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General Climbing Discussion

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Extreme sports and kids... 22-May-2015 At 4:11:37 PM Snacks

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"And just how useful have they been sitting in the background? Have they stopped anyone doing stupid shit?"

Yes. All the time... they're a formal way of 'enforcing' and promoting the common sense you speak of.

The example Patto provided demonstrates that if someone misrepresents themselves as an experienced person and this goes bad then it can have follow on consequences for that person... which I personally think is reasonable, and you do not, but if that's your unrelenting opinion then fair enough.

...

"I'm sure that person wasn't thinking, gee, there's no way I could be sued for negligence so I'll just leave this guy hanging and bugger off, it won't matter if he falls and I don't really care if he dies. He's thinking that it's perfectly fine to do so, otherwise, he would think, f**k I could kill my friend if I did this and that would be bad."

Yes. That is also a good reason for the person to pay attention... as is an actual consequence that affects them from doing something careless...

But take the Perp story to the extreme and consider someone who DELIBERATELY left his friend hanging there with the partial intent of him falling...

You're saying that he could just claim it was an accident and the charge of involuntary manslaughter could be easily dodged by simply claiming "Oh sorry, I'm a recreational climber and I'm exempt from such laws."

The next Ivan Milat would be queuing up at Point Perp to offer everyone top belays if you had it your way...

Trying to explain a different way Wendy without a ludicrous Milat example...

Situations where it is ambiguous as to whether a situation was accidental/deliberate and it has resulted in a fatality or some other major outcome will be scrutinized heavily... And I really don't see the problem with that.

As far as educating people goes on how to climb properly... no. These cases and their outcomes just raise awareness. It's a sad reality that it often takes a death with punishment laid for preventative action to be taken seriously. As it is and has been in many workplace industries...

EDIT: A while ago I was curious about this stuff and asked a couple of mates that are NSW Prosecutors and they explained some of the above to me and yeah, it may seem ridiculous and overkill... but when it is your relative that has died from someone else's screw up then you'd like to think the law will do something to balance the scales...