Everyone's favorite Nanny-Commie, Joan Claybrook, is at it again. At a press conference, Claybrook said, “I’m here today to talk about killer stoves.” The children are dying and being injured, she said. It seems that peoples' brats are flipping down stove doors, standing and jumping on them, and then those bad boys tip. Joan's commie outfit, Public Citizen, has even dedicated a whole website to this: killerstoves.com. I'll bet'cha that url was an easy one to snag.
Apparently, there is some "50-cent anti-tip bracket that can prevent stoves from tipping over," but consumers are too lazy to install them. From Public Citizen's website:
“There have been more than 100 reported cases of death and injury from scalding and burns due to hot foods and liquids spilling from the stove top, and from the weight crushing anyone in the path of the tipping ranges,” said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. “Considering the lack of consistent reporting and the millions of homes with these ovens, we believe the numbers of those maimed or killed by ranges tipping over are much greater.”
...This design flaw has particularly affected children and the elderly. CPSC accident reports include cases of a 24-pound toddler who stood on an open oven door, tipping the range so that boiling chicken soup spilled over him, causing severe burns; a 3-year old who climbed onto the range door and was killed when the stove fell over on him; and an 88-year old woman who slipped as she was cleaning her range and grabbed the oven door for support – which caused the oven to flip over and crush her in her own kitchen with her upper body wedged into the hot oven in which she had just finished baking cookies.
...“When companies fail to take simple steps to save lives, and the CPSC fails to act on a well-known and preventable problem that leads to horrible burns and deaths, something’s very wrong,” said U.S. PIRG Consumer Program Director Ed Mierzwinski. “It’s time to fix the stove tip-over problem that’s been ignored for too long.”
So when 88-year-old grandma falls down the stairs, who do we blame then? When your kid falls on his face after tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, what is to be regulated? The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers told CNN, “Manufacturers provide with every new range an effective and reliable anti-tip device that can be easily installed. It is up to the installer and the consumer to act.”
Joan ignores the real solution: people need to take simple steps on their own. But in this "it's your fault" culture, personal responsibility disappears down the rathole of human inanity. So instead of Claybrook persuading people to get with it and install the anti-tip brackets, she'd rather get Congress involved and agitate for regulation and get folks all riled up for filing lawsuits. Claybrook is what you'd call a post-Cold War era lifestyle Communist.
Yes, Congressmen Dingell and Stupak have ripped off a letter to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission in which they note that the killer stove issue is of "great importance to the health and welfare of the general public, particularly children." What buffoonery! You can see the video of the CNN "Killer Stove" report here.
