toy police Archives - Page 2 of 3

CPSIA – Numbers Don’t Lie – Much Ado About Nothing

The Consumer Product Safety Information Act (CPSIA) is a terrible law that is costing American businesses billions of dollars and eliminating thousands of jobs – all in the name of protecting children from lead poisoning. The law illustrates perfectly the problem with giving government too much power over our lives. CPSIA over-regulates something that in reality is not a problem. CPSIA’s purpose is to protect children from lead poisoning.

A recent study of 899 Consumer Product Safety Commission product recalls over an 11 year period found that only one child in that period died from lead poisoning attributable to the recalled products. Why is the government regulating something that is statistically insignificant? The answer is because that is what government does. Government decides what is important and needs regulation and the facts be damned. Government knows best and government will fix it for us.

Here are some of the findings of the study of CPSC recalls over 11 years:

Recalls: 899
Products Recalled: 3,128
Units Recalled: 308,697,297
Injuries to Kids from Recalled Products: 2,381
Deaths from Recalled Products: 35

The study also determined the cause of injuries and deaths:

Brake Failure 0, 0
Burns 74, 0
Cadmium 0, 0
Choking 150, 3
Collision 2, 0
Falling/entrapment 1803, 17
Fire hazard 4, 0
Illness 0, 0
Impalement 0, 0
Laceration 284, 0
Lead 3, 1
[The only death from lead in 11 years]
Lead-in-paint 1, 0 [That’s right, ONE INJURY in 11 years, no deaths.]
Magnets 3, 0
Strangulation 26, 7
Suffocation 29, 7

It is a fact of life that children will be injured and killed in accidents while growing up. It is not possible to protect all children from injuries and death. What is the point in spending billings of dollars to “protect” so few children from injury and death? Why doesn’t the government allocate our precious financial resources based in importance, i.e., preventing the most common causes of injuries and deaths rather than to obscure and numerically small causes?

The authors of SuperFreakonomics explain how media and people get caught up with terror as an isolated event without recognizing how rare the event actually is. The book tells about a 2001 Time magazine cover story on shark attacks, a story the media loves to tell over and over. Four people on the planet earth with 6 billion people died from shark attacks in 2001. Over the ten year period 1995 to 2005, an average of 6 people a year died from shark attacks worldwide. Every year over 200 people are killed by elephants, but the media doesn’t write scare stories about elephant attacks. Why sharks, but not elephants?

The media writes about shark attacks because it has shark attacks on the brain and statistical facts about the number of deaths only gets in the way of the story. It’s the same with government. It’s obsessed with lead poisoning and the facts be damned. The CPSIA is the law that requires that all children’s products contain lower levels of lead than found in many common every day products. The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s job is to enforce the law regardless of cost to the country or the consequences of a bad law.

According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2006, lead poisoning was not one of the ten leading causes of death in children under 10. The leading causes of deaths of children under 10 were traffic accidents, suffocation, drowning and fire/burns. Why is the government wasting money and effort on lead in children’s toys instead of trying to reduce the leading causes of children’s deaths and injuries?

See “CPSIA – Publishers HOWL Over Inadequate Waxman Amendment.” which discusses the stupidy of the CPSIA’s ban on lead in children’s books that has lead to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of harmless books because people cannot afford to pay the cost of testing the books for lead content.

Lead Police Recall Dangerous Bicycle Bells that Have Injured Nobody

Warning: Do not let your kids eat any bicycle bells because the bells may contain lead. If your child must eat bicycle bells, try to educate the kid to never eat the entire bell. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall of children’s red, black and white bicycle bells bells that have “I ♥ My Bike” printed on the top. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed. Hazard: The red paint on the bicycle bells contains excessive lead levels, violating the federal lead paint standard. Incidents/Injuries: None reported.

Toy Police Have an Unsupported Fear of Cadmium & Want to Ban it in Children’s Products

Recently the Associated Press ran a story about the metal content of a number of items of children’s jewelry made in China. The AP tested some jewelry products and found that some of the items contained cadmium. The article speculated that the manufacturers of these items substituted cadmium in place of lead because of the unrealistic minimum lead content requirement of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CSPIA). The federal toy police, aka the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has been cracking down on companies that import and distribute or sell children’s products that do not meet the lead content testing requirements of the CSPIA. Testing the lead content of every part of a children’s product is very expensive and impossible for many manufacturers of children’s products. Many manufacturers cannot comply with the CSPIA and simply stop making children’s products.

Eight states are now considering banning excess levels of cadmium in children’s products. These state are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, and New York. The only reason the states and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are considering regulating cadmium in children’s products is because of the January 2010 AP story. From the beginning of recorded time up to the date of the AP story, the toy police haven’t cared the least about the level of cadmium in children’s products. The reason nobody cared is because there are no scientific studies that have shown that “high levels” (what ever that is) of cadmium poses a danger to children who suck on products that contain cadmium.

Another Associated Press story called “N.J. Assembly bill tightens restrictions on toxic content in children’s jewelry,” makes the following unsupported allegation, “Cadmium is a known carcinogen, particularly when inhaled in a factory or other workplace.” It then states, “The exact risks to adults aren’t clear because it typically takes long-term exposure to the metal to cause the diseases.” The Handmade Toy Alliance CSPIA Blog says, “Cadmium, after all, is a naturally occurring element and is found in trace amounts in almost everything from carrots to carpet.” See

Why Do Toy Police Want to Ban Rhinestones?

Amend the CPSIA: “The Democrats apparently have it in for rhinestones and are so uptight about this ‘menace’ that they are willing to write an outright ban into the CPSIA, via Mr. Waxman’s new amendment. No more bling for you! Have we finally entered the land of the looneys? . . . . Chairman Tenenbaum has conceded in writing that the stones are not dangerous . . . .”

Kid’s ATV Industry Wants Toy Police to Allow Sales of Kid-Sized ATVs to Kids Without Testing for Lead Content

An onerous federal law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) prevents the sale of products to children unless the products and their component parts each pass an expensive test for lead that proves the products and their components lead content is below the stringent federal lead standard. Many companies that used to produce children’s products or components used in children’s products have gone out of business because they cannot afford to pay for the expensive testing. An industry that has been affected is the kids all terrain vehicle (ATV) industry. The Motorcycle Industry Council Wants Congress to amend the CPSIA to allow kid-sized ATVs to be sold without undergoing the expensive lead content tests. The MIC produced a call to action video asking people to contact their Congressmen/women and Senators and ask them to exempt the sale of ATVs from the CPSIA’s lead content testing requirement. The video gives three reasons for the exemption:

Use of kids ATVs is not dangerous nor does it create a health problem for children. Experts say the amount of lead a child gets from contact with an ATV is less than a child gets from drinking a glass of water.
The CPSIA has the unintended consequence of causing parents to let their kids ride adult ATVs that are more dangerous and not size-appropriate for children because the parents cannot buy kid-size ATVs.
The CPSIA has caused a lot of people in the children’s ATV industry to lose their jobs. MIC estimates that a complete ban on youth models will cause the industry to lose $1 billion a year.