprise me of the risk. But when small children get hold of guns and kill themselves (or worse, kill another kid) that's frequently just treated as 'the cost of our 2nd amendment freedom' or some bullshit. there are a lot of cases where parents get off with no legal penalty because the death of a child is so painful, even though they're clearly responsible. That does not make it OK to push the liability onto some third party who wasn't present and who supplied a a dangerous product with a detailed warning about the risks involved in it suse which people chose to ignore.
Also, is there much evidence of teens actually doing this and accidentally swallowing them? I have no doubt that teens are playing with the magnets in stupid ways, but how many teens have swallowed magnets this way and had complications? The CPSC claims its happening but provides no breakout stats for this.
http://onsafety.cpsc.gov/blog/2011/11/10/magnet-dangers/
Also also, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the claims the CPSC is making. On the page I linked, they clam "22 reports of magnet incidents involving children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years old since June 2009" through Nov 2011 and provide a yearly breakout of all those reports. In the press release poison.org cites, they claim "CPSC staff estimates that small, high powered magnet sets were associated with 1,700 emergency room-treated injuries between 2009 and 2011." So they estimate two orders of magnitude higher than they actually have reports for?
https://www.cpsc.gov/Newsroom/News-Releases/2012/CPSC-Starts...
No, I have not read the more than 1,300 case studies of children taken to hospital after swallowing these magnets.
> Do we ban button batteries also?
We mandate that button batteries are supplied in toys that cannot be opened, or that can only be opened with a screwdriver.
Where did that 1300 number come from? I'm seeing so many random numbers for how often kids are swallowing magnets that I'm doubting the good faith of the CPSC now.