Transportation
What We Can Do About Kids Killed by Cars
In the 1970s, the Dutch launched an effort to "stop the child murder" by drivers. Could the U.S. do the same?
It’s a biological imperative: We respond more emotionally to the deaths of children than we do to the deaths of middle-aged or old people. When kids lose their lives in preventable ways, whether from disease or violence, it makes us mad. And sometimes, it makes us do something.
In the 1940s and ‘50s, polio epidemics in the United States paralyzed and killed thousands of children, galvanizing research and later implementation of a vaccination protocol on an unprecedented scale. More recently, it was the sight of the bodies of children killed by chemical weapons in Syria that spurred a fresh round of international pressure to intervene. The massacre of first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 reignited the national debate over guns.