Product liability for kitchen drawer pulls [closed]

Question

The drawer pulls in our kitchen look like this:

A couple days ago, the cuff of my wife's pants snagged on the bottom drawer pull and she fell hard on her hip. She's going to spend a week in the hospital and a couple weeks in rehab with 3 fractures to her pelvis.

I'm not really interested in hunting down the manufacturer and suing them for a billion bucks. But now that the danger is in front of my face, it seems like this sort of thing could (and probably has) happened a lot. I googled around a bit and there are a good number of complaints about these "bar pulls catching clothes." I didn't find anyone complaining of injury, however.

I think these things are dangerous and I'd like to work on making them go away. A lawsuit against one manufacturer only stops one manufacturer and I think there are probably many. How does one go about getting a product recalled and taken off the market? My wife is 58 years old and exercises, so she'll rebound fairly well. But how many 70-year-old women with osteoporosis wearing loose sweatpants have drawer pulls like this? It could be that a number of hip fractures have been unknowingly caused by these drawer pulls.

So I would like advice on what to do. There are two goals: Informing the public of the danger and removing the danger. What are the paths toward these goals?

Edits: I'm in Texas. I don't "reject" the lawsuit approach, it's just not my motivation. I was hoping that someone more knowledgeable about law things would tell me about various avenues through which I can pursue this. Sure, one avenue is to get one of those billboard/accident lawyers and milk the company for as much as we can shake them down for. There must be other legal paths that aren't so sleazy.

Answer 1

As you ae aware, one possible response would be a product liability suit. I am not at all sure if such a suit would be successful. What a court and jury can be persuaded is an inherently dangerous product does not always agree with what I should describe as dangerous. If you wanted to go that route, you would need to get in touch with a lawyer who deals in such cases. To make such ligation economically feasible, one would have to find many people who had suffered actual injury, I believe, and sue as a class.

However, that would not necessarily result in a recall, nor in regulation prohibiting such pulls.

One might, in the US reach out to the federal OSHA who regulate workplace safety. One might approach non-governmental consumer organizations, such as Consumer's Union. One might create a website on the topic, and attempt to form a limited-purpose organization of one's own. One might talk to a member of Congress who could better asses the chance of passing new laws governing such pulls. It is hard to say if any of these approaches would bear fruit, but each would be possible.