> you’re saying if the failsafe fails someone might die (presumably not common event), yet without the failsafe many people are assured to die (apparently a com

> you’re saying if the failsafe fails someone might die (presumably not common event), yet without the failsafe many people are assured to die (apparently a common enough event), so therefore we shouldn’t have the failsafe? No, he's saying that the failsafe adds no value for the vast majority of generator users, because they take responsibility for their own actions and their consequences and learn how to properly use their portable generators. So requiring the failsafe by regulation is punishing all of the responsible adults because of a few irresponsible people. That doesn't make sense. The people who should suffer the consequences of being irresponsible are the people who are irresponsible, not everybody else. > apparently a common enough event 1300 deaths and 77,000 injuries--over 17 years. That's not common at all; it's miniscule. From what I can gather, about 10% of households have portable generators. That's 30 million of them in the US alone. In the same period of time, roughly 510,000 people in the US died in traffic accidents (roughly 30,000 a year times 17 years). And that's even after decades of government regulations imposing safety features on vehicles. So not only is regulation like this unfair and nonsensical, it doesn't even work. People who insist on being irresponsible will find a way to do it no matter what regulations you impose. The rest of us should not have to suffer the burden of ever-increasing regulations that don't even work. > for each of those “not smart going to run a generator” that doesn’t kill their entire family, there will be at least someone who got a good bargain on the feature by not killing everyone in their house This kind of reasoning does not justify a government regulation. It only counts the benefit to the miniscule number of people who can't be responsible on their own. It doesn't count the cost, both in the ever-increasing burden of regulations we all have to deal with, and the ever-increasing power we are forced to give the government on such grounds, which then gets misused in more and more ways.