Self Defense and Implacable Neglect

We do not, as a society, wish to sit in moral judgement upon others. And when others suffer dreadful calamities leading to loss of precious human lives where family members sit in stunned mourning at the loss of loved ones, no one in society takes it upon themselves to point out how avoidable those deaths are.

When news reportage reveals just how casually those who should be involved in securing the safety of those closest to them, it's as a good a time as any to remind people of their responsibilities. In the case of fire consuming a household and taking with it the lives of children, all too often it is discovered that the simplest method to protect that family has been ignored.

The purchase and installation of an inexpensive, common commodity like a smoke detector can work wonders in alerting residents to the danger they are in when fire breaks out. Yet family after family suffers the agony of lost lives because of failure to provide this most useful tool in alerting people how they may escape from harm.

Parents who simply ignore the continued pleas of civil authorities to install smoke detectors are actually guilty of failing to provide the necessities of life to their vulnerable children. It takes very little time and disposable income to install a detector and speak with children, to lay out an escape plan in the event of fire.

Children are exposed to the topic at their elementary school, where mock exercises in evacuation are carried out. This is the school administration carrying out its responsibility to its day-time charges should the school building become involved with a fire situation. The children are taught how to respond, calmly, and with safety in mind.

Those same children may go home oblivious to the fact that their parents have failed to provide warning of impending danger in the case of a fire. They likely do not feel any loss of confidence in their parents, since most children instinctively believe their parents will protect and shield them from harm.

The Ottawa area has just recently seen a funeral for a young mother and her three very young children, dead as a result of a home fire. It was discovered by the responding firemen that the home's smoke alarm had no working batteries rendering it utterly useless.

Worse, one supposes, was the fact that the two-story house the family lived in, had only a front entrance and none other. The home likely did not accord to current building codes. Since the fire began on the porch consuming the front of the house there was no rear or side exit, only windows, one from which the father leaped with a young son who later died of his trauma.

The extended family of those who died in the Alexandria fire are in mourning. The father, who suffered grave burns and is being treated in hospital, will eventually be released to resume his life. It will certainly be a far different life than he has known up until the present, with the absence of his partner and their three children.

Perhaps our fire and police departments, those whom we call upon in such desperate situations as house fires to render assistance, and who view the tragedies that unfold through human careless, should take the issue of violations of the law with respect to ignoring the need to install and maintain smoke alarms far more seriously. These simple-minded lapses of judgement should be fined, heavily.

Better to proceed with fining people to the extent that the law permits, if they disregard the need to protect themselves and their families, than deal with these ongoing and unnecessary tragedies.