His client the next day could be a fast-food CEO trying to deal with an E. coli outbreak. Sandman has reduced his expertise to a tidy equation: Risk = hazard + outrage. For the CEO with the bad hamburger meat, Sandman engages in "outrage reduction"; for the environmentalists, its "outrage increase." Note that Sandman addresses the outrage but not the hazard itself. He concedes that outrage and hazard do not carry equal weight in his risk equation. "When hazard is high and outrage is low, people un- derreact," he says. "And when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact." So why is a swimming pool less frightening than a gun? The thought of a child being shot through the chest with a neighbors gun is gruesome, dramatic, horrifying-in a word, outrageous. Swim- ming pools do not inspire outrage. This is due in part to the familiar- ity factor. Just as most people spend more time in cars than in airplanes, most of us have a lot more experience swimming in pools than shooting guns. But it takes only about thirty seconds for a child to drown, and it often happens noiselessly. An infant can drown in water as shallow as a few inches. The steps to prevent drowning, meanwhile, are pretty straightforward: a watchful adult, a fence around the pool, a locked back door so a toddler doesnt slip outside unnoticed. If every parent followed these precautions, the lives of perhaps four hundred young children could be saved each year. That would out- number the lives saved by two of the most widely promoted inven- tions in recent memory: safer cribs and child car seats. The data show that car seats are, at best, nominally helpful. It is certainly safer to keep a child in the rear seat than sitting on a lap in the front seat, where in the event of an accident he essentially becomes a projectile.     But the safety to be gained here is from preventing the kids from rid- ing shotgun, not from strapping them into a $200 car seat. Neverthe-