There is no excuse for leaving a cord hanging.. They make these pipe things that secure them to the wall. It is a rounded bit with a lip on each side and they install very easily with or without dry wall screw. I used them when I used baby monitors for my first 4.. I am not a baby proof everything kind of person but a sleeping baby rolls, he'll so does one who is just in his crib, if there is a cord he can grasp or even just get caught on it's a very real danger.

Coarse I don't need the monitors anymore as the baby is never by himself..

There is no excuse for ANYTHING within reach of a crib. I was watching one of those home improvement shows, and they placed a potted ficus behind the crib, which they'd placed diagonally across a corner of the room. Stupid. First thing the baby would do is eat those leaves and quite possibly choke.

One of mine nearly choked to death on a bolt she'd pulled from her crib. Thank god, her older sister was sleeping on her floor, as punishment, and alerted us. We tighten the bolts frequently now.

her older sister was sleeping on her floor, as punishment

WTF?

A warning label! Yeah, that'll do the trick. The babies will read the warning label and realize that strangling themselves on the cords is a bad idea. Problem solved! Thanks, CPSC!

I'll see your recall and raise you an outright banning: over a period of ten years, 32 children nationwide died in broken or improperly assembled drop-side cribs. One of the families was friends with Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from NY, and now it's a federal crime to sell or donate drop-side cribs. New or used.

To put that number in perspective, about 30 infants (mostly black, mostly poor) are smothered to death in Milwaukee alone every year when their mothers put them to sleep in adult beds or sofas. But hey, as long as one rich family in Manhattan can have their guilt over their own carelessness ameliorated, who cares about the poor children in the rest of the country? Certainly not nanny-state, anti-business Democrats.

Eventually we're going to run out of things for them to ban, and then what are they going to do to pander?

Anybody remember the Battlestar Galactica toys? Some kid(s) decided to shoot the little plastic missiles down their own throats, and the rest of the country was punished by a massive recall and redesign, so the missiles didn't actually fire, just pop out about a quarter inch. Not that that stopped the truly stupid, who likely broke them off so they could check if they were candy.

It even spread to the Star Wars line, when they had to hastily redesign the mail-in Boba Fett figure so his backpack wouldn't shoot anymore. It took YEARS for any toys to have firing missiles again.

Needless to say, the firing version of these items are an order of magnitude more sought-after than the safe ones.

I bought a reading lamp last year, and there were six (!) warning labels on the cord. I didn't bother to read them, I just cut them off. But I'd bet one of them said not to use the lamp in the bathtub.

Ray, since you need details, older sis and her twin shared a room, were up jumping around past bedtime, so one had to move to a pallet on the baby's room floor. The consequence of not staying in bed after lights out.

Many terrible things happen in life but we can't put a warning label on everything. My son had an accident with a glass table top at his grandparent's house when he was younger. Should I lobby lawmakers to put warning labels on glass? I remember days of visiting my grandparents' homes where everything was glass and little knicknacks all over. Should that be illegal? Sometimes bad things happen despite all you can do to child proof. Cords should never be within reach of sleeping babies. We should all know that but somehow a baby on occasion strangles on a cord. How is that the fault of a manufacturere? I may go into business and start building bubbles because pretty soon every kid in America will need one.

Thanks momof4. That makes more sense.

You can't fix stupid, regardless of the number of warning labels that are attached to a product.

I never used a baby monitor. I could hear the girls just fine if they needed me, they've got some good lungs in 'em! I think 50% of things people buy to use for their babies are just money makers for people who have learned they can make a boatload of money pandering to new parents. Things like a baby-wipes warmer? http://www.amazon.com/Prince-Lionheart-Ultimate-Wipes-Warmer/dp/B00008ODBG
Never needed one, I just grabbed a wipe, held it between both hands for a second, and wiped their little tushes with it! Just reading some of the reviews about it makes me understand now why we're becoming a nation of wusses.

It's been said that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity of the American consumer.

Are these, perhaps, cases where common sense should have prevailed?

Are you asking: Is water wet? Do most birds fly? Do fish swim?

And the most important -- why do some 30 deaths cause a company to have to have a recall that all they are doing is sending out stickers to prior purchasers.

Per infoplease in 2005 4,138,349 children were born. Lets just round it down 4M for the sake of argument. And then multiply by 10 the number of cord strangulation incidents. (We all know not every gets reported.)

That comes out to

(300/ 4,000,000) * 100 = 0.0075%

When does government and intelligence ever go together?

And talk about finding it hard to enforce consequences after that, since her monkeying around that night saved her baby sister's life.

I'm going off-tangent here -- but the one that bothers me in the post-Tuscon shooting. The call for the limitation on magazine capacities, etc. does not solve the issue.

A criminal with a gun can and will kill you regardless of all the laws for a six round magazine, or a seven round or fifteen round.

Is the criminal going to observe the gun laws. that is the argument that always is overlooked.

It isn't the item, its the person on either end.