By the way, your parallels all miss the mark.

A loaded gun is inherently dangerous. Making it more safe, denying access, education all make sense, and the more of those things we do the better off we all are in the form of reduced cost and risk exposure.

Fact is guns are designed to kill things. We can only do so much, right?

Now, the inherent danger on a treadmill is different from a gun. Fact is treadmills are not designed to kill things.

That difference matters.

It can be made such that it rejects the danger condition mechanically, while still performing the task in a reasonable, cost effective way.

Fans are similar things. They are not designed to cut things or kill, but they can do that, unless designed to not do that.

Open, metal blade fans look cool, and are quiet, but people can get fingers into them easily.

Fans with fine screens on them reject the fingers, but pass the air. Fans with plastic blades improve things more. Bladeless fans, or flexible blade fans more still, though one can argue they perform a lot worse and may not always make sense.

All of these are primary, passive safety, engineered in to be a basic part of the device in question.

Doing that is the most robust kind of safety too.

No software, just physics applied to minimize harm. Always on.

For a treadmill, guards and paying attention to basic dimensions are primary safety, always on features.

Passive safety is best coupled with education, and it can all be enhanced further with software too.

Say we made a fan with software and sensors that can act quickly enough to stop the fan should people get fingers in the blades.

What happens when the sensor fails, or the software glitches?

Those are secondary safety concerns. Good to have, but not as good as primary safety is. Not always on.

You are talking about education as a safety measure. And you are not wrong to do so.

Others here, myself included, are talking about basic, primary safety, always on.

Education is not always on. Software and other active safety features are not always on.

Guards and basic dimensions being such that the machine rejects things it could do serious harm to are always on.

None of this is imaginary. None of it is trivial either.

It all adds up, and shipping a ton of these machines lacking basic, primary safety features increases the harm in the world, and for what?

A bit more margin, or other minor considerations.

Remember it all adds up.

Take a decade and a well designed machine with robust safety features and this one, and this one will injure or kill more people than the other one will.

That harm will happen because mistakes happen.

We can't undo dead and maimed people either. Talking about blame and shame, shoulda, coulda, woulda still leaves us with unrecoverable harm that was unnecessary.

Harsh world you want to live in!

Better hope you are not tired, or uninformed because in your world nobody gives a fuck whether you and yours live or die, or get hurt.

In the one product safety people work to make reality, people do give a fuck, and consider talking about close calls and minor injuries, when it all could and would have been so much worse, a very nice problem to have.

So, here is how that will all go:

On an A / B test, the safer world wins by a mile.

In that world we admonish the parents, who still have a live kid, and we all carry on thankful what could be done, makes good sense to be done, WAS DONE.

In this world, we admonish the parents, express our condolences and lean hard on these clowns to either step up or get out of the game.

In yours... well? Good luck. I suppose we can tell the parents they can just make another kid.