Rotating the bars... now why didn't I think of that. My son can reach the footpegs, but has to slide forward a bit, and I've had some concerns about tip-over bars making it more difficult for him to reach the pegs. While you can't do it with the MCL peg lowering kit, there are some more expensive one you can flip and raise the pegs, but that brings the pegs even closer to the tip-over bars. This kills two birds with one stone, as it were.
I do have a couple of concerns however. By flipping the tip-over bars mounting them horizontally rather than vertically, you are shifting the contact-with-ground point a few inches lower and I wonder how this would affect the balance when tipped... i.e. would the bike have more of a tendency to want to roll or flip over the bars and put the wheels into the air. I would hope that a few inches wouldn't make that much of a difference. Also, part of the strength of the tip-over bars comes from orientation... when mounted correctly, vertically, the top of the bars acts as a supporting member for the bottom of the bar and greatly reduces the chance that the bars will bend up towards the seat. However, mounted in the horizontal positions, it seems more plausible that the bars might bend or you might break a weld as the force of the weight of the bike is aplied directly to the weld.
Has anyone with bars mounted this way had a tip-over? If so, did you bend the bars or crack/break a weld? How severe was the tip-over?