Exactly. You don't feel comfortable letting your child roam around when there are news stories like this one. We like to hearken back to the good ol' days and talk of spending every moment running around the neighborhood and walking long distances and hardly being in the house at all. But now kids just have to be watched so close. A parent can't follow them all over yet keeping them too close brings warnings of no exercise and obesity. It's hard.
Stories like this one are why Lurker Jr is already enrolled in a Tae Kwan Do course, has been taught that if someone grabs him he is to fight back with every fiber of his being, kick, scream, bite, scratch, poke, look for any possible weapon, and never, ever let himself be put into a strange vehicle.
He knows how to handled firearms, but since he's not yet 12 and we live in the Peoples Republik of IL letting him have even a small pocket knife is completely out of the question.
It is hard, indeed.
L