I recently moved to the St. Louis area for a software job at Boeing. I'm actually in a nice quiet neighborhood in St. Charles right under the flight path for planes landing at Lambert Field.
The fireworks last night were insane. All around me folks were setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking, my dogs were freaking out, one of them had a seizure. The air was filled with smoke and smelled of gun powder. It was one of the craziest things I've ever experienced.
Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.
I don't know what the planes were doing; I didn't hear or see any landing with all the smoke and noise.
40-50 years ago, fireworks were largely unregulated across the US and were a major part of the 4th of July cultural experience. Dangerous, slightly reckless, and incredibly fun. I have fond memories of this as a child. It is a big part of American culture, like turkey on Thanksgiving.
Every country has rules that exist but which are culturally unenforceable. Today, fireworks are outlawed in much of the US because safety. Americans refuse to comply across such a broad cross-section of people that it is effectively unenforceable. The cultural contradiction is too strong, people won’t give up their traditions for mere safety reasons. Even the nominal enforcers don’t believe in it. No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
This may be unsatisfying for many people but the impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans in the US captures an important component of the American zeitgeist. It is annoying for me sometimes but I recognize that this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
I realize as a Californian we may not count as "American" in this particular zeitgeist stereotype. But FWIW we have a firework ban in Nevada County that is widely respected. There are very few violations and the law is actively enforced.
The difference is we are in a no-joke dangerous fire situation and everyone recognizes it. Most people know better than to set off incendiary explosives in a forest. Anyone who shot off illegal fireworks would immediately be shamed and censured by their neighbors. I guess it's a form of commune-ism.
I too live in Nevada County. While I largely agree with the claim that most people recognize and respect the safety implications, most years I still see (or hear) illegal fireworks. It’s clearly the odd individual doing it and not the majority of people, but the asymmetric risk they impose is a real bummer and I would love to see more/better enforcement of the restrictions on such individuals.
I grew up in southern CA, in a dry pine forest. I can assure you the children I knew traded and set off fireworks. We were all envious of the families who brought them back from Mexico — they had the best stuff.
I guess rules-followers assumed we were all doing as they did.
I'd argue the conclusion is wrong. The premise, that places like CA are currently such tinderboxes as a direct result of preventing natural burning and continuing to develop in areas that need to burn to stay healthy, is extremely well supported.
There was a similar cultural shift in the Portland OR area after fireworks caused the massive Eagle Creek fire 9 years ago. This is the first year that it seems like firework activity returned to the pre-fire levels.
I saw a video of fireworks over LA from the window of a descending airplane in the last several years and it was pretty beautiful. They were everywhere.
I genuinely don't understand how this has never been a news headline throughout my entire life until now. We have closed air-spaces. We know when fireworks will be deployed. The article didn't specify any reason this would be different, but I would think there is a reasonable explanation. Maybe this happens all the time and I just haven't noticed.
Back around 1982, fireworks were a big no in my neighborhood.
My friend across the street had some bottle rockets and he decided to shoot one off in the middle of the street. We didn't have a bottle to put it in to light it, so we wedged it between two bricks. He lit it and a split second before it went off, it tilted to point directly down the street. It fired off blazing down the middle of the road. At the same time a cop car just happened to turn the corner and that damn thing popped on the hood of the cop car.
We scattered like ants. My friend that lit it ran inside, I hid in his garage under his moms car and the other two hauled ass home.
Well the cop parked out front and knocked on his door. His dad answered and they spent which felt like an hour (probably 10-15 minutes) talking about what happened. He got in big trouble and grounded. I stayed in the garage until the smoke cleared, then ran home. I didn't see him for at least a week.
Your post reminded me about that incident. They were regulated in Fort Worth Texas 44 years ago. I haven't thought about that day in years! LOL!
Thanks for the fun memory.
Yea, I think OP is wearing rose-colored glasses. I'm 50 and I don't remember any time in my life when anything bigger than sparklers or tiny firecrackers were legal. To my young eyes, they've always been illegal. The differences now are 1. a more belligerent and careless population and 2. plummeting police enforcement. You can read a lot of comments here from places (mostly CA) where people care to do the right thing and enforcement is actually happening, and lo and behold it's at least helping. Fireworks bans are not any more "culturally unenforceable" than masking during COVID was.
It helps when your local culture is respectful, cooperative, and intelligent enough to understand why we don't light fires when every tree and blade of grass within 200 miles is dry as a bone. It hurts when your local culture is "Fuck everyone else, I'm going to do what I want!"
I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.
I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.
Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.
My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.
I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.
In the mid-90s I had a brief but enjoyable hobby of model rocketry. I guess the #1 obstacle in this pastime is finding a safe launch site.
I had assembled a gorgeous SR-71 Blackbird rocket. I took it to a vast lawn space at Warren College, UCSD, on a quiet weekend, and set it on its maiden voyage. The very lopsided SR-71 immediately went horizontal and landed softly within a swimming pool fence where I had no access.
Some time later, I chose the neighborhood public school yard on a weekend. Nevertheless, the preparations drew a curious crowd of unaccompanied minor children who were younger than me. I told them to be careful and stay clear, and set off the rocket. By the time its parachute deployed, a security guard was driving his car around the field to meet us all at the landing site and give us all a stern warning.
So I abandoned that hobby forever and found less explosive things to tinker with. This week I grabbed two boxes of glow-sticks at the hardware store, and had myself a very glowy 4th.
That’s what I remember too. Fireworks in the city limits was a no-no. People would do it but you were risking a visit from the local police car. In my neighborhood (OakCliff in Dallas) the police have completely given up, people cruise Jefferson Ave shooting AR15s out of the back of their trucks every Sunday night. July 4th and New Years is completely out of control, it’s going to take a house getting burned down or some other horrible tragedy to change it.
We were setting off fireworks in the street in the middle of the afternoon (cause you'd buy a bunch and gradually deploy in the days leading up to the event). We shot off a rocket, which was one of mine. There were fire trucks shortly after putting out a blaze in an open lot. 1980s, I was <10 years, my older brother and his friend were pretty sure we caused it.
I have no way to know if we started that fire, but regulations exist for a reason and people who live in at-risk areas understand that they could lose their homes.
Some friends and I lit a wheat field on fire with Roman candles in Oklahoma when I was 18.
We were having a blast driving down the road shooting candles out of the car window when we topped the crest of a small hill and looked back to see smoke. We drove back and the field was on fire. Fortunately we were able to put it out before it spread any further and the area was so isolated no one saw us.
You're right but in my experience in Washington state - Park rangers, forest fire marshals, and reservation police will all rigorously enforce the bans in places that are prone to wild fires. The local community won't have much sympathy either. People get how dumb that is. You also see bans enforced in very well off communities that basically have their own police force too. It's fascinating how these micro-cultures all self-regulate.
> this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
Yeah, and that’s the problem. A whole country full of people belligerent enough to say “fuck you” to anyone who tells them “hey you probably shouldn’t blow your hand off”. What a wonderful place.
But this is none of your business. I live in Germany, where everything is regulated by well meaning people. Going so far to regulate what you ought to say or to watch.
It is hellish. I don't recognize the country any more in which I was born and raised.
