I am sorry if I seem to be arguing with you Red, that is really not my intention.

We live in a world of idiots and morons.

It is easy to get upset with the rest of them, but often enough we find ourselves being one of the idiots and morons too.

Editorialists like the one who wrote the original newspaper article make it worse by stirring up our moral indignation and getting us attacking each other instead of working out good solutions.

And Education doesn't seem to work, or at least it only works to some degree.
If you look at a lot of these cases they deliberately ignored warning signs, even moving barricades out of their way to place themselves in danger.
These are the "It is easier to get forgiveness than get permission!" type of people.

As I said before, you can't cure stupid.
It is part of the nature of the human herd.

And billing them for their own rescue often just results in extra costs like lawyer's fees because they simply don't pay the judgments.

I think they should be charged,
but they should be charged with reckless endangerment and attempted suicide or something like that which earns them jail time instead of just billed for a few dollars (that they often walk away from paying anyhow).
Maybe we should make them wear a sign saying "I am an idiot!" for a year too.

Now if we just accepted the actual SAR costs as a minor cost of doing business for the recreation industry, and funded it like we should it would be a much better solution than trying to bill the victims of their own idiocy.