Authorities in Merced County, Calif., say no charges are expected to be filed after a two-year-old boy died from drinking cleaning fluid.
Authorities tell the Merced Sun-Star that the child’s grandmother gave the boy what she thought was a bottle of water to drink Friday afternoon. The boy had become thirsty while playing at his grandparents’ shop and the grandmother found the bottle on the floorboard of her husband’s truck.
But the bottle actually contained solution used to clean aluminum rims.
Now working in a lab, there is a OSHA rule that any bottle in the lab MUST be labeled with its contents. If you fill a bottle with water you need to put a label on it that says “H2O”, I’ve never written “Tap Water” because I’ve never felt the need to keep it around, so generally my “H2O” labels also contain “Distilled” or “Sterile” etc. I’ll also note that on one of the boats I worked on there was a Gatoraid bottle bouncing around in a bin for days filled with red liquid. Looked like punch Gatoraid…then one day the boat lost steering, and the captain refilled the steering line with the red liquid. Turns out it was transmission oil, not Gatoraid. Lesson learned.
Also on a similar note, growing up in Maine it wasn’t uncommon for there to be guns in plain sight, such as shotguns or rifles hanging on the wall, or pistols tucked in cabinets. Not sure if they were loaded, it didn’t matter, they were guns, all kids knew they were real, and we knew they weren’t to be touched without adult supervision and permission. No locks, no disassembly, no “Safe Storage” nonsense. The only gun safety needed was educating kids that guns are dangerous and they only get to be handled by adults or with adult supervision. They weren’t stored in Toy Boxes with other toys like some anti-rights studies did.
Oddly enough this can all be solved with REAL common sense. Don’t put dangerous chemicals into a bottle labeled for safe chemicals. Don’t trust opened containers. Hell don’t give a kid an opened water bottle, period, as even a bottle containing spring water could be filled with dangerous bacteria if left open for a long period of time in a warm environment!
In the end there are things more dangerous than guns, but I guess we only need to focus on “Gun Death”.
