Senator Fun Hater Klobuchar
Oh look, unintended consequences of being a nannystate Senator. See how Senator Klobuchar’s desire to politicize tragedy and create one size fits all legislation done hastily and ends up restricting freedoms.
Democratic Sen. Jon Tester’s father used a horse to get around his 1,100-acre Montana farm. When Jon got older, he sold the horse and bought a motorcycle.
Now, Montana’s junior senator is trying to help keep the young citizens of Montana riding. At the start of this Congress, Tester reintroduced legislation dubbed ”the dirt bike bill” that makes it possible for retailers to sell motorized vehicles (dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles) properly sized for children as young as six.
Why can’t 6 year olds ride dirt bikes you may ask?
If you thought it had something to do with the inherent danger of zipping around on what is essentially a small Harley Davidson, you’d be wrong. Instead, it has to do with lead. In 2008, the passage of the Consumer Product Safety Act made it illegal for children’s toys to contain more than a specified amount of lead.
Concern over lead in children’s toys came to a head in 2006 when a 4-year-old boy named Jarnell Brown of Minneapolis died after swallowing a heart-shaped charm bracelet made by Reebok. The charm, which came free in a box of shoes, turned out to be made almost entirely of the heavy metal, and Brown died of lead poisoning.
As part of subsequent toy-safety legislation, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., added a provision that would ban the metal from children’s toys. The bill has led to the recall of an array of toys including dinosaur play sets, body boards, fishing poles, animal masks, and dolls.
As far as the bill was concerned, if children were going to ride dirt bikes, they had to adhere to the same set of regulations as Barbie dolls. And children’s dirt bikes and ATVs had enough lead in their brake parts, battery terminals, and other internal components to keep them off the market. To Tester, this wasn’t horse sense; it was horse’s ass sense.
That last line seem quit fitting to describe the nannystate Amy Klobuchar adores so much.
Don’t forget that Minnesota also shares the love of ATVs as well as has a role in the manufacturing of them.









