![]() I go to bed miserable, and it’s going to happen to other people unless we do something. “Nobody knows what it’s like who hasn’t lost a child. She used to bring me home notes like yours,” he said, gesturing to a child’s crayon drawings on the aide’s bulletin boards. “It’s not me,” he said, his voice rising, as it would so often on this day. He feels compelled to continually remind each person he deals with that he is here on a mission and there can be no compromise. He cannot for a moment accept that he has become part of the give-and-take process. “But you have to do what’s best for you.” Of course, taking lawn darts out of the commission reform bill would weaken that bill because it would rob it of a popular provision, he explained. “What can I do? Can I get somebody to introduce another bill that would just ban lawn darts?” “It’s not going to be out of character,” the aide said. ![]() “These people are going to sit down tomorrow and as far as I’m concerned commit a crime,” Snow said. ![]() It was unconscionable, Snow insisted, for the commission to rely on voluntary compliance when a new survey showed lawn darts still being sold in toy stores. They chatted in a blur of jargon and statistics and criteria. Snow walked into the chill air, caught a cab to Congress and sat down with a Senate subcommittee staff member who had been helpful in the past. But the bill was not moving to the Senate floor, seemingly stalled because of the absence of a key Senate Commerce Committee member, Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), who is off running for President. Thanks to Snow, a provision was added to the bill that would require the commission to ban the lawn dart. When Snow made his first trip to Washington, legislation had already been introduced to restructure the consumer safety commission. The best he could hope for was a motion that in effect accepted a pledge by lawn dart manufacturers to tighten their marketing standards. ![]() A sympathetic consumer protection commission staff member had warned him that two of the three members of the commission were certain to oppose a ban on lawn darts. He called congressional aides, consumer advocates and lawyers, the network of people he has clung to during his makeshift education as a citizen lobbyist. Tuesday morning, the day before the commission’s scheduled hearing, Snow rose in Washington and worked the telephone. The way he saw it, the government had to ban lawn darts now, before more people began buying them for spring and summer recreation. It was then that a hard reality began to close in on David Snow, who had never ventured into the realm of government until Michelle died. The commission, long under fire from consumer advocates and Congress for timidity, held a hearing last October to consider banning the lawn dart but delayed a decision. It also conducted a study that confirmed widespread marketing violations. Under his pressure, the commission last summer revealed that lawn darts had sent nearly 5,000 children to hospital emergency rooms during the last decade. Snow’s well-publicized crusade took off quickly. The warning label on the package was tiny. They had come in a package containing other, safer games. Snow, a 40-year-old aerospace production supervisor, knew nothing of this when a dart thrown by another child sailed into his front lawn last April and embedded itself in Michelle’s brain.
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