> But this is none of your business. I live in Germany, where everything is regulated by well meaning people.
Assuming you haven't lived in the US I think you're severely underestimating some of the stupidity going on.
So let's say your house has a thatched roof in California where it's bone dry and hot. At that point, the person lighting the fireworks will still say it's none of your business. Even if it's illegal and every year houses burn down as a result.
I don't think you get how much of an 'I don't care about anyone else, because FREEDOM... Murica' mindset exists unless you've lived there
Fine, bad example. The point being, people light fireworks in places with extreme fire risk. And don't you dare tell them they cannot. None of your business is the kind response
> Going so far to regulate what you ought to say or to watch.
Native born German. Calling BS on that crap.
I recommend reading up on "freedom from" vs. "freedom to". Explains quite a lot of differences between the European tradition of ensuring people are "free from" an potentially oppressive state vs. the US tradition of "freedom to".
In each "freedom of speech" index I know, Germany fares better than the US, or Britain, or Australia. Or quite a lot of different countries tbh.
RSF World Press (lower is better):
- Germany 14/180
- Britain 18/180
- Australia 33/180
- USA 64/180
Freedom House (higher is better):
- Germany 95/100
- Britain 92/100
- Australia 95/100
- USA 84/100
No one actually believes their BS and I doubt you actually do either.
They use so many bullshit and mental gymnastics to "score" Germany well despite their appalling "free speech" laws. I think it's very fair to say anyone appealing to either of these index's isn't even attempting to argue in good faith.
To be fair, that'll happen in New York if you protest the internationally-illegal sale of real estate in Palestine taking place in a synagogue. Here's the event, a law was passed protecting religious institutions from protest (but was really for this).
German here. The law as written actually permits most of the speech: As long as you avoid a number of banned phrases and don't voice explicit support for groups classified as terrorist organizations, your speech is protected - in theory.
In practice, wondrous things may start to happen already long before you reach that threshold, such as police forgetting their own laws, your venue, backup venue and second backup venue suddenly all deciding they cannot host you, politicians trying to fire you - or you suddenly realizing that you're unable to access any kind of bank account or credit card because the EU put you on a sanctions list (behind closed doors, without telling you, with no option to appeal).
But none of that has to do with overregulation - on the contrary, those measures are often in violation of the law and courts have frequently decided in favor of pro-palestinian activists and axed them.
This article does not say someone was arrested because of a public talk about Gaza and Israel. A local government has cut funding to a local org because of a disagreement. Nobody was arrested.
One of the problems I have with the right wing is they literally just decry anything and everything that doesnt only benefit themselves and when they get in office they do exactly the same thing with the subtext being "Tough shit, now I get to wear the Boot"
This is just BS. I had and saw many public discussion also on German Marktätze on this topic, some quite heated. Nobody was arrested or removed from their job or otherwise sanctioned. But of course people were disagreeing.
The right to free speech is not the right to freedom from contradiction!
I was referring to"hey you probably shouldn’t blow your hand off”. I am not against regulations per se, I am German after all.
But a sane discussion should be had how far this should go. Regulating things which are dangerous to the person taking a risk knowingly is over the top in my book.
Best fireworks show I’ve ever seen in my life was in the middle of the German ruhrgebiet, on a small hill overlooking a shallow valley full of villages, each one setting off a seemingly-infinite round of colour and sound for the hour or so, New Year’s Eve, early 2000’s…
Have you experienced Silvesterabend (New Year's Eve) in a major German city? It feels like a warzone. In the context of fireworks specifically, this image of Germany as an over-regulated nanny state feels particularly at odds with my experience of Germany.
I don't know when you were born but I'm pretty sure Germany was regulation capital of the world already back then and this is just your nostalgia bias speaking (also I agree with you Germany is currently way way overregulated but also outsiders have no way to really understand the degree of overregulation).
But also the US pretty much care too much when you for example try to blow your head off with drugs instead of a gun or explosives so the grass is not that green on the other side either.
No the regulation "from Europe" whatever that means is not worse, that's just the usual dumb anti-EU propaganda. If by that you perhaps mean checking EU agro subsidies against the actual size and use of declared fields, then that is not regulation, it's just checking the subsidies are not defrauded, which is a huge issue. Every farmer is free not to ask for the subsidies.
But for most of the EU regs, the member country can choose how to implement them. Usually countries manage to not overburden their people with that. The German problem is homegrown.
I wish you would have to life one with that bureaucratic nightmare / crony employment program that you put on your fellow human. I have no stronger curse.. The eu had one job - to protect europe, from war, from statesized companies like china and get it competitive again before the innovators take itall. It has failed in all fields.
I live in the EU. There is no war in the EU, that's surely a success by your own count. And it's cute to mention several "jobs" as one job. Perhaps you would like to narrow down your argument, if there is one.
Ukrainewar is a direct result of the change by trade policies. Libya, syria and algeria are barely stable. major industries are dying or migrating away, and the solution to this is firesales of smaller industries to incentivize "partners" to lower trade barriers and sell for a limited timemore from major industries.
The solution of choice in tech seems to be rent-seeking by institutions. The eu is dying and good riddance. Maybe its successor can be better.
Reality be the absolute and not a social construct at all. Either deal with it or become another USSR that tries to wing it while lying to itself to the bitter end.
Is that the line for regulations you're okay with holding on to? If so you better start regulating how many beds each hospital has as well, if bed demand is the bar you must control bed supply.
We were talking about the US here though. Its very different when the government already effectively controls healthcare as a whole, of course they would control or have a large say in hospital bed numbers, for example.
For better or worse the US healthcare system is largely private. If the government isn't running the hospitals or directly paying for all care they shouldn't be stipulating quotas for access to various kinds of care.
Why healthcare specifically, and where so you draw the line? Are you okay with democratically elected officials making any decision for the people as they see fit?
Well that's effectively my point? Are you okay with elected officials having the power to write whatever law they wish simply because they were democratically elected?
Surely there must be a line and you aren't granted the elected body control to do literally whatever they want.
We couldn't get people to wear masks to reduce the spread and help keep beds open for all the other typical needs, why would they let harm from fireworks impede them?
It's funny because I read the parent comment and thought that was actually kinda cool.
Lots of things we do are really stupid from a purely productivity, health or safety perspective.
American's were probably wrong to oppose alcohol prohibition. They probably should ban motorbikes. Fireworks should be largely banned to members of the public. Pizza should be illegal. Etc..
Part of what makes a country a place you'd want to live is the fact they don't create an excess of rules and regulations to optimise for what's best on paper, but allow people to do stupid things and allow them to live the life they want to live and take the risks they want to take where risks are not too excessive.
Commercial fireworks are dangerous, but not that dangerous. It's inadvisable that someone would use them without proper safety training, and it probably makes sense to have some rules around selling them to try to limit use, but in reality this just isn't a big problem.
Obviously people who live on flight paths should be more careful.
The threat of getting sued only motivates people with something to lose. If we let lawsuits largely drive what the rules are, how do you govern people who are so poor they are "judgement-proof."
True, but this is how it actually works, in the US.
Lots of stuff is not anywhere close to ideal, but it is what it is.
people refusing to understand that, doesn't help. Change usually comes from people who first, understand and accept, then they know what to do, to actually make change, as opposed to tilting at windmills.
