...The fact it has happened before should have put Catherine and William on notice of what can potentially happen regardless of where they were at the time.
I always thought Catherine was an intelligent young woman. Given this has happened before, I would call it an error of judgement on her part and that of William.
I can understand your reasoning.
For me, it comes down to the tree climbing analogy I used in another post. Kids falls from trees all the time. Some are injured. Some even die. So, using your reasoning, if I let my child climb a tree and something happens, then I have made an error in judgement and must accept partial blame.
If nothing happens, I am just a good mom who doesn't have over-protection problems.
Riding a bus, getting on a plane, driving a car ... these are all the same. Using that same reasoning, Princess Grace showed poor judgement when she decided to drive her car. Certainly there have been car accidents before.
While I respect your opinion and can see the logic used to arrive at it, I still believe this is a form, albeit very mild and genteel, of blaming the victim.
Based upon the logic, Catherine and William need to cloister themselves or else anything that happens to them will, logically, be the result of poor judgement because as Ecclesiastes says, "there is nothing new under the sun" so every bad thing has a chance of repeating itself and has already happened at least once.
An extreme rebuttal, I know, and I do not mean to seem strident, but I do believe strongly that this opinion, however reasonably held, is part of the problem. Somehow, somewhere, we have become a society that believes, at some level, that most victims could have prevented their own injuries. I reject that solely on principle because it means, ipso facto, that I accept the way things are in this regard - and I most certainly do not.
You made a good argument. Always a pleasure talking with smart people