[NOTE: The following essay is by my son Tyler, a Boston trial attorney, Harvard graduate, member of Erie Chapman Foundation Board, husband and father of three. His subject touches our health & safety & is appropriate for Memorial Day.]

“Jarts,” or lawn darts with sharp metal tips, have been banned in the US since 1988. People sometimes post pictures of Jarts (something so obviously dangerous as to be comical) under captions about how “we survived the 70’s.” We think we were lucky to survive such unregulated dangers. 

Question: How many children were killed by metal-tip lawn darts before they were banned?
Answer: One.

The father of that one victim – 7-year-old Michelle Snow – advocated so effectively for the outright ban of lawn darts that they became illegal only 18 months after Michelle’s death. 

Lawn darts are not guns. Guns are thousands of times worse. There was no “National Jarts Association,” either, to block progress.

I never worried once about mass school shootings as a kid in the 70’s. That’s because there were none – not a single mass murder of children in a primary or secondary school in the entire decade of the 1970’s.

Today my 7-year-old daughter is having an active shooter drill at her school.

-Tyler Chapman, M.Ed., J.D.