The thing is, you call the vehicles themselves "treacherous", when they're not any more treacherous than my wife's crappy corolla. They're perfectly fine when operated in a safe fashion, but give a kid the keys or operate it in an unsafe manner, and you're just asking for trouble.
Life itself is treacherous, not some vehicle. ATV deaths amount for just a small fraction of child and young adult fatalities nationwide, because most parents know that it's stupid to let a kid use one unsupervised. That said, even the most talented person, whether they're a child or an adult, will make occasional mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are fatal.
How many adults have you seen run their cars off the road when it's raining or snowing? Do you then call the cars treacherous and curse the salesman who sold it to them? That happens far far far more often than kids killing themselves on ATVs, but somehow the fatal results of bad driving in a regular car is "ok", but fatal results of bad ATV driving is the ATVs fault. That's a load of BS but people get all excited waving their arms around, and it makes them feel better pointing the finger at the evil salesman or the evil ATV manufacturer.
Where is the outrage against the evil automakers for enticing us to buy and drive cars that can go 2 times the legal speed limit? There are around 16,000 fatalities in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR, so why is that OK, but a handful of ATV fatalities involving people who shouldn't have even been driving them is blamed on the ATV instead of the person driving or the person who let them drive?
