>> Children drowning is tragic, but this is nanny-state stuff. Are we to wrap literally any pond, lake, stream, fountain, etc. with a four-foot tall fence, because children exist? Imagine Central Park, but with the ponds surrounded by chain-link fences -- now that I think about it, I'm sort of amazed that New York City (where every other building is perpetually surrounded by ugly and useless scaffolding because one person died from falling bricks once) hasn't actually done this.

Sorry if I'm being too literal here but are you saying that, for half of the houses in New York, it's true that someone died because a brick fell on their head from that house?

Half of all the houses? That sounds like a real problem that should be fixed somehow.

No, there are scaffoldings everywhere in NYC because of a law that was passed in response to a single [1] death from a falling brick.

[1] there might have been two, but they were separated by years, if not decades. It wasn't a common occurrence.