Is there never a tragedy that doesn’t require a new law?  It is almost funny how quickly legislators—at both the state and federal level—have to put out a press release announcing a new law after some individual tragedy.  Such is the case with the death of 4-year-old Carlos Alejandro Flores at the Great America amusement park in San Jose last week.  Despite the fact that Great America has announced that children shorter than 4 feet twill now be required to wear life vests in all of its 17 locations nationwide, State Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, says that she plans to introduce legislation to address the problem.  Her bill would legally require children under 4 feet to were life vests at amusement parks, set a mandatory ratio of lifeguards to swimmers and require that young children not be left unattended.  The key to this sad situation is that the 4-year-old boy was left unattended.  We can pass a law to require parents to say with their young children in water parks, but do we really think that it will change the behavior of irresponsible parents?  Sorry to be harsh, but I’ve had my 4-year-old at these pools and there is no way a parent could leave a child alone and think that they were safe.  Sometimes tragedy happens because of someone’s mistake, sometime due to irresponsibility and sometimes just sheer bad luck. I think in this case, it was negligence on the mother’s part and I wonder why Alquist thinks that the park, not the parent, bears the responsibility for this tragedy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.