Nah, I’d rather beg for money than be run over by some dipshit driving a truck on swampers that’s 3 times as big as they’ll ever need. Oh, wait, in other countries you don’t have to beg and plead to receive healthcare.
Comes in handy when the government agents are rounding up your neighbors. Except when they direct that energy at the neighbors instead of the government agents.
In my experience, the cycling and native-plant gardening types of Minneapolis are the ones ready to throw the tear gas cans back, and the fireworks-loving Texans are salivating over the boots.
No it doesn’t. The reactionary people are the ones cheering on the people doing the rounding, as long as it’s against people they don’t like.
That’s the problem with the mindset - if it was genuinely anarchistic it would be better. Instead, it’s just privileged and focused on creating an out group.
Aren’t people on this website supposed to be like, smart? If I wanted someone to tell me “if you don’t like it leave it” as if it’s an actual position worth arguing I could just go to the bar.
Americans are always funny,... being proud they can have one day a year where they can breath a highly toxic air created by others or are forced not to ventilate their house and spend their day with a >2000ppm CO2 headache/drowsiness (or from the other PoV, proud they can inflict this on fellow Americans, even better).
"And if you don't like this, you can just git out!"
All the while they're stripped of dignity in the eyes of people abroad, by their aggressive/genocidal government's foreign policy actions.
Fireworks on holidays were also a huge part of Chinese culture, but they've been banned now in cities and the ban seems to be mostly effective.
China even has the same issue as the US, where they aren't banned at the national level so you can still drive two hours and buy them legally. And whatever your stereotypes, China has plenty of scofflaws who aren't going to give something up just because the government tells them to, and its police are, very broadly, less heavy-handed as the US
I suspect banning firework sales in the US would have a significant impact.
China goes up and down on this. In Beijing in 2002, fireworks were pretty muted, there were some but not many. In 2008, completely different, they even burned the facade off of that CCTV cultural center.
Note that Beijing is where the central government is the strongest, although Beijingers aren’t as law abiding as residents of south Chinese cities are. Still, they were selling fireworks (when they were allowed) inside the third ring, you didn’t have to go out to Hebei to get them.
As for what the policy is now, I couldnt tell you, and wouldn’t assume it was one way or the other.
China's a police state where the government has absolute power and isn't limited even slightly by the constitution, with a disarmed population, it's completely incomparable.
We have seen the “checks and balances” were held together by decorum alone. We are now seeing what happens if decorum is absent and government officials regularly lie and mislead the public and other government officials without facing any consequences.
I absolutely agree that things in the US seem to be going in a bad direction, but we haven't yet lost our constitution or system of checks and balances.
There's a big difference between the Constitution, law, and doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, was little more than policy and had nothing to do with law or constitutional rights.
Our checks and balances are still there, the problem we have today is the lack of willingness for those with the power to actually use them. Congress can stop Trump on many of the things he's doing, for example, they just don't want to and have instead continued a decades long pattern of Congress ceding power to executive. The judicial branch has at least stepped in at times, they really don't have to as the Supreme Court can choose to simply not hear a case.
The issue of lying politicians is as old as governments. If we want to focus on Trump as the issue here, and he's a big one, you only have to go back to the pandemic to find politicians on the other side of the aisle blatantly lying to the public without consequence.
> but we haven't yet lost our constitution or system of checks and balances.
> the problem we have today is the lack of willingness for those with the power to actually use them.
What they do is illegal, sure, but, unless they face consequences for that, they'll continue doing it. There are trillions of dollars to be made, and nothing to stand between them and the money.
> The issue of lying politicians is as old as governments.
It could be solved by making it a criminal offense (with attached loss of political rights and hefty prison time) to materially mislead the public while holding office (elected or nominated).
> It could be solved by making it a criminal offense to materially mislead the public while holding office
The problem would be how you define that in law and enforce it in the real world.
Its already hard enough to legally distinguish between a lie, misrepresentation, and someone telling what is wrong but they honestly believe to be true given what they know at the time. How do you define that?
And for politicians who are regularly working with state secrets, politically sensitive information, confidential/classified documents, etc how could you ever actually catch them in a lie?
> Its already hard enough to legally distinguish between a lie, misrepresentation, and someone telling what is wrong but they honestly believe to be true
You can’t and you shouldn’t. People in power need to be careful with the information they give the people they serve. If it’s wrong at the time it was communicated, too bad. The person should have been more careful.
Given American policing culture, I really don't buy that the police can't show up and start arresting you for public endangerment. They may not want to, but that is different
The "trick" I've seen is just doing it with enough space to be safe and with property owner permission. The cops are likely caring about safety not the letter of culturally unenforceable law on July 4th. Problem is this don't work in the suburbs and cities, it's just to dense.
Classic Internet Tough Guy boast. Imagine thinking that, when the police come to fine you, your neighbors will break the law in front of the police "to show them!". Your neighbors may be just smart enough to not invite the police to fine them, too.
The "market of stubbornness" is about one deep at any given moment.
They actually do mind, which is why they don’t do it. Did you forget the reality of the situation?
They mind because they are completely outnumbered. Policing only works if you can point out a small minority and say “these people are causing harm to the majority of us”. With something like fireworks (or cannabis protests in many places) the police are severely outnumbered and they don’t have enough room
in their jails anyway.
LOL, 25 years ago my neighbors and I were setting off fireworks over a yet-undeveloped part of our neighborhood. We saw police pull into the neighborhood. My family were the cowards who went inside. Our neighbors had to pay a fine. If we'd hung around we'd have paid a fine too.
I don't know what it's like now but that sounds like Europe in the 1980s. I remember going there from a country that restricted anything fancier than a sparkler and being amazed at all the cool things you could get. Blowing holes in snow forts with the larger Chinabölller was particularly fun.
Can only speak to my experience here in Washington, but 40 years ago you still needed to go to the reservation for the fun stuff. Even basic small firecrackers were outlawed in my county.
At least for where I grew up, you seem to have history backwards. 40-50 years ago fireworks were largely outlawed - the best I could play with as a kid were smokebombs, snaps, sparklers, and small fountains. Now fireworks are pretty much completely legal, even municipal grade cannons. This is why they are going off all over the place on July 4th.
There are some states where you can still buy them year round. Holiday or not.
South Carolina comes to mind because I was there a few months ago. They have giant stores all over the state.
As a Canadian, the earliest memories I have of driving into the United States were seeing the giant "fireworks" billboards lining the interstate. I know it depends on the state, but it's one of those things you notice as an outsider.
I find it really amusing to see people carrying their assault rifles to grocery stores as if they are expecting a zombie outbreak or an alien invasion anytime now.
Because fireworks are not usually homemade, enforcing bans is pretty easily done by cracking down on retailers who illegally sell them. They are easy to find (have to advertise) and have a lot to lose by breaking commerce laws. Notably, cannabis grows naturally in many climates in the US (so retail not strictly necessary) and we still ban it.
IIRC our state long prohibited the kind of fireworks that go into the air (roman candles, etc.) and only allowed sparklers and similar ground-effect pyrotechnics. Of course, the odd person would drive hundreds of miles with fireworks in their trunk, but overall the ban was fairly effective.
