Suzy Shuster

Pledge to ask if there is a gun where your kid visits or plays. Pledge to protect your children from harm's way.

Pharmaceuticals are regulated. Pesticides are, as well as food, save the occasional salmonella outbreak. But chemicals and their witch's brew of ingredients continue to augment American industry without anyone quite knowing their makeup and possible toxicity. And that needs to change.

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

In 1976 the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed, sending the EPA on a 30-year-plus odyssey chasing down the chemical industry in a fruitless quest for responsibility.