Say Anything Blog

Terrible things happen. It’s a fact of life. We do what we can to limit and prevent them, but every once in a while something slips by and there is an accident. It’s a fact of life. Of course, to limit human error and laziness, the government has intervened over the years and enacted consumer laws and protection acts, which have certainly helped, but don’t eliminate the problems. When it comes right down to it, human nature allows for error no matter how much legislation is in place.

However, does that stop politicians from going overkill whenever a feel-good PR opportunity arises? Yeah right.

On June 29th, one of those sequences of events happened here in Minnesota. Human error resulted in a horrible accident and a great PR opportunity for over zealous politicians.

For those who don’t know the story, on June 29th, a six-year old girl was in a kiddie pool at her parent’s country club. She sat on an open drain hole, which tore a small hole in her rectum and pulled out most of her small intestines, effectively disemboweling her.

There are some interesting facts at work here:

• First off, Minnesota state code requires a cover over the drain hole



• The pool was inspected in May, at which time the cover was checked and in properly in place



• The pool records for the past three years showed that nothing was wrong with the drain cover



• The city inspector would shut down any pool that was missing the drain cover



• The city inspects pools monthly. Trained operators are responsible for maintenance and making sure the pools are kept up to code

So, this was a horrible accident. I can’t imagine what this poor girl and her family went through. She is only six years old and will have to eat through a tube the rest of her life and have a colostomy bag. Short of death, this sort of thing ranks at the top of accidents.

But the operative word here was that it was an accident. There are laws in place to limit this sort of thing from happening. People are hired and charged by the owners of the pools to maintain and keep the pool safe. Yet it happened anyway.

For whatever reason, the system failed, but the failure was not due to the system. It was due to human error. For whatever reason, that cover was removed and not put back. Was it sitting on a bench in the maintenance shed? I don’t know, but I would be willing to bet it was somewhere near by.

So… Was this a governmental failure? Was this a failure of the law? Was this an accident that happened because there wasn’t enough legislation out there to prevent it?

No! Of course not. Short of assigning a government inspector to each pool and making sure that they are there during all operating hours and constantly inspecting the state of the pool, there isn’t anything more that can be done. The government sets laws to maximize consumer safety, but it’s still up to the individuals out there to uphold them. It’s also up to the individual to understand what assumption of risk means. It means that no matter how many safe guards and laws are in place, there will always be human error to consider. There will always be the guy who came to work tired or angry or after just having a fight with his girlfriend… There will always be the possibility for somebody to miss a step - no matter how rigidly outlined those steps might be.

So,with all of this to consider, it absolutely confounded me that it took less than one week for Representative Ramstad (a rino of the worst kind) and my personal favorite politician, Senator Amy Klobuchar to get involved. Less than one week after the accident, these two feel good politicians used heart strings to call for federal legislation for better pool safety, the “Pool and Spa Safety Act.”

I won’t get into the details, but I will address the silly nature of this nanny-oriented piece of legislation that not only tramples all over State’s rights, but also introduces a federal level of hand-holding that is absolutely unnecessary in today’s world.

To be certain, I do have a heart. I understand that an accident like this is horrible and nobody wants to see a repeat. Both Klobuchar and Ramstad pulled out their best “concerned politician” game faces with this. However, that doesn’t make it right. The politicians pushing this act claim that there needs to be more laws in place to ensure safety in pools. Klobuchar even specifically said:

“There are laws we can pass to strengthen the safety standards and prevent this from occurring again.”

But I can’t help myself. I want to know what’s wrong with state laws? There are already laws in place designed to limit the possibility of this sort of thing, yet they do happen as I illustrated above. Klobuchar hit the nail right on the head by using the worst choice of words… “prevent". I’m sorry Klobuchar, but if you use the dictionary definition of “prevent,” you would have to just keep kids from going to pools all together. That would be the only surefire way to “prevent” this sort of thing from happening.

This is government gone awry. This is the nanny state out of control.  When the federal government gets involved in trying to “prevent” things from happening by trying to pass legislation above and beyond existing state legislation, they are overstepping their bounds. Somehow, these people have forgotten that there is such a thing as human nature. They have forgotten that no matter how much legislation is out there, no matter how tightly you hold people’s hands, that there is still the possibility of somebody making a mistake and somebody getting hurt as the result.

These are our elected officials and tax dollars at work. This is the federal government violating the inter-state commerce clause and trampling states rights to regulate themselves. This is the federal government telling people that every accident can be taken care of through nanny state legislation.

I don’t know about you, but I’m plum out of hands to be held.