Courtesy www.mynrma.com.au

Experts estimate that 38 children die each year trapped in hot cars.  So far this year, locked vehicles have been responsible for roasting at least 20 tots. We must do something about this dangerous situation before any more innocent children suffer tragic and unnecessary vehicular deaths. With this in mind, TTAG calls on Congress and the Department of Transportation to pass an immediate ban on the installation of door locks and closeable and/or fixed side windows in passenger cars, minivans, pickup trucks, SUVs, crossover vehicles, and any other type of motor vehicle not manufactured specifically for commercial use and operated by specifically-trained and licensed drivers…

In addition, any such vehicles already on the road must have these deadly door locks and windows removed if used to transport children under the age of 12. We have to take action to stop this epidemic of vehicular slaughter. It will be worth getting a little wet or cold and risking an increase in auto theft and higher insurance premiums if it saves even one child. We must think of the children.

We now return you to your regular programming.

 

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83 COMMENTS

  2. *grabs a bag of popcorn, props up feet, and awaits the full weight of sarcasm-challenged interwebz rage to come crashing down on this thread*

  3. We need to close the private-car sale loophole. No one needs a dually turbo-diesel pickup truck .

    • To be known hereafter as an “Urban Assault Vehicle.”
      Mine is black, making it even more dangerous.

    • If you insist on owning one, it should have a mandated/regulated 3gal gas tank. The amount of havoc such a vehicle could produce in an “active driver” scenario would be significantly lessened by having to stop to refuel.

        • Mine has an aftermarket 54 gallon tank. I can drive 1000+ miles without stopping (as long as I’m using the Wendy Davis Signature Model catheter)
          Costs almost $200 to reload, though. Anyone got any recipes for loading my own?

        • jimbthepilot says:
          July 20, 2013 at 17:34
          “Anyone got any recipes for loading my own?”

          Befriend a farmer and make a deal with him? (there’s no road tax on farm gas.)

        • You with your gas guzzlers are supporting terrorist regimes in Middle Eastern countries. OPEC, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood etc. are all paid for with oil. There’s blood OILY BLOOD on your hands! The above needs more sarcasm.

        • A-Rod, when posting from a mobile device, if you get the message that your comment “failed to post,” ignore it, at least until you refresh the page to verify. 99% of the time, it’s wrong.

        • @ A-ROD

          Talk to the government and the Oil Companies then. We got plenty of oil under our feet. THEY don’t want to use it.

        • Well, my truck has a silencer. And I bought it (the truck) from a private seller with no background check. Using actual cash. So there.

  4. Although in this case it’s pointing out a serious issue, the hyperbole-based “ban everything” rhetoric is probably my least favorite of the arguments that people on our side put forth. The first guy to jokingly say “ban pressure cookers” or “nobody needs a pressure cooker larger than 5 quarts” after Boston got a chuckle (as in, it’s funny because the comparison is true), but the 732 people who repeated it after him really drove it into the ground.

    Things like “an immediate ban on the installation of door locks” and “We need to close the private-car sale loophole. No one needs a dually turbo-diesel pickup truck” aren’t going to convince anyone to change sides. It’s just a self-congratulatory inside joke circle jerk. (No offense ST, you just had the only example in this comment thread thus far.)

    I’ll probably get shouted down and “If you don’t like it, don’t read it,” and that’s fine, I suppose. Just sharing my thoughts. If the headline I saw in my email was “Ban Car Door Locks For The Children!” I wouldn’t have even bothered to click through, but when I saw “We Interrupt for a Public Service Announcement” I thought it was going to be a post about something important. So, I clicked through and got assaulted by stupid. I suppose that makes me foolish for not knowing better after all the time I’ve spent here.

    • A little healthy venting is cathartic. To me, TTAG is more for us ‘evil owners’ than it is a platform to help debunk some of the ridiculousness or change opinion. Though it does a decent job of the latter regardless.

      No attempt here to demean you opinion. My 0.02 only.

