A little neighbor girl disappeared when I was about 8 or 10, and a good part of our Indiana farm town turned out to look for her. It was one for all and all for one in the village of Mount Summit, where pretty much every person knew every child on sight. No description required.

The drama continued for a while, until somebody thought to search the closets of the Johnsons' house. Jennifer was safe and sound asleep in one of them.

This was around 1960, a time at least perceived as more innocent. A missing child was cause for the kind of alarm that roused the neighbors, not necessarily the police. I don't remember Jennifer's frantic parents calling the sheriff, although I suppose they would have gotten around to it if she hadn't turned up so soon.

Crime was not so much on our minds then. I might head out on my bicycle early in the morning, check in at lunch and dinner, and be out who-knows-where until long after dark in a town that, while tiny, was cut two ways by busy highways.

Did anybody pause to consider how ripe I was for abduction, and how many hours I could be gone before anybody noticed? I don't think so. And, compared with many of my friends, I had a hovering mother.

So how long would I need to have been gone before my mom would be prosecuted for not calling the cops? Odd as the question might sound, some lawmakers in Illinois — including Rep. Dwight Kay, R-Glen Carbon — are proposing a legal deadline: 24 hours.

The sponsors are among leaders in several states motivated by the case of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony, missing in Florida for about 30 days in 2008 before her mother, Casey Anthony, claimed a nanny made off with the girl. Cops decided the nanny never existed and charged the mother with murder even before the child's body was found.

A jury decided in July that Casey Anthony was not guilty of murder, an outcome that many people found incredible and that raised the question of why an innocent mother would wait a month to report her child was missing. (At trial, the defense claimed, but offered no evidence, that what she really hid was knowledge of her daughter's accidental death.)

In any event, those circumstances were widely considered an outrage, and an outrage surely demands some kind of action.

Hence, Illinois House Bill 3800, which would make it a felony to fail to call law enforcement if a child under age 13 in your care is missing more than 24 hours.

You're probably asking yourself right about now what kind of parent — Casey Anthony notwithstanding — would need to be compelled by fear of prison to do such an obvious thing.

I also wonder about that, and whether a law would make any difference.

The most common killers of children are the victims' parents. It's awful, but that's the way things are. If the parent is responsible for the disappearance, what difference will the law make? In such a case, the circumstances reported to police — including the time given for the disappearance — will certainly be self-serving.

But if it is a real kidnapping, 24 hours would be way too long. Studies show that the vast majority of children taken by strangers and killed are dead within the first day.

Besides, Illinois already makes it a felony to lose track of a child under 13 in your care for more than 24 hours.

The reporting requirement might even do some harm.

Consider an instance in which a parent decides on Thursday to tell police that nobody has seen Junior since Tuesday. Oops. A friend points out that such a reporting delay is a Class 4 felony. That could mean prison time. So the police get told that Junior disappeared on Wednesday, a lie that could doom the whole investigation.

Admittedly, this would not be a very good parent. But the legislation is, by its nature, aimed at not-very-good parents.

The bill looks like an example of a laudable intent that fails to heed a salient warning provided by humorist Will Rogers almost 80 years ago: "You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people."