The American Spectator

Ken Shreve br> New Hampshire /p> p> REVERSE DECISIONS br> Re: Eric Peters’s Mandatory Back-Up Cameras? : /p>

The Safe Sledding Crisis revisited — I told you it wasn’t very funny!

p>Having grown up in a semi-rural area of the country, I mowed my parents’ lawn with a lawn tractor — there was about an acre of lawn to mow. A couple of years ago, I purchased my own lawn tractor with an interesting feature. It requires the user to push a button if you decide to go in reverse (in addition to engaging the transmission into reverse) with the mowing blades in motion — I guess the idea is that you first think about what you are about to do. I don’t know if this is required on all lawn tractors by government fiat or if the manufacturer had been intimidated by fear of civil suit, but I do know it is really annoying to have to go through the acrobatics that I do to make trim cuts around trees and other such obstacles — the button is an awkward reach through the steering wheel. I certainly would not have chosen this feature if I had a choice. Once in a while I do think about what a grisly and horrific accident must of occurred to generate such an idiotic feature on a machine — then I think of what a horrific parent that would allow a child small enough not to get out of harms way out and about with a lawn tractor in action. br> — Anthony.Mastroserio /p> p> Peters is right. The more we resort to using technology to idiot-proof life, the more idiots we get. When drivers get used to technology taking care of safety responsibilities, enough of the driving population adjusts by getting lazier or assuming riskier behavior in other areas so that the net effect is a wash. You may dent one problem, but the long-term effect is lazier, dumber, more dangerous drivers. Not all drivers, of course, but enough to end up with yet another problem unsolved by government.