      • I suppose cathartic venting is healthy is true. I was just having flashbacks to Boston (as I mentioned). In that thread, a couple people did the “ban pressure cookers” thing right off the bat, and everyone laughed, and it was awesome. But three and four days later, there were still people adding comments that said nothing more than “ban pressure cookers!” which indicated they’d either not bothered to read the comments, or were too stupid to realize that 150 people had already done it, or were arrogant enough to think they were the first ones to be that clever.

        I’m such a killjoy.

        • Somebody’s gotta keep us on point. Otherwise our posts would devolve into comments about boobs and fart jokes. Keep it up.

    • You mean you ACTUALLY BELIEVED this was intended to sway anti-gunners? You need to lighten up, Matt in FL. Clearly it was not.

      “…but the 732 people who repeated it after him really drove it into the ground.”

      Sheesh… since when has THAT not happened?

      It was a lighthearted joke for a decompressing weekend TTAG downtime crew. Or do you actually believe Chuck Schumer and DiFi read TTAG?

      Maybe some time in the Everglades would clear things up in your head. Say hi to the Skunk Apes for me!

    • I ran out of popcorn so I’ll just reiterate the serious side of this TTAG post– hot summer day in the sun = bad idea to keep either your kid or your pet in a vehicle for a prolonged time.

  5. This is just silly. The cars aren’t the cause of the problem. Cars don’t lock themselves you know.

    • i beg to differ, mine locks automatically when the ignition is turned or its put in drive or reverse but ur right stupid is definitely the problem. I had an infant cousin left in a vehicle by her “care taker” in the middle of the TEXAS summer. Needless to say that after the shock and sorrow passed all we could ask is WTF was this person thinking.

  6. Maybe we can team up with my cause: We demand the US Dept of Health & Human Services shut down every Home Depot until five-gallon buckets are banned.
    This would save 30 children from drowning each year.

    • I was disecting a heart for an anatomy class one day when I noticed on the bucet of hearts it had a disclaimer. The picture was an infant head first in the bucket with the red circle/slash buster sign. Because you know, I always bring infants in to a lab with fermaldahyde.

  7. That’s a horrible idea!

    38 deaths out of a population of 350M is minuscule. What right do you have to demand the government curtail the rights of responsible car owners just because a few idiots sometimes…oh…hold on a sec…I see what you did there…subtle…

  8. If we allowed people to drive masses of metal weighing several tons on our public roads at high speeds, we’d have a public “demolition derby” on every corner. Like the “Wild West” when wagons and horses ran roughshod over every small town.

    And don’t get me started on swimming pools. Nobody needs a swimming pool. We have bathtubs.

    • I agree. It’s every bit as ridiculous as a ban on assault weapons, assault handguns, high capacity magazinrs, or any other ban supported by control freak politicians.

  11. As all the Holder lovers say today ban the right to drive so all the children are saved!!

  13. But wait!

    I love my window locks.

    It keeps my kids from rolling down the windows in the back and allowing differential pressure fluctuations from creating a dynamic change in eustation tubes creating fluxation in the the ear drums..

    In otherwords going “woop woop woop really fast and hurting my ear drums!

  15. And we need to immediately ban the sale of dangerous mufflers! The only reason anybody would want a silent car would be for use in crime, and for assassinating public officials!

  18. Ban high capacity vans with fully automatic transmissions!
    It’s for the children ™.

  19. You can have my door locks when you pry them from my cold, dead car.

    Which would set off the alarm. I hope.

  20. Thank you TTAG for bring to light, and addressing this serious issue. I hope you will also stand with me in calling for a ban on high capacity swimming pools, do you know how many kids you could drown in one of those?!?!?! So called experts, like swimming advocate Michael Phelps, says that these death pits are for sporting purposes only. But I know in my heart that if some psycho had one in his backyard, he could drown, like, a hundred kids in it! It keeps me up at night just thinking about it! I’m writing my representatives regarding this issue, and I encourage fellow readers to do the same… for the children.

    btw, please visit my wifes web page and join her organization, A Million Moms Demanding Action for Commen Sense Swimming Pool Safety.

    http://www.demandaplantostopdeathpitstodaybecauseimamoron.org

  21. Its screwed up to see TTAG resorting to using dead children to make a crappy joke about gun control.

    And its even worse to see them doing it under the guise of a public announcement.

