The cat is out of the bag with cellphones. Kids want cellphones. Parents want kids to have cellphones because when they go to school they want their kids to be able to contact them at all times.
Cellphones are like computers. You can’t live with them and you can’t live live without them.
Though personally I really can’t stand them.
Kids want drugs too. You gonna give them drugs?
There are phones at school.
I get along fine without a mobile phone. Believe it or not, I can actually go out for a few hours somewhere without having phone calls I desperately need to make or receive that simply cannot wait, I'm not so important that I MUST be reachable by the world 24/7, and kids actually learn better and grow up smarter if they don't have their face in and their mind on games, social media and internet websites day and night and are forced to learn, remember, figure out and solve things much less plan for life events as mankind did for 200,000 years without expecting to have the answer to every little thing handed to them at the tap of a button instead.
In the past, kids have used their phones when faced with trouble to get adult help.
So let's see, a solder comes back from combat in the middle-east. He's seen things that most people have never seen, and is going to experience it for the rest of his life. But because he's in Vermont, he can't use a cell phone because his mind isn't mature enough to use one according to this state Senator. And he has to ask somebody over 21 years old to buy him a pack of cigarettes and a 12 pack of Miller beer.
I favor 18 as the across-the-board age of adulthood.
A phone itself is fine. My interest would be in removing children's ability to access social media and to freely navigate the internet. It's seriously ******* up their heads.
They do that at home, at the library, maybe in school. I don't think it's governments place to tell our children how to behave and what legal activity they are allowed to be involved in. If parents do it, that's their business.
However the bill restricts not only usage of any cell phone feature, but the possession of one as well. That means if your child is in serious need of help, under this proposal, they would have no access to help. It could be somebody stalking them, kidnapping them and being placed in the trunk of a car, an injury that prevents them from movement. It could be a number of things.
And if you defy the law, and your child is caught with a cell phone, do you want to see them go to jail for a year because they had one?
I totally get what your saying Ray, but at the same time, I somehow grew up living a pretty wild and crazy life while amazingly managing to avoid all of that and / or learning how to deal with life by eliminating, preventing, minimizing or anticipating bad situations and planning for them. Basically, it sounds like people today simply live in great fear of life (this is true!) and maybe we really need to start implanting all people with a locator chip at birth under the skin that not only tracks us, but in case of emergency, we can push on it and send out an panic signal so that the authorities can send out a SWAT team to save us.
Seriously, I belong to a "neighborhood blog" where people share tips, help, etc., and you'd be amazed the things people post. One person posted that a car stopped on her street one night and was just sitting there. How she even noticed this I cannot say, but she got on there reporting it asking if anyone else had seen the car or cars like it very concerned that the neighborhood was being cased.
Meantime, it was probably someone lost getting directions or maybe had a gumball roll under his seat.