> No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
All that said, I am a fan of removing laws that continue to exist only as a pretext for targeting disfavored groups. A lot of the rot in the country is downstream of us not really being a nation of laws.
> This may be unsatisfying for many people but the impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans in the US captures an important component of the American zeitgeist. It is annoying for me sometimes but I recognize that this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
I've taken to describing this aspect of Americana as "the fatal need to have a pretty good time", after the Minced Mockingbird post[0].
The twenty something guys in my neighborhood set off fireworks from a small boat in the river behind my house. Same guys took an ATV out on the ice when the river froze this winter. They haven’t died yet!
I draw the line at setting the tinderbox that’s california on fire however.
> Even the nominal enforcers don’t believe in it. No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
Case in point, the ATC on this very flight said something along the lines of "Thanks for the report, I'll pass it on, but I doubt they'll be able to do something about it"...
I don't agree. I think it's a choice that each area has made between law enforcement and local governance. Regarding the St. Louis area, it really depends on which jurisdiction you are in. St. Louis County has over 90 municipalities. The neighboring counties are also fragmented but to a lesser degree. There are areas (mostly more rural) where it is legal and loud, some where it's not legal but enforcement is lacking, and there are quiet areas in which I assume enforcement does happen.
Yea, people have tried for decades to ban deepavali fireworks here in india with zero effect. It's simply not enforceable. The police themselves burst.
The police erased fireworks explosions in my neighborhood in the Bay Area.
Two years ago, I heard thousands of explosions in the month of July, same as every year. Then last year, the police posted signs reminding people that fireworks are illegal and that they would begin issuing fines to violators. The number of explosions was about 30% of usual (i.e., still many hundreds of explosions). This year I've heard exactly one explosion (on July 03).
I unambiguously welcome this change. You mention safety, but fireworks are also hard on neighbors with PTSD.
Is littering also in your opinion "an important component of the American zeitgeist"?
Illinois prohibits unlicensed individuals from buying or setting off commercial grade fireworks. People buy them in Indiana. Some of the largest fireworks stores in the country sit right on the Indiana side of the state line.
Illinois bans nearly all fireworks, not just commercial grade. You can basically only buy sparklers or tiny fountains.
You have to visit Wisconsin or Indiana to get anything that pops, spins, bangs, or flies. Even those little ground spinners are banned in Illinois and they are hardly “commercial grade”.
In Texas, you have to go outside of the city limits. South Carolina you can get them year round. There are other states that are legal year round, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
As Eastern European - please don't go to Eastern Europe. Keep your bullshit with yourself, we don't want Americans who will then wake up that we aren't their "Conservative, Christian paradise".
As someone living on one of the westernmost parts of Europe, I’d ask them respectfully to not come here unless they are asking for political asylum (which we consider an inalienable human right). And, in their case right now, a very understandable one to want to exercise.
I, for instance, would have done that the first time, in 2016. I wouldn’t wait for the circus to be on fire to leave.
Imagine thinking you are saying something positive about American “culture” with your comment. Wow.
You would have sounded more true to it by just writing “MMMURICA, AMIRIGHT!?!?”
> Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions
Fireworks are not legal to shoot in pretty much any city. They are not legal in my city. That did not stop them from being used. In fact, they are going off around me the night after too
My opinion about how people use fireworks changed when I adopted a dog from a shelter and discovered how deeply traumatizing booms are to her. From chatting with other dog owners this seems to be common. If my neighbors could see the extent fireworks affect the same friendly, silly pup their children love greeting everyday, they would probably think twice about how they use them. We can manage the night of the 4th by traveling out of town, but the 1-2 weeks of random booms that follow the holiday are really tough for us.
You certainly have a higher opinion of neighbors than I do. As far as any action that negatively intrudes on others, it seems the most likely responses are either that they are allowed to do what they want and you need to deal with it, or to do it even more now that they know it bothers you as punishment for you daring to ask.
Yeah first 4th of July as a dog owner. He did relatively OK inside but we had a hell of a time taking him out for a walk. Every time we thought everyone was done blowing their loads someone else refueled and things started over again.
I used to love the tradition of lighting fireworks but I think the way people have been using them has changed in the last decade. Everything seems to transform into a war zone and some people do incredibly dangerous things.
Its become a dick waggling contest. It will be quiet all night and then one person sets something off. Some other person "well ill show them who has better booms" and gets a bigger one, sets it off. Next thing you know its 30 minutes of booms and pops culminating in the largest boom possible, its goddamn irritatibg
It's insane to me how much dogs are supposedly loved by such a large chunk of the pop, and yet people proceed to go apeshit with fireworks fully knowing how badly this affects them.
My guess because we just read of the seizure stories online but 95% of dogs are ok with it. Mine is. There's a limit to dealing with edge cases that most people have.
My dog, now passed after a long and happy life, loved fireworks deeply. It was his favorite day of the year. He would chase and pretend to bite, bark, and run around with joy.
We have three dogs of different breeds and ages, none of them handle fireworks well. They don't have seizures, but one of them turns into a quivering, shaking mess and the other two try to hide under couches and beds. I wish they were okay with it, but my wife and I have to plan our 4th around the dogs because of how they react.
>setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking,
I'm in Bellevue, WA, and experienced house-shaking fireworks for the first time this year. I was inside with my cats - theyve always been more or less fine with fireworks, just hiding under the bed - but this year's house shakers were on another level. When the first one went off, I thought an accident had happened and a cache of fireworks had exploded. Scared the hell outta me. Then there were about 5 more like that spread across the next 5 hours. 0% of pets would be ok with these ones, I guarantee it. Idk if theyre new this year or what but Ill be doing the same as OP next year.
I've had two dogs. One didn't like fireworks but would just turn his head towards the noise then walk over to the nearest human, and the other completely ignored them.
However! The first was a Labrador cross and the second was full lab. Breeds intended for use as gun dogs might not react to gunpowder and explosions as much.
That study doesn't say "freak out". It says 83% ever showed "any fear" of fireworks, which is a huge variation. My doesn't like going outside when there are fireworks, but the sound of rain freaks him out way more.
Our dog is not ok with fireworks or gunshots. He either goes into the basement (normally off limits) or into the bedroom (mostly off limits) when he hears them.
However it also took him quite a few years to get over his fear of thunder.
I think he'll survive even though he'd be included in the 83%.
Most dogs in my neighborhood are ok with them. My own dog loves them. I try to keep him inside only because I think it might be bad for his hearing if he gets too close.
Beyond basic temperament I wonder if owner training is implicated, as more people become annoyed by fireworks they don’t expose the dog to them at a young age.
Just as you don't need to be a vet to know the difference between a dog and a cat.
I own a dog and it's common sense that a dog is a reflection of the owner, and when you have a dog you know every other owner and dog in the neighborhood (and the ones that use fireworks have dogs that don't mind fireworks). If you don't enjoy fireworks then you tend not to introduce the dog to fireworks at a young age, and the dog will tend to be afraid of them. Look up "optimal age to train a dog".
> Getting your dog used to loud and sudden noises can make them more relaxed and less reactive when the fireworks outside get going. There’s a good range of CDs and playlists of fireworks, storms, and loud noises available, and playing these can really help your dog desensitise to the noise.
