When my kids were little, they wanted to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for climbing onto the roof of the house and jumping off. My parents stopped me because they knew something that, as a child, I didn’t. I stopped my kids for the same reason. I could foresee the likely results of their actions, and used my own wisdom and experience to stop and discipline them. Had I simply said, “Don’t do that,” and walked away, I guarantee you my children would have eaten the cake anyhow. I would have jumped from the roof again as soon as my parents weren’t watching. Punishment is required to drive that point home.
It’s the same thing as a society. As adults, we have a responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves- children, for example. For that reason, we have laws preventing children from engaging in sexual intercourse with adults. The excuse pedophiles frequently give: “the child was a willing participant” is immaterial. There are consequences to the actions the child is engaging in, and they don’t yet have the maturity to fully understand those consequences, and therefore are incapable of making a fully informed decision of risk versus benefit.
Robert Heinlein stated this principle rather eloquently in his novel Starship Troopers:
duty is an adult virtue—indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents—people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail
How many times have we seen a story about a female (usually a teacher) who had sexual intercourse with a 15 or 16 year old boy, a child? If the teacher happens to be physically attractive, there is always some moron who will come around and say “There was no victim here. Had this woman wanted to sex me up, I would gladly have done so. Therefore, no harm, no foul. There was no victim here.”
However, let that exact situation occur and let the adult teacher be a fat, unattractive woman or a male PE teacher, and those cries disappear, replaced by calls to prosecute. Why? Those people are substituting their own desires to have sex with that teacher for adult responsibility and common sense.
Again, I will regale you with a story from my past. I was once part of a case where a woman was selling her children to adults for the purposes of sexual relations. So, are there victims here? Were the kids harmed? They split the money with their mother, so they probably wanted to, right? Of course not. That woman deserved to lose those kids, and the cops rightfully arrested that woman and her kids. Sometimes, parents don’t make wise decisions in raising their kids.
Our societal responsibility towards children is the reason why we don’t have children working in coal mines any longer. The child doesn’t know any better, so we as a society have put rules in place to protect them until they are old enough to assume that duty we all have as adults. If an adult wants to do any of the above: jump from the roof, have cake for dinner, work in a coal mine, or have sex with attractive teachers, they can do so, because they have the ability to understand the consequences of their choices and will have to live with the consequences.
So let’s apply that principle to the idea of children riding motorcycles. My post from the other day had me being told I sound like a “boomer.” First, I don’t see why so-called boomers and their ideas are automatically bad, except for the immature notion that because they are old, they are somehow out of touch. That is a poor argument and just makes you sound like a spoiled child who is never allowed to do anything because mom and dad just don’t understand that things are different nowadays, and your outdated ideas are stupid. That’s why you don’t believe in the Constitution because it was written by out of touch old men who owned slaves, and …
I was told how wrong I was because there was no victim to a child riding a motorcycle on a road. After all, he was just going down the street to fish. The story of “I ride my lawnmower 4 miles down the road all the time.” Does that mower go 50 miles per hour? Are you 11 years old, or are you an adult who is capable of deciding for yourself?
All sorts of excuses. Let’s just stop enforcing any rules for children. After all, they can and should be permitted to have sex with adults if they want, have chocolate cake of they want, transition sexes if they want, well, you know, DO whatever they want. After all, children aren’t immature, they are just little adults.
Or you could just think to yourself what it would feel like to hold a dead child, or tell a parent that their child was killed when he got in an accident when he hit a car while riding that electric motorcycle at 50 mph.
Then we pass laws that say a child can’t ride vehicles that are designed for roadway use. In order to be considered off road only, it has to meet certain criteria. Some of those are the vehicle can’t be capable of speeds over 28 mph, and in the case of mopeds or electric bikes, they have to have pedals and a few other criteria:
- Riders under 16 must have adult supervision
- an approved safety-course certificate
- wear an approved helmet, eye protection, and over-the-ankle boots.
- Riding must be permitted at that location
- public-road use is generally prohibited, subject to specific exceptions
In order for Cade’s vehicle to be considered legal for him to operate, Florida requires fully operable pedals, a motor of less than 750 watts, and compliance with one of the three e-bike classifications. The reported bike failed both the pedal and power requirements, so it did not receive the e-bike exemption from licensing and registration laws. §§316.003(23), 316.20655(2).
He was riding what the law considers to be a motorcycle on a public roadway. You might as well let him drive a Camaro. However, when that kid makes a driving error and smears himself all over the hood of someone’s F150, I imagine no one here will be saying, “Welp, shit happens. FAFO.”
The police, had they just “given him a warning” would have been wasting their breath. The kid would have rolled his eyes, waited until the cop was out of sight, and gone right back out on that motorcycle. Perhaps this was the case this time. Maybe a cop DID already warn him. Maybe not.
I will die on this hill: There are certain things that we cannot allow children to do. Driving on a motorcycle at 11 years old is not one of them. I would even go a step further and say the parents should be arrested as well, for letting him buy and drive a motorcycle on a public roadway.
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