    • Chill, brother. If I didn’t have a twisted sense of humor, I’d have nothing at all. A little parody of the blood t-shirt wave hurts nothing but the credibility of the gun grabbers.

  22. Wow, you guys are really blowing this way out of proportion. Seriously. All we have to do is make it illegal to leave an infant locked inside a car without any supervision, then the police will automatically and instantly stop this from ever happening again. People rarely do anything illegal no matter how stupid they happen to be and if they do the police are always in the right place at the right time to stop it in time.

  24. We must pass a law requiring the installation of technology that can sense if a person or pet is still in a car, analyze the external and internal temperatures, and then automatically self-start adjusting the car’s heating or air-conditioning as needed even if the driver has turned-off the engine. Technology can also be installed that sounds a loud alarm and alerts the police if a child(ren) is left in the car under a certain weight. If the new technology can save just one child’s life then it is worth it.

    • If their owners care that little about them, why should the taxpayers bother with them?

    • OK, coming as the guy who’s usually the first to call BS on this stuff, I think your reaction goes a little far. Is it stupid? Maybe. Does it rise to the level of loss of respect? Nah, not even close.

      On the other hand, I still haven’t heard anything from RF on the MAIG Hunter Revealed post. It’s still sitting there, full of unsupported allegations, and a line that says “TTAG has put in a call into Mr. Nida.” There’s even a fairly long comment by someone who claims to be Mr. Nida, but nothing further from RF. Despite several comments and a couple direct emails, I still haven’t heard a peep about it from him. The last thing I heard was back on July 1, when Dan told me that RF had just started his drive down for his move, and that I shouldn’t “expect a response any time soon. And don’t take the lack of response as a blow-off.” Well, that was twenty days ago, and the post still sits there, unsupported, and there’s been zero followup, and no supporting information posted. If there isn’t anything further to back up what’s written in that post, I think that guy deserves a retraction and an apology. Or, the issue can continue to be ignored, and hurt the credibility of everything else RF writes, and by extension the credibility of this site. That’s the kind of thing I lose respect over.

      • Indeed.

        I was admittingly expecting a serious post on children being left in cars during the summer.

        But this? This is just bad taste.

        • The paradox is in the illustrations.

          Ofcourse it is awefull and absolutey no reason to leave a kid in a car unless you are with a dew feet of it at all times. Never locked!

          That is the point. It is an illistative argument to show how specific laws have no effect when common sense is applied.

          It is only bad taste if you don’t understand the context.

  28. Negligent people roasting their children in cars are not a hot topic for the press. Now… negligent gun owners?… that is an issue. If a gun is involved that topic needs to be discussed. We have to stop the flow of these machines made of steel, aluminum, wood, springs, and polymer because of the trail of blood and death that are following them. We need to do something about these guns that are held by these negligent people. Negligent people without guns are apparently not an issue however.

  29. I am very pro gun/anti-gun control and I find this to be the most distasteful, revolting satire I have ever read. If this is what you need to resort to in order to make a point about gun control, you’re doing it wrong. Pick up a book or watch a few youtube videos and you can come up with plenty of valid anti gun control information to share and advocate. Making jokes about children cooking in cars (which does happen) is why anti gunners think we’re all CRAZY. Get a grip.

  31. I worry about this every day. I don’t think it should be regulated, but if there was a camera or alarm or something I could buy, my lady and I would have it in our cars.

  32. And nobody thinks to notice that it’s already illegal to leave a kid locked in a car, just like they never say that all those massacres took place in “gun-free zones” like Aurora.

  33. Nothing like a little dark humor to start off the morning. Too bad most readers here have enough common sense to see it for what it is. I was expecting way more people to come unhinged in the comments and I was excited to watch it unfold.

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