> Start by playing the sounds at a low volume, and as your dog gets used to it you can slowly increase the volume over a period of time so that they become used to the noise. This can work especially well with young dogs and puppies, and can let you nip any problems in the bud before they even arise.
The degradation of canine genetics and behavior to the point where loud noises cause seizures is pretty absurd. I love dogs but I grew up around working dogs. City people have pushed dog breeding to the point where the desirable dog is riddled with some pretty extreme codependency and anxiety that they mistake for affection and companionship. The poor animals spending their lives in a few hundred square feet and completely alone for a large majority of their lives kinda sickens me.
Jeez, just imagine a ballistic missile hitting your neighbour's house, with no indication or alert coming ahead. I would bet a good 50€ that you'd be freaking the shit out.
I agree, but luckily my terrier apparently doesn't give a poo about fireworks. Probably nobody jad thrown fireworks at him yet. My inlaws' country dog (also a fox terrier mix with the same temperament) growls at people, especially teens, smelling of powder and barks at fireworks and motorbikes. Good thing he's not a Malinois to nip those teens and chase the motorbikes. So it'a more of a nature vs. nurture thing.
Given that most dogs are adopted from shelters, dog behavior is often a reflection of early upbringing. The current owner can train and teach their dog, but some behaviors and fears set in fairly early on.
Moreover, many dogs are beaten or worse when they’re young, and undoing that fear and trauma is a lifelong (for the dog) struggle.
Thus, dog behavior is far from “strictly a reflection of their [current] owner.”
Fireworks are a traumatic and disruptive intrusion on their environment akin to a temporary war. We (humans) already do enough traumatic and disruptive intrusions on the lives of wild animals, that doing this wholly unnecessary “just for funsies” thing is particularly cruel.
It’s rich how you’ve decided to call out “city people” as being responsible for the situation rather than the trash individuals who set off illegal fireworks.
I mean I think most people would agree it's completely irresponsible and borderline absuive to own a dog and stay in nearly any city in the USA during the 4th.
People rightfully blame the owners it's not like this is a surprise for them.....
Like 80% of dog owners treat dogs like possessions. When I say "like possessions" I mean they abuse them by physical means or by locking them into small apartments and not meeting the animals basic needs. It's wild how people trap dogs into small city/suburb boxes and then 'train' them to be good(break them). I stand by 80% if you account for global numbers and not just western/developed nations.
In much of the developed world it's weirdly mandatory to have a dog or cat. The way folks treat them is so messed up. Then these folks turn around and claim they love animals. It's nonsense. Most people don't need a pet nor do they treat them like an animal lover would.
But words have no meaning nowadays. Everyone is everything they want to be.
A few years ago, on July 4th one of my mom's dogs freaked out, somehow managed to escape, and got hit by a car before my mom found her. She loved that dog, regularly attending nose work competitions with it.
One of your pets getting a seizure must be harrowing for both you and the dog.
My female Weimaraner was terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks. Once, she managed to squeeze herself under my Mini Cooper. I didn't know at the time that panic vests were a thing. The breed is a gun dog ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I forget how we managed to get her out from under there, but it took a bit. My Akita doesn't care, he checks the balcony, yawns, and back to his toys. But he is a afraid of air balloons and blow up Christmas Santas. Go figure.
I moved across states a few years ago. In the old neighborhood, people would be drunk and lighting that crap off for hours and hours. Completely moronic and thoughtless.
Here, it is illegal. First offense is a fine, second offense is jail.
As another STL resident, fireworks are illegal everywhere in the County (not sure if St. Charles as well, but probably), and our local muni PD even sent out multiple warnings about prosecution.
But our inner ring suburb was similarly full of smoke last night and the smell of many amateur fireworks shows.
Only a few in my neighborhood, but they were quite the production. I remember firing a few bottle rockets as a kid, but these were definitely a few steps above that! Sounded like mini mortars, maybe those boxes with a bunch of shells timed to go after each other.
STL is famous for having a large number of folks shooting guns into the air on New Years. So much so that there are warnings to not go outside. Stay safe.
There have also been incidents of people being hit by those bullets. It’s just so reckless and dangerous for people to do that. But there’s always someone doing it …
I spent a year in Germany and Oh God do Germans shoot off fireworks for the New Year. Most of the time Germans live up to the stereotype of neat, clean, quiet, polite but the next day there is a mess of firework wrappers all over the street.
People might say you just made this up for internet points. But this is real, this is an actual thing that happens to dogs (and other pets) when exposed to prolong fireworks noise!
Yeah, it really happened. But to be fair the little dog in question is prone to seizures and all the booming certainly set this one off. She was fine after things calmed down around midnight.
I don't know fireworks that well, but these appeared to be the commercial type, with a large lift-charge that lights the sky up with a lightning style flash followed by a sky burst and the house-shaking boom of the sort I usually associate with shows put on the city or whatnot. I had two of these "shows" going on just north of me and one to the south.
And I have a pretty good idea of heights around here. I mentioned I work at Boeing on flying things so I track the ones that fly over me. They're usually about 1000 to 1500 ft. AGL on approach when they go over my house and about 200 knots. Southwest has the most flights into and out of St. Louis so it's usually a 737, and those have a wingspan of just over 100 feet on the newer models.
So yeah, I'd say these fireworks were going up at least 300 feet.
On Reddit last year, I found a link to a City of Phoenix dashboard that monitors all the county-wide emergency dispatch calls that are not suppressed for privacy/security reasons. I watch it throughout the day and night, especially on holidays like this one.
I counted upwards of 23 fires on the map at any single point in time, between sunset and 11pm. Most of those calls indicated either debris fires, or Dumpster fires, but there were also roof fires and vehicle fires, including one police-involved car accident.
I stayed inside all weekend after attending church on Saturday evening. The Air Force flyover was not visible in my area. I immensely enjoyed the celebrations on live streaming. And singing my heart out, creating new playlists.
> Despite strict fireworks bans in many cities, including Oakland, they’ve become a year-round nuisance in the Bay Area. And one of the primary ways they’re spread is through the enterprising but illegal work of small-time dealers who obtain the contraband from licensed shops outside of California, sneak it into the state, and then sell hundreds and even thousands of pounds of explosives out of homes, vehicles, storage units, and even corner stores.
When I was in North Carolina on a trip the chap I was visiting said I'd know if I was crossing over to South Carolina when I saw all the fireworks shops as it was illegal to sell them in NC but not SC. Funny to see.
(No idea what the actual rules are, just repeating what he told me)
Same in the NY/NJ/PA tri-state. Ahead of the 4th a NY state trooper sits in the parking lot of the Phantom Fireworks in Matamoras, presumably calling in NY plates for their buddy to go pull over.
We just took the back roads home instead of the highway.
The Kentucky/Indiana border has always been that way in my lifetime. Kentucky restricts fireworks sales to just "sparklers" and Indiana has much more latitude in what they can sell. The thing about Indiana fireworks stores that has long confused me has been how many of them are gas stations. That always seemed like a problematic pairing to me.
In a lot of states, Indian reservations can also sell them. And they’re basically completely unregulated. It’s illegal to bring them or set them off into other towns but people do it. Hundreds of people. And tens of thousands have to be repeatedly woken up because of their selfishness.
