"3 children over the past 20 years". At this criteria everything will be banned.

You are being callous Stephen.

Next you will probably oppose the proposed mandatory wearing of meteor helmets for kids. Granted, the odds of them being hit by meteoric material is quite small, but consider the catastrophic result if they are hit un-helmeted. What if it were your child?

I personally think the mandatory wearing of meteor helmets is long overdue, possibly even for adults, although one could argue that we are capable of judging the risk for ourselves.

So, yes, child seats on the planes, and mandatory meteor helmets... the sooner the better.

Also, since the majority of injuries and death to children happen either inside the home.... or outside of it.... banning children from both places is also necessary. What is the State for, if not this?

How about helmets and mouthguards for all car passengers? I predict this will be mandatory in another Democratic administration or two, along with "learning-to-walk body armor" to protect toddler wannabe's. The role of government is infinite when it's the sole repository for the charitable impulse.

Yes, but how we can be sure that the Indoor Meteor Helmets are manufactured to standards? Andrew X, you are not going far enough.

Usually in an airliner crash, they take the casualties out in plastic sandwich bags -- the biggest pieces are usually small enough to palm in your hand. Shredded charred hamburger.

Given this, I doubt a Government-approved child safety seat would make much of a difference.

But, it makes Our Betters feel like they're Doing Something Important (and shows how Concerned and Compassionate (TM) they are to the serfs...)

Ken:

Given that the figure is only 3, I'm assuming it's children killed when thrown from parents' arms during extremely rough landings or turbulence:

One young child died and three others suffered minor injuries when they flew out of their parents' arms in the 1989 crash landing of a United Airlines DC-10 in Sioux City, Iowa.

And apparently there's still dispute over whether this will just lead to more children killed in car accidents taken instead of the now-more-expensive flights.

Mike:

That Sioux Falls "crash landing" was almost all crash, with just a little landing thrown in.

Roughly 111 people were killed. That anyone survived at all is a testimony to the incredible professionalism of the crew.

Jeff, that is probably the only airline crash in the last 20 years where more than 2 people survived.

There haven't been that many crashes of big airliners in the past 20 years, at least outside Russia and China, but there have been quite a few survivors in some of them.

The arguments about seatbelts, safety seats etc. come down to a balancing of interests.

The National Research Council, for example, recommended against seat belts on school buses on the grounds that the money could save more lives if spent elsewhere, although no one could deny that sometimes a seatbelt on a school bus would save lives.

So did painting them yellow.

That government considers whether the public good would be enhanced by X is not a sign that government is bad, though I know you libertarians think so.

Granted, Harry, I think the point is that it can be taken to absurd lengths. Painting school buses yellow is no big thing. Child seats on planes will either take some seats out of use for adults for the airlines (thus costing us all), or make an already burdened flight crew even busier, or both. (How many lives lost if a crew putting kids in seats just once misses an evil character while doing so. Just a hypothetical.) And any parent will tell you that removing the child, especially under stressful situations (like maybe, a flaming aircraft) can be quite difficult. All this, not to protect kids in a one in a 100,000 plane crash, but rather for a one in 2 MILLION plane crash where everybody is NOT just ground into hamburger. C'mon.

It's the utterly craven need of the implementers to "feel good" about themselves, while not hesitating to burden the rest of us in order to do it, AND while possibly making the problem actually worse than better, that sets off the libertarian aggravation.

So go ahead and discuss it, I suppose. Maybe one out of five such discussions does some good.

But child seats for passenger aircraft? C'mon. How high a priority is this, as Stephen asks.

Actually you'd save quite a few lives if uyou just reversed the seats in most vehicles, but especially planes.

Agreed, Andrew, but it sense a tone here that it's outrageous that the government would assess an alleged danger.

You could, of course, test your kids' pajamas for fire retardant vs. possible health problems from the retardant, but the pajamas would end up costing you about a million dollars.

Many, but obviously not all, of these wild goose chases originate outside government.

The world is full of knuckleheads. In our system, they get to vote.