It's legal to sell guns, muscle cars, whiskey, swords, hydrochloric acid, and fireworks. But magnets? Someone might get hurt!
Countries that, self-admittedly, cannot be trusted to safely handle Kinder surprise eggs, probably should stay away from magnets too.
The complaints comes because of problems that have arisen with kids in the past.
This thread brings up many different hazards from our everyday lives and compares them with neodymium magnet toys. Is this a fair comparison?
We interact with most of these hazards every day. Any given kid would be educated about electric wires, hot stoves, fire, sharp objects. If not the kid then at least the parent would be educated about the dangers of ingesting bleach or laundry detergent, and so on. Yes, sadly above hazards still cause many deaths, but they also are much more widespread than neodymium magnet toys.
Now take our magnets.
- They're new and sufficiently rare. Average kid wouldn't know its dangers—average parent doesn't! (Compare to guns, fireworks.)
- They're shiny, attractive, and with funny physical properties to boot. Inviting to play. (Compare to hydrochloric acid.)
- We're already nearly blind to all the swallowing hazard labels around us.
Magnets are awesome and I definitely would buy myself a set, but the controversy doesn't seem to me totally insubstantial.
As far as I could understand the only risk is for children to swallow these magnets? Or is there some other hazard due to them being magnets?
If it's only about swallowing, then how is it different from any other object of similar size?
If we ban them because they are "new and sufficiently rare", then how is it we don't ban all new products below certain size threshold? Everything is new in the beginning. Same with shiny and attractive, there are many such objects which can be swallowed (e.g. jewlery) and somehow these are not banned.
> Zen Magnets may cause fatal intestinal pinching if swallowed.
> Don't leave them around animals, or children who don't understand this.
> US Government Age recommendation is 14 years.
Then it dawned on me, and I thought that it's actually too mild a warning. What exactly children are expected to understand? that they shouldn't swallow those toys—of course they understand that, it's accidents that everyone's worried about. If I were the business owner, I'd prefer to err on the safe side: “Keep away from children”, “This is not your average swallowing hazard!”, and so on.
And I'm not entirely convinced about safety rules "below a certain size threshold". For instance, refrigerators are invariably lethal when swallowed whole.
[0] just to be clear: I'm not advocating to ban these toys in any country that can safely be trusted to handle Kinder surprise eggs.
I mean look at The Mandala Set that Zen Magnets sells? http://zenmagnets.com/the-mandala-set/
How small are those spheres exactly? They look like toys, or candy. Small children love to swallow things, especially small round non-pointy things, and someone's kid dying or merely getting serious lifelong intestinal damage from swallowing small powerful magnets (like neodymium magnets are), due to intestinal pinching, is no joke. It doesn't matter to a kid if the original product came with a warning label or consent form or not.
Muscle cars, whiskey, full-size swords, chemicals don't look like toys, and aren't as likely to be played with by especially small children. Small separated magnets, especially any that happened to fall and roll across the floor out of sight, seem like a greater risk to me.
The witch hunt for these things is ridiculous, and does not stand up to scrutiny - Dogs are statistically over 120 times more dangerous than Buckyball magnet sets. Should we ban dogs? This is simply a case of someone championing their cause because they can, not because it's the right thing to do.