Yeah not sure why that changed, when I was a kid you could only get sparklers and small stuff that stayed on the ground. Today I could get everything for a near-professional show if I wanted to spend the money.
When I was a kid you could get actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite. Now you can only get little firecrackers that don't even blow up little green army men.
It's really dependent on your state laws. My state allows fireworks, so you can get most things but they are very limited in size and explosive content.
What it amounts to is that most cities/counties don't enforce their existing laws in this area because people would have a shit fit, and they would arrest so many people that it's kind of impossible.
Something something banning things doesn't really work to do anything but make criminals out of every day people.
> actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite
Not even close.
A military M80 [0] is ~5g of flash powder, an inconsequential amount of low-explosive albeit enough to seriously injure yourself. The consumer "M80" are even weaker. These are used to simulate real explosions by the military.
The smallest standardized military demolition charge contains ~110g of TNT, in a similar small cylindrical format. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in power between an M80 and these demolition charges.
A "quarter stick of dynamite" isn't a standard thing. But if it was, it would probably come in around 50g of TNT equivalent.
You could sure make decent explosives with OTC fireworks though - in the early 90s we would buy hundreds of those whistling fireworks, hammer them, cut the bottoms off, and then fill various bottles with all the powder. We made a shockwave with one of our makeshift bombs and decided we should probably stop after that.
The old school whistling fireworks were often based on picrate chemistry. Picrates famously have the ability when burned to hover between normally deflagration and true detonation; the whistling is a side effect of this. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history (see below) was a picrate explosion. These aren’t used anymore for safety reasons; they don’t have a great stability profile and picrates are true high-explosives.
Over the years they have found alternatives for and phased out most high-explosives used in fireworks. Many high-explosives will just deflagrate/burn but can spontaneously detonate with considerable power if the conditions are right, which makes them dangerous.
Have advances in explosives, fuses and quality control made fireworks safer in the last 40 years?
Or perhaps the safety improvements are offset by sellers now offering bigger fireworks (either because those are now actually safe and both buyers and sellers are more comfortable with them, or just because of a general hedonic improvement).
Or perhaps they are safer for their users, but worse for starting fires or interfering with low-flying aircraft.
Either way I would be interested in reading more about this, something more nuanced than "fireworks dangerous". At the least it's a counterpoint to what happened with illegal drugs which seem to have become more dangerous as a result of regulation and bans.
I think the improvements in consumer fireworks safety has been incremental. The fuses are more reliable, they’ve reduced the use of mercury and other heavy metals in pyrotechnics, and they’ve moved toward more stable chemistries. That said, I think regulation is marginal at best so who knows what a random firework will actually do. There are also practical constraints on the kinds of chemistries that make good fireworks e.g. you don’t want potential high-explosives to be something you can buy over-the-counter by the kilo.
There is a parallel in military explosives research. For example, the US military is slowly moving toward “insensitive munitions” which use explosive chemistries that are nearly impossible to detonate accidentally due to fire or impact. This originated in nuclear weapons research but has spread to other weapon systems.
Fireworks are intrinsically dangerous in the hands of incompetence, ignorance, or stupidity. No amount of engineering can solve that problem unfortunately.
M80s were more like 1/8th of a stick, I think. My uncle bought quarter sticks of dynamite one time. Wow. Quite a bit bigger and louder than an M80, and M80s were LOUD! My dad's cousin blew off most of his thumb and parts of several fingers with one. It was old, and it had a flash fuse. He was planning to toss it, but it went off instantly. (Don't hold fireworks when you are lighting them.)
A couple of years ago my brother got some flat triangles from a guy on the side of the road. First thing I've seen in years that was like an M80. We put a flat soccer ball over one, and it went 50 feet in the air. Very fun.
> Today I could get everything for a near-professional show if I wanted to spend the money.
Not unless you're purchasing on the black market or (illegally) manufacturing it yourself.† The professional stuff is substantially larger than anything sold on the consumer market.
† Which is surprisingly trivial to do BTW but please be extremely cautious and very thoroughly master the underlying theory if you decide to go that route.
Yep. I volunteered for a real fireworks show in California once. The size of the mortars was… so much bigger than the stuff I was used to seeing people get at fireworks shops.
Along with the reminder from the safety coordinator that each firework was capable of completely talking your arm or leg off. The “consumer” grade fireworks aren’t capable of that, although they’re still dangerous.
Being homemade is (almost) never in and of itself a reason. A lack of knowledge or judgment certainly can be. However often the motivation for DIY is to circumvent regulations to go big but of course one of the primary reasons for such regulations is that the associated consequences when things go wrong are dire. The story could well have turned out the same even if the item had been purchased from a reputable vendor. There's a very good reason the professional shows use barges or large fields and set up a huge exclusion zone around them.
When I was a kid growing up in Iowa in the 90s, my friends and I would hold Roman candles and bottle rockets in our hands and try to shoot them at each other. We're lucky we didn't get seriously injured, but it was all fun and games back then as long as you didn't tell your parents.
Did you move? There are huge differences between states in what’s available, all the way from “just sparklers and other tiny stuff that doesn’t fly” up to “anything that doesn’t require an explosives license”, and within states areas near cities often restrict fireworks sales.
Rather than regulate fireworks out of existence wouldn't it be better to fix the problem at the root? Why do we permit such fire prone housing to be built just to save a few dollars?
The root problem is drunk people lighting off a bunch of rocket-propelled explosives, actually. Even if the houses were fireproof concrete bunkers, they'd still be starting wildfires in the grass/brush/trees. (And of course, it's more than "a few dollars.")
> Why do we permit such fire prone housing to be built just to save a few dollars.
I know you didn’t mean it, but this question isn’t a question. It’s a statement formed as a question. It’s a judgement. It’s not a curiosity legitimately asking why.
There are so many good reasons why houses in the US are built the way they are. Some of which are…
1. Concrete/Brick houses retain heat and are often harder to cool. They also don’t insulate well. US Houses have been built as a means of controlling moisture, humidity, and cooling efficiently.
2. Stick built houses cost less to repair. Brick/Concrete houses require much more demolition to repair, rebuild, or change. While replacing a load bearing wall in a stick house can be done easily, concrete and brick require the entire wall to be torn down.
3. Humidity, Moisture, and Wind matter. When moisture gets into concrete and brick then freezes it can cause huge structural cracks. Whereas in stick houses, it’s not as big a deal. I had a house with a raised driveway and a walkout basement. The basement and driveway had to be completely demolished due to moisture cracks. If the entire house was concrete it would have been a write off.
4. Soil composition matters. In some areas the soil is not capable of holding the weight of all the concrete and brick. Causing structure issues later and endangering folks.
Modern building codes today in most places are pretty solid. They require 2x6 framing, they require testing of the airways in the house to ensure proper air leaking/sealing. They require the structure of the house be built with specific bolts. They require the framing to be done in a way that resists wind sheer and twisting.
The US Building codes have been revised consistently over time. This started with the nuclear bomb testing in the 40s and onward. They built houses, and then bombed them to find out how to make them better. We’ve learned from Tornados, Hurricanes, and more. These all have resulted in major improvements to building houses.
