The Yakima City Council meets tonight to talk about pit bulls one last time. I hope to present this.

Pit Bulls area public safety issue.  It took a deadly tragedy to put the original Pit Bull ban in place, our community learned a terrible lesson and the ban was instituted to protect innocent members of the public from future attacks..

Reducing speed in a school zone is also a public safety issue too.

We ask people to slow down in a school zone,  why? Because of the potential of a vehicle striking a child is horrific enough for society to impose restrictions of the conduct of innocent drivers.  Are their parallels?

We have a school zone law but not everyone obeys it, does that mean we should do away with the it -well maybe we should.

Doesn't the the law give us a false sense of security that no-one will ever speed in a school zone?   WE KNOW THEY DO...

And after all, people have places to go, things to do, time is money and time is tight,   AND most people have driven for years and never struck a child in a school zone .they may not even know one someone who has. Why shouldn't they be able to zip through school zone..you know, if they're careful.

Afterall, it not the vehicle, it's the driver...right   All vehicles can generate horrible accidents, ...so its the driver and what's important  is how the driver was raised, trained and socialized.  Not all drivers are prone to carelessly speed around kids.  They don't need reduced speed zones.  Why punish the careful fast drivers for the bad behavior of the careless fast drivers in school zones.

I mean IF there is an accident and that's a big if but IF there is one, then, once we clean up the intersection and send the injured to the hospital with our best wishes for a full recovery, well THEN we can apply all kinds of future preventative action. After the accident The driver can lose his license--for awhile, maybe he'll have to keep his car in a garage, after the accident maybe the cars accelerator cable will be snipped and tied back, after the accident, the insurance may go up...surely all those "after accident actions" will be a comfort to the family who child was inured or killed, won't it?

No one knows when a kid will leap into traffic and not look, no one knows when a ball will bounce into the street followed by an excited but inattentive boy or girl.  We can't predict their behavior, but we do know the potential, we have a track record of destruction, we know what CAN happen when when car meets kid and that potential damage is enough for our responsible elected public safety guardians to take preventative action and require all drivers, even the responsible drivers, to slow down for accident prevention ---- for public safety.

The pit bull ban is about public safety, 30 years of putting the greater community good above individual and personal desires.  What has changed?  Will the community be safer without the ban?

Pit bulls killed a 2 year old toddler in Philadelphia last week...five years short of walking to his his first school zone.  But its not the potential of the dog, It's the owner.

So If you are going to vote to lift the ban, why not vote to roll back the school zone reduced speed limit too.  If this council is going to cash in 30 years of success and roll the dice with our community's safety, let's get our money's worth.

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