Courtesy of New York Legal Update, the New York Department of State has promulgated emergency regulations requiring the installation of a pool alarm.  This comes in reaction to the tragic drowning of 3 year old Anthony Muniz.  You may recall the bizarre story, where young Anthony scaled fences to reach a pool three houses away.

Once again, H.L. Mencken’s admonition that for every complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple and absolutely wrong, comes to mind.  The Anthony Muniz story is indeed a tragedy.  Any time a child dies, it’s a tragedy.  But mankind cannot find a simple cure for every act that can be performed, and we need to get that bone out of our heads that makes us think otherwise.

This is a particularly expensive cure to boot.  These pool alarms cost $200 to $300 apiece, meaning that the people who own the companies that make them were having a huge party last night.  Woo hoo!  And for some pools, and pool owners, these are great devices, perfect for making sure that their pools are safe and protected.
But the cost to New York pool owners will be in the millions, and there will necessarily be a huge percentage for whom this cure offers absolutely nothing.

Not to mention, this quick fix would have done nothing for little Anthony, since the owner of the pool in which he drowned would have been exempt anyway.  Mind you, the local reaction to this tragedy has been mixed, with many wondering why blame the pool instead of Anthony’s parents, who somehow failed to notice that there son (who was known to “wander”) was long gone.  Of course, it’s a lot easier to blame an inanimate object that parents who have just lost a child.

Please understand, I am not against safety or protection of children.  Nor am I primarily concerned with safety as a cost / benefit issue.  What does concern me is the constant use of aberrational tragedies to justify new laws.  It has become a given in criminal law, where every law now has somebody’s name attached to it even though it is then used for purposes entirely unrelated to its inception. 

This knee jerk reaction of passing a law in response to every tragedy may be a terrific way for some legislator to get his name in the paper, but it is creating a world of ever-increasing restriction and a populace that believes that passing laws is the answer to every problem.  Where does it stop?