Today in the US we have no shortage of housing methods. We have SIP Framing, ICF Concrete Framing, Recycled ICF, Modular designs, etc. Most still go with stick built because it’s the better option for the majority.
I lived in a 2x4 house in TN that was built poorly and improperly. I spent 200k in 4 years repairing that house. Now I live in a 2x6 built slab house. This house was built by a luxury builder properly.
The difference between the two is astonishing. The TN House couldn’t go less than 82 degrees when it was hot and humid. The luxury house is in Vegas, it can be 50 degrees inside when it’s 120 outside. You can cut costs on stick built, but you can also make some of the best houses with it.
Also, to add to this what we’ve learned about fires and houses is that.. it’s less about how the house is built.
Whether a house catches fire or not is almost always due to the landscaping, maintenance, and roof of the house.
Traditional house siding and roof will resist flames and fires. However, if an overgrown bush catches fire it will cause enough heat to the side of the house to break down that protection and set it aflame. Same with leaves in gutters, etc.
Since we're on a wild tangent here, the US house construction is also held back by the sheer momentum of wood-framed buildings.
For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build. Yet approximately nobody in the US uses it.
> For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build.
Apparently it ages out though and becomes unsafe when it does, resulting in a scandal in the UK:
"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) as building material or system. Many buildings from the 60s and 70s built from many materials are now having problems due to inadequate maintenance, and old age."
I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean. I've never heard of this problem with regular brick or concrete structures.
Not really. AAC was used to build floors without enough of additional reinforcement, and this is a bad idea. Just like regular concrete, it's weak in tension and is even more brittle.
If you use it to build walls and then use regular concrete or wood to build floors, it has none of these issues.
It's an amazing material, very light and it can be cut with a special handsaw on site.
No, it really was a question. Please don't inject your own biases and assumptions when interpreting my words.
It seems that you've invented a false dichotomy where the only options are wood frame or brick and concrete and then assumed me to be advocating for the latter. I was not. There are a variety of ways in which wood frame structures can be made less prone to external sources of fire. At least a few jurisdictions in california have adopted some of these methods into code as of late.
My question implied judgment to an extent, sure, but it was also genuine in that I truly do not understand why we as a society are not more proactive about these things. It isn't limited to fires either. In the face of all sorts of natural disasters we consistently optimize regulations for cost rather than safety. Consider the myriad examples of structures being built in flood prone areas.
Off topic but I went to a local town’s medium-sized professional fireworks show this weekend and there were none of those small flash really loud fireworks that shake you to the core. Not even in the grand finale. Oddly they are what I enjoy most. Have they gone out of fashion or do they mess too much with pets?
There are such a wide variety of fireworks available now there is probably less need for those specifically. The show I was at still had enough loud booms to set off dozens of cars' alarms repeatedly during the twenty minutes.
That's what I know them as too. We used to go out to a family friend's farm for a fireworks show he'd put on every 4th, and he'd always have a bunch of those interspersed. They used to be my favorite growing up, because of the anticipation between when it launched and when it would explode.
I miss those too. I remember as a kid one display that shot a bunch of really bright white flare-like fireworks that were blinding and hung in the sky followed by dozens of those small but loud ones and it was memorable.
As a European reading these comments I never would have expected fireworks in the US to regulated at all. In my country you can buy whatever you want. The most popular time to use them is at New Year, and even in supermarkets they have popup stalls selling then. If you go out at midnight you can see fireworks in every direction.
I live in a capital city thats surrounded by forest. I've never heard of any forest fires caused by them, but I guess it's because winter - we often have snow that time of year.
It definately has a big effect on air quality though, the smell of gunpowder lingers until the next day. We are far from the sea so there is little wind that time of year, and the cold temperatures cause the smoke to stay close to the ground (same issue with wood burning stoves which are common in older houses).
What is sad is that a few irresponsible people are always what end up ruining something that most can manage to do without endangering others. Growing up it was a yearly thing where my family would go somewhere safe away from public and set off fireworks.
Fireworks are a lot of fun. Sure not everyone's thing but many enjoy them and can manage to use basic safety and not endanger anyone.
I just can't believe a firework going off right at an airport was not intentional. I believe someone was most likely thinking "I'm gonna lite this off right by a plane for all to see my awesome show!". Not trying to hit the jet but rather just look at me people isn't this awesome!? No it is not.
This is the type of thing that ends up getting fireworks banned or more controlled for the rest of us.
Reminds me of the idiot who flew his drone over an active forest fire while crews were actively fighting it causing the helicopters or water bombers to have to disengage the fire until the drone was gone. Then drone rules get tightened for the average guy just wanting to have fun responsibly.
My uncle's house is under the landing path for Midway Airport. His whole house shakes when a plane comes by. From his front yard you can easily read the numbers on the plane's body.
Parts of the fence surrounding the airport is across the street from a neighborhood. You can sit and watch planes landing not too far above your head. I'm not surprised a consumer grade firework was able to hit one of those planes.
From his house, no I don't think a consumer mortar could hit a plane. The planes weren't that low.
But the area surrounding the airport is very densely populated. Given all those people, I'm not surprised some dumb kid (or adult) lit fireworks near the airport.
Also, most fireworks are illegal in Illinois. But it's only a 30 minute drive from Chicago to Indiana.
There is a fireworks store near me in Pennsylvania that is off I-95 at maybe the first exit over the Delaware line. When you enter the building, you go into an atrium with two doors that go into two separate sub-stores divided by a wall. In the atrium, they check your driver's license. If you have a Pennsylvania license, you have to enter the store that only sells non-explosive, non-aerial fireworks (no rockets, mortars, firecrackers, Roman candles, etc). If you have a Delaware license, you can go in the other part of the store that sells the good stuff. It's illegal to possess explosive and aerial fireworks in Delaware. They also have a waiver to sign that agrees you will use the fireworks legally.
I guess in Pennsylvania it's illegal to sell the good stuff to PA residents, but not to out of state visitors.
In one of the MD boarder counties (Montgomery maybe?) it at least used to (and may still) be illegal to posses even sparklers or fountains. And they were serious about enforcing it. Cops would stake out VA fireworks stands and radio in license plates to cops in-county. Since even possession is illegal, it's a confiscation and fine the moment you cross the boarder.
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
When I lived in Beijing (10+ years ago), CNY would be constant fire crackers and fire works (but more bang bang than flashy lights) from 9PM to 3 or 4 AM. And I don’t mean just constant fire works, I mean what it must have felt like being bombed by multiple fleets of bombers in WW2. You should just hear constantly fire work shrapnel hitting your window.
I flew in once on CNY and could see constant flashing all below during our descent into Beijing capital. The whole country side looked like it was exploding, and the villages were nestled on mountains or in mountain valleys to great effect.
Here in Salt Lake City, a prolonged drought has made it a tinderbox. Home fireworks are prohibited, and there's signage up all over the place warning of the danger. And yet, the firework stands popped up in grocery store parking lots like they do every year, and people lined up. Bananas.
Luckily no new fires started around here, but we also have the local "Pioneer Day" on July 24 that starts up a fresh round of pyrotechnics.
This is more of an issue with operating during the week before and after 4th of July in Chicago. As I'm writing fireworks are going off.
