Register Hot Dogs, Not Hand Guns.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/22/children.choking/?hpt=C1
Labels urged for foods that can choke kids

(100 child deaths per year ... a rough estimate of how many children choke to death on food every year, according to the most recent statistics from a 2002 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

Is 100 children dying per year serious? Lets look at it from the governments perspective.

In 1999, according to government reports, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States. This was considered horrible by the United States government, and they have therefore decided to ban guns.

In 1999, according to government reports, 41,611 people were killed and 3.4 million people were injured in automobile accidents. This is considered acceptable, and there are no plans to ban automobiles.

What conclusion can we draw from this?

It could mean that the government prefers you use a car to kill someone rather than using a gun. It is always so difficult to know what special interest group has bribed the government to take a ludicrous position.

Or it could mean that there is some magic number of deaths used to decide a products acceptability. If the number of deaths is below the magic number, the deaths and injuries are bad and the product must be stopped at all costs. If the number of deaths is above the magic number, the deaths and injuries are acceptable, and there is no need to prevent the usage of the product.

If this is the case, then it probably means that we need to ban hot dogs, grapes, raw carrots, apples and peanuts. At least until we can get the deaths caused by them up to the death rate of automobiles, at which point, we would no longer need to regulate / ban them.