This thread always comes up sooner or later.
If you lived by the 'What If' rule, you'd never leave the house and would go around in flame retardant, shock retardant bubblewrap.
Yes, nasty shit can happen and does happen. I remember a case of a man's house burning down because a bottle of bleach was knocked over in his cabinet, that dripped onto a bottle of something else that reacted and ignited. The fireman said it was a one in a million occurence. Remember also that barrier that came down on that car killing the driver? Tesco's I think it was. And the wall that fell down and killed that poor child as she was walking past?
But I bet you still keep bottles of bleach in your cabinets next to other bottles of chemicals, I bet you still drive under barriers and I bet you let your children walk past walls.
Yes, we shouldn't take risks, but we each have our own definition of what a risk is. In these situations no-one is wrong and no-one is right.
I'm a liberal, I have left my kids in the car whilst I picked up bread and milk from the shop, I never take them out at the petrol station, I have left dd home alone whilst I picked up ds from nursery, etc etc. Other people are much more paranoid than me and would never dream of doing those things! But that doesn't make me wrong or her wrong. It just means we have different views and different attitudes towards risk-taking. Why can't we just accept this and let people get on with parenting?
Unless it's something very very dangerous, like leaving a child in a locked car on a very hot day for hours, then it's really none of our business what other people do with their lives.