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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

> Swimming is one of the few activities that children engage in which can go so wrong as to end up in their death

Climbing trees (fall risk)

Climbing tall playground equipment (I broke my arm falling from a height of just 3 feet once, on one of those). Broken neck, etc.

Playing in the street (cars)

Bicycling (can get hit by a car, sigh)

Trampoline (don't get me started)

Exploring (falling down deep wells, etc.)

The Gashlycrumb Tinies is not just a morbid story about impossible deaths. Living is dangerous, living young possibly especially so!

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Drowning far outweighs all of those categories for ages 1 - 9 https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

In the large majority of motor vehicle incidents the child is an occupant of the vehicle : https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I see they have a category "Unintentional Pedestrian, Other" unable to find a glossary. Possibly refers to being hit by MV while a pedestrian?

Unintentional Poisoning seems really common for adults?! Misuse of prescription drugs apparently.

That's also illegal drugs, IE opiod overdoses

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5605a1.htm

The graph in your first link is absolutely fascinating. I found the number of "Unintentional Poisoning" and "Suicide" deaths especially surprising (due to the high numbers)

Unintentional poisonings have rocketed up the charts in the past few years. It didn't used to be in first place. That's the fentanyl crisis you're seeing.

The document we were looking at for poisoning was from 2011.

10 Leading Causes of Injury Deaths by Age Group HighlightingUnintentional Injury Deaths, United States – 2011

It seems I'm getting old, but you can watch it happen:

2007 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/unintentional_2007_bw...

2008 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2009 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_injury...

2010 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/10lcid_unintentional_...

2011 - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_inj...

All Data - https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html

In the US children aged under 9 cannot be counted as a death by suicide.

Suicide means "the deceased ended their life, and had the intent to do so". The US says that people under the age of 9 cannot make a reasoned decision about killing themselves, and thus cannot have the intent to die.

So there will be some people under 9 who killed themselves. It will be a very small number. But their death will be counted as something other than suicide.

Jesus. Multiple types of suffocation for babies < 1 yr old

From your link:

5-9: Unintentional Drowning 128

Unintentional Fire/Burn 81

I would not call that "far outweighs".

I can agree with that not "far outweighing", but those are mostly home fires : https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/105/6/1355#re... not "activities that children engage in"

Household:

- various kitchentools, knives, fork

- other tools, axe, hammer

- (poison) cleaning stuff

- climbing on the tish and falling on their neck

- ...

Yes, life is dangerous, yet sadly most parents today take the approach of avoiding all dangers at all cost.

And of course you should not leave dangerous things around and make it as safe as possible, but how can one learn, how to deal with dangers, when all the slightest dangers are removed? That will only hurt later on.

One have to play with fire, to learn how to deal with it. If parents forbid it completely, kids will just burn stuff on their own. I did ... and luckily I never burned anything down. But friends of mine ... allmost burned down a village.

Making fireworks that closely resembled pipe bombs (almost blew leg off)

oh jesus. yeah, exactly!

I had a pyromaniac phase. Once set a field on fire. Things could have gone extremely worse.

Peter Thiel mentions in his autobiography that, out of the six co-founders of PayPal, four of them made bombs in high school.

Tory Bruno, CEO of the United Launch Alliance, made rockets out of 80yo moldy dynamite. 6m10s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPoVi_h0r0

Moldy? Psh, that's nothing. The real excitement begins when you play with the sweat coming off the dynamite, like we did back when I was a kid in the 80s!

Note: the above is sarcasm. "Sweating" or "weeping" dynamite is dangerous and you should immediately leave the area and contact your local equivalent of 'the bomb squad' to report it.

Over time, regardless of the sorbent used, sticks of dynamite will "weep" or "sweat" nitroglycerin, which can then pool in the bottom of the box or storage area. For that reason, explosive manuals recommend the repeated turning over of boxes of dynamite in storage. Crystals will form on the outside of the sticks, causing them to be even more sensitive to shock, friction, and temperature. Therefore, while the risk of an explosion without the use of a blasting cap is minimal for fresh dynamite, old dynamite is dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite

Fellow 90's kid-pyro checking in. I remember when my father finally found my stash of black powder, metal tubing, various makeshift cannons, and flammable chemicals. Didn't really get in trouble--he was relieved it wasn't something as dangerous as weed.

Among destructive devices built as kids in the 90s, I think our crowning accomplishment was the Thermite we made as teenagers... only possible thanks to my friend who was somehow able to acquire a big block of Magnesium. I provided the Aluminium baseball bat ;) We got lucky that it fizzled out partway through (maybe from hitting dirt?), but his parents were definitely not too thrilled about the nasty hole in the concrete patio.

The most likely outcome from all the scenarios you mentioned is that nothing happens. Kids do these things all the time and are just fine.

Injuries occur occasionally, and even less frequently are those injuries fatal.

A friend of mine supermaned head-first into a tree while snowboarding last year. The tree was probably a foot in diameter, and he was going fast enough to shake snow off the whole tree. What happened? Nothing. We all laughed about it and kept snowboarding.

We are pretty resilient creatures when it comes to impact damage.

Drowning though, completely different. Much like filling a car's oil intake with dirt and then having the engine immediately seize. If you start breathing in water, you're do some serious damage to your lungs and cutting off oxygen to your brain, and further inhibiting basic survival functionality, and quickly resulting in death, if not remedied immediately.

So none of those activities resulted in your death? Or are you posting on HN from beyond the grave?

None did, this was a counterargument to the claim that swimming was "one of the few" ways for kids to die.

There are unfortunately many many ways for kids to die.

Yeah, but drowning is way more common than the other ones. This is like saying, "Well, I am not going to wear my seat belt, since people also die from being struck by lightning"

Just because multiple things are possible doesn't mean they are equally probable.

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