Chances are, you’ve never played a game of lawn darts. That’s because the US Consumer Product Safety Commission voted to ban them in 1988.

Hint: It’s the less dangerous one.

Lawn Darts - the reasoning went - were just too dangerous. Too many children were getting hurt. According to the CPSC release:

“Over a period of eight years, lawn darts had sent 6,100 people to the emergency room. 81% of those cases involved children 15 or younger. “

Wait, where have we seen statistics like that before? Oh, right - The American Journal of Emergency Medicine study evaluating golf injuries in the emergency room. For comparison, that study found golf caused:

  • 31,500 emergency room visits per year
  • Injury rates were highest among individuals 7-17 years old and individuals >54 years old

Lawn darts caused ~700 injuries per year and our government banned them. But somehow golf causes 31,500 emergency room visits per year and no one cares? Statistics like these are why we started our movement.

The campaign to ban lawn darts was started by one man and completed in just over one year (April 1987 - May 1988).

The fact is, banning golf is going to take more work than that. We’re up against the obsessive golf culture in America, and we’ll have to keep fighting for years to achieve our goals. But stories like this give us hope.

We will succeed. We will ban golf.