The bad parent argument is garbage. If I visit someone's house or bring one of my little ones with me to my accountants or lawyer's office I don't expect to need to be ultra-vigilant, it should be a generally safe environment. I want to live in a society where that is true.
Essentially, for 2013, there were 559 injuries sampled from pens and pencils among people aged 1 month to 15 years old. There were 297 from scissors - although I might have missed a few classification product codes for scissors, there were quite a few. There were 219 sampled injuries from building sets, of which magnetic balls are included.
However, these are the sample counts. The Historical Estimate I believe is the total injuries over the time period selected. Building sets is by far the least, 2500 less than scissors and almost 10000 less than pens and pencils.
I then read through those cases. In the 219 cases, magnet is mentioned 13 times. Swallow is mentioned 58 times, but I assume this includes other building sets such as Legos, Knex etc.
13/219*6800 = 403 magnetic swallowing injuries over 2013.
This [2] report from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition mentions 480 magnet ingestions over the past 10 years, roughly 204 occurring over 2013.
There is an argument to be made over severity of injury I believe, but via the numbers, these balls are not as dangerous as scissors or pencils and pens. I frankly find this attempt at a ban ridiculous. What if a child swallows staples? Thumbtacks? These all are things that can be left on a desk that would cause significant injury.
Please correct me if I’m wrong with my interpretation of the data.
[1] http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Research--Statistics/NEISS-Injury-Dat...
[2] http://www.consumerreports.org/content/dam/cro/news_articles...
Think of all the confounding factors here such as ages 1 month to 15 years - older children are far more likely to be injuring themselves with knives, the population at risk from these magnets is generally under 10 years old. Think of just how rarely a child in America makes contact with one of these magnets as opposed to the other objects. All children in the school age range are practically forced to be in contact with a pencil for hours a day every weekday for ten months.
PS: I do really appreciate that you looked these numbers up though.
Can you cite stats for that claim?
Add up all the scissors, pencils, and knives in America.
Look up the injuries/fatalities to children caused by each.
Viola!
If you're going to claim your opinion as fact, it's just rude to be a dick when you're called on it. At least admit that it's not 'empirically true' - or, perhaps more to the point, that you don't actually know.
This comment ended up doing the work for me, and demonstrates my point. But then based on the numbers somehow concludes that it demonstrates the opposite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138774
How many houses in the world have pencils in them? Pretty close to every single one, how someone concludes from the injury rate cited that they are more dangerous than these magnetic toys is beyond my understanding.
That comment goes so far as to note that over 40% of the incidents reported in the last 10 years occurred in 2013, how that does not make one think that maybe the recent prevalence of these powerful magnets could be related is also puzzling to me.