RALEIGH
The sponsor of a bill to forbid use of all-terrain vehicles by children under 12 pulled the bill from the N.C. Senate floor yesterday after complaints from hunters, farmers and tracks where youngsters race ATVs.
But the mother and grandmother of a Wilkes County 2-year-old who was killed this month in an ATV accident said yesterday that no one under 16 should ride the vehicles.
"I don't want anybody else to lose their baby and have to go through what I'm going through," said Christina Carver, the mother of Analyss Marie Carver. "That was my baby, and I've lost her and I can't have her back."
Analyss was killed and her 5-year-old brother received a concussion on April 17 when she pushed the accelerator on a full-size ATV that a 9-year-old had just dismounted. The vehicle slammed into a wall.
"She didn't know how to push it and make it go slow or go fast, and it just went all the way," Christina Carver said.
Though the 9-year-old was a family friend who regularly rode an ATV, Carver said, no one under 16 should be allowed to use the vehicles. "I do not believe they have the mental ability to know whether they should or shouldn't cut it off," she said. "Children just don't have that judgment.... Anything can happen in a split second."
Analyss's grandmother, Diane Gentry, echoed her daughter's words.
"I do not think anyone under the age of 16 should be allowed to operate them. They are dangerous in the hands of anyone not capable of making such a decision," Gentry wrote in an e-mail message to the Winston-Salem Journal.
"And it seems like some parents are not capable of making the same decision either, so the law should step in and make that decision for them," she wrote.
Though pediatricians and emergency-room physicians say that no one under 16 should ride ATVs, the industry says that riders as young as 6 can safely ride vehicles sized for youngsters.
A bill in the Senate compromises by banning the use of ATVs by children under 12. It would require all riders to complete a safety course and wear helmets. And it would ban the use of ATVs on public roads and rights of way.
But the sponsor, Sen. William Purcell, D-Scotland, pulled the bill from the floor before it could be debated yesterday. Purcell said he was responding to complaints from hunters who use ATVs to reach deer stands and duck blinds, farmers who use them to take feed to animals, and a racing circuit with tracks in Elizabeth City and East Bend where young riders race ATVs.
"We may be exempting a few areas," Purcell said.
The restrictions on ATV use would be the first regulation of the vehicles in North Carolina. Purcell, a retired pediatrician, noted that states with safety regulations have half of the death rates among child ATV riders than states without regulations.
Purcell acknowledged that it might be difficult for deputies and other law-enforcement officers to enforce the proposed rules, especially on private property. "It is very difficult to police this," he said.
But he pointed to the state's success with laws on children's safety seats and the reduction in deaths of 16-year-olds that resulted after the state adopted graduated driver's licenses.
"I think there are law-abiding people out there. Once you pass a law, most people will abide by it," he said.
A study published last year in the journal Pediatrics compared ATV injuries and deaths among child ATV riders in North Carolina to those in Pennslyvania, which has regulated ATV use since 1985. Pennsylvania does not allow children under 10 to ride ATVs on public land or recreation areas and requires riders under 16 to pass a safety course. All riders must wear helmets.
"Living in Pennsylvania was associated with decreased risk factors for ATV injury, such as young age and riding unhelmeted," the researchers at UNC Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan concluded.
In 2002, the study said, children under 16 accounted for 33 percent of ATV-related deaths and 37 percent of ATV-related injuries reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Children under 12 accounted for 10 percent of the deaths.
But the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission recommended this year that the commission not adopt a ban on sale of ATVs for children because it would be too hard to enforce.
The safety commission "cannot control the behavior of consumers or prevent adults from allowing children to ride adult-sized ATVs," the report said.
