"We know what the world is like when most people don't learn how to swim, because this was the case just a little more than a century ago - and the result was a lot of deaths due to drowning."

Ah, but this was before the State had expanded rapidly enough to fence-in all lakes and ponds and keep out all non-professionals. If they can do that with Federal lands allocated to the military.....

And if they treated all bodies of water on private property under "attractive nuisance" laws where they weren't sufficiently patrolled; then they could use similarly draconian laws ( like the statutory rape ones ) to treat all accidental drowning as a "lure and murder" case. Just a few such prosecutions would send a clear cut message to either keep civilians away or to accept full responsibility for the actions leading to drowning.

Of course all this is moot when the full force of the Fed patrolling one small body of water cannot prevent thousands from trespassing on it ( the Rio Grande. ) Similarly the Prohibitionists couldn't patrol the Great Lakes.

But agreed that if we treated child drownings as we do sexual misadventures, then swimming instructions would be administered by agents of the State in civic pools, private pools would be prohibited and swimming for recreational purposes would be outlawed.

Dante