Glenn links to an article about police in Wisconsin trying to get kids to wear helmets while sledding. But I don’t think they’re going far enough.
I chipped a tooth sledding. I was 13, hit a bump at the bottom of the hill. The metal part of the Flexible Flyer hit me in the chin, my tooth chipped, and I had to have a root canal.
I say add mouthguards to sledding protection as well. The ones that boxers use would probably work.
If you’re going to have a nanny state, make sure you do it right, dammit!
And then, come to think of it, we should have eye protectors too. You never can tell what’s going to fly in your eye as you sled down a hill at the horrifying speed of 17 mph. Goggles for sledders. And perhaps we should start a movement to get all bicyclists to wear goggles, too. Helmets are not enough.
Update: Welcome, Instapundit readers. You don’t need a helmet to check out the rest of this site. Yet.
You’re still proposing an unacceptably dangerous and deadly world. We clearly need to ban hills.
What sort of parent would allow kids to go sledding without body armor? Those metal skids are sharp!
Couldn’t they make rubber ones? We need a law.
Shouldn’t sleds come with bumpers at least as strong as automobiles? I realize vehicle skid control would be against the whole purpose of sledding so maybe all trees on ‘approved’ sledding slopes should have airbags strapped to them.
So we have the softest play surface known to science here (snow), and still we need helmets. Unbelievable.
I find that winter sledding is just too dangerous(all that hard and slippery ice), so every July 4, I treat the nieces/nephews to a day of sledding. Yes, some people think I’m being too cautious, can one ever be too cautious FOR THE CHILDREN?
When I was a kid we all swiped candles (white ones, we didn’t want any dye or other diluents in the wax) to wipe down the sled runners. Every kid with a sled had a white candle stub in his pocket.
I don’t know if it really made a difference, but we were all convinced it made the sleds go like lightning. Had a cop been present with radar, we would certainly have had him clock an unwaxed sled and then the same sled, waxed. And then we would have insituted an ad hoc tournament to see who could score the highest sled speed.
The hill in Manotou Park in Spokane was to us the ultimate sled venue, save for when we Boy Scouts got to do a winter camp on Mount Spokane. Astonishingly high, steep, and long, it was for me the Platonic Ideal of a sledding hill.
Many years later I revisited Spokane, and went to the park, expecting to find that the hill had shrunk with the passage of time. Instead, my reaction was “Damn! I used to sled on THAT monster?!!!?”
Wow, I forgot about that. Yeah, we used to wax the runners, too, sometimes. In Jewish households, you have white candles for the Sabbath. Easy to find. I don’t remember if we asked for them or swiped them.
We sanded and waxed our sled runners and then found the steepest, longest hills to race down. One night, when my sled was broken, I picked up a shattered fragment of one of those snow frisby things (someone else was a little too robust in their sliding), put it under my rump and shot down the hill with absolutely no control whatsoever. It was okay, because there were lots of soft people to crash into when I needed to stop.
I’m going to take this one step further and suggest that we install those liquid styrofoam crash protection devices like Stallone had in his car in Demolition Man. Better yet, pre-wrap children in those cocoons and set them still. Can’t let them roll around because they might get motion sick.