Fireworks (display) kinds are illegal in Illinois and there are absolutely no fireworks shot off the before and after 4th of july. Nothing happens nothing to see here.
Am I the only one who thinks the risks are worth the reward? People are celebrating, kids are having fun. Yes a few people blow their hands off, but are we going to remove everything, one by one, in the name of safety?
I have a beautiful memory from a summer night long ago, in Barceloneta on the evening of the summer solstice—the festival of Saint Joan [0]. I didn’t know it was coming, which was its own special sort of astonishment… walked in to eat dinner, walked out to a mountain of furniture on fire in the intersection, air thick with gunpowder smoke, bands of youths firing Roman candles at one other…
The specific image that comes to mind, though—I remember dozens upon dozens of ambulances lined up at the ready along the waterfront, their crews hanging out enjoying the madness until they would be called upon.
Having been raised in pretty cautious circles, that image struck me: the powers-that-be knew some proportion of bad stuff would happen. I figured that meant they’d “just make a law against it.” Instead of trying to stop it, though, they focused on preparedness and timely response.
Since then, of course, I’ve learned that The Law has a lot less raw power than I’d imagined against tradition and popular will…
Since then I’ve accepted as creed that the best and most human parts of life reach their most salient in the moments of paradox between principles. “Avoid safety risks” is correct, “living fully requires accepting risks” is also correct.
Nope, completely with you on this. The logical conclusion of banning everything dangerous is everything in existence being banned. There are many things people do that I think are dumb or dangerous but that doesn't mean I think they should be banned from doing them.
I’m with you. I shoot off small fireworks for my kids and my immediate neighbor on our quiet street, and we have a neighbor a few doors down who invariably calls the cops. This has been going on since the 2000s when she moved in. If I’m fined, I just pay it.
If breaking the law is immoral, what are we celebrating on the 4th of July but a massively immoral action? It was certainly not legal for the the colonies to secede from England.
Come on, it’s not a choice between complete anarchy and complete restriction.
It is very, very fair for society to be like “hm I think X activity is easy to abuse in a way that hurts innocent bystanders,” and then limits the activity to people with licenses and training or things like that.
Like no, it’s totally not cool to give a free pass to people who are putting other people’s lives and homes at risk. How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
I don’t care if it’s just your own life at risk. But you’re essentially saying that people should be free to play around with explosive devices in dense city neighborhoods. Fuck no, it’s fucking concerning to have an explosion rattle your windows. The people most likely to do this shit in the streets have no clue what they’re doing.
> How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
Probably the same way I'd feel if it burned down because my neighbor did some other stupid thing, like drive into it with a truck or try stealing electricity. There would be many feelings probably, but none of them would be "trucks/DIY should be illegal".
What if there was one day a year where it was expected for people to speed through your neighborhood at 20 over the speed limit, which ends up with a bunch of people driving into houses with their vehicles?
It's not really the fireworks that is the issue. It's the alcohol, drugs, and overall attitude towards a dangerous activity. It's a bit different than a random mishap or whatnot.
> What if there was one day a year where it was expected for people to speed through your neighborhood at 20 over the speed limit, which ends up with a bunch of people driving into houses with their vehicles?
You mean All Saints Day (1st of November)? No, thousands of drunk drivers taking dozens of innocent lives and hurting hundreds more, year after year like a clockwork, is still not a reason to ban trucks, or any other car type. Or to cancel All Saints Day, if that's what you're implying.
Stealing electricity is already illegal. Driving a truck into your home could be a genuine accident, but it's more likely that alcohol was involved first (which is illegal with driving).
Where I live, it's already illegal to shoot fireworks in the city limits, people still do that. Banning sales and importation is the next logical step.
> Like no, it’s totally not cool to give a free pass to people who are putting other people’s lives and homes at risk. How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
We quite literally have a long and rich tradition of laws to handle exactly this.
You are arguing against a straw man. It was never claimed or even implied that society can't or shouldn't regulate activities that cause harm. The cost benefit tradeoff in this specific instance was called into question and the broader implications of a consistent application of the same bar across all of society was inquired about.
> you’re essentially saying that people should be free to play around with explosive devices in dense city neighborhoods. Fuck no, it’s fucking concerning to have an explosion rattle your windows.
This is nothing more than emotional grandstanding. You could construct similar rants against a canister of gas or bottle of starter fluid. Obviously how you use the thing is important.
Lest you miss my point or think I miss the mark there are video footage of clueless people nearly killing themselves and others through entirely avoidable mishaps with gasoline abound.
The question is the amount of knowledge and judgment required, the likelihood of mishap, and the size of the consequences when one inevitably happens. Regulation needs to balance these things against utility and personal freedom.
Large? When fireworks within the ATF limits for unlicensed individuals are used according to manufacturer instructions they explode on the ground or in the air in a way that does not endanger the surrounding structures. Of course you can't safely light them off in a narrow alley between three story buildings. Anyone doing that (or similarly foolish things) was behaving recklessly to begin with.
>How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
Burning your neighbors house down is already illegal. You and they should already have insurance. House fires in human dwellings have been a risk since we started building houses next to other houses.
The issue is that we (and I mean worldwide) have gone from legalism as a method of settling disputes and advertising penalties for destructive behavior, to outlawing risk entirely.
The crux of the matter is that no one stops to point out where the line is. Laws will come in to penalise low probability risks, people make these arguments "wont someone think of the children" and then lawmakers turn on to even lower probability risks.
If you had even a benchmark, "more probable than x is outlawed" people would be more understanding. And its not a slippery slope argument, because the slope seems to be the point and without a line the destination appears to be all possible risk.
>Rules do not necessarily reduce freedom, they can in fact even provide more freedom on the longer term, when the system finds a new balance.
The kind of rules being peddled by the kind of people who peddle rules in a fireworks thread are almost certainly the exact opposite of the kind that direct things at a freer equilibrium.
It's not that we can't have rules. It's that we can't have shortsighted people with bad morals writing tules.
>Rules do not necessarily reduce freedom, they can in fact even provide more freedom on the longer term
Back to my point above that there are laws and regulations that are fine, and then theres the pre-crime nonsense trying to reduce risk to zero that are being peddled today.
IDK what has been going on but people in my area seem to be getting their hands on professional-level fireworks that sound like bombs going off. It used to be the roman candles and the fountains and a gentle background noise around the neighborhood but now it's insane.
There are plenty of parts of the world where people are free to enjoy themselves but also considerate of others.
AI tells me that the line was written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, and Roger S. H. Schulman. They also worked on Pirates of the Caribbean, Aladdin,
and the Mask of Zorro. so, to answer my own question, yes they are.
Fireworks affects others: fire danger, noise, lack of post-celebration cleanup. I've seen trash and unlit fireworks left in school yards that had kids coming in for summer school.
If people were more respectful with fireworks, this wouldn't be a polarizing opinion. Yet, here we are.
You know, there are millions of ways having fun that endangers no others. Millions!
(also small children have no fun, not at all! Woken up to be scared to shit, for f's sake, that's opposite of fun, the very opposite! Use your brain please!)
I am fine with the professional fireworks shows but people setting fireworks inside residential areas, in all hours of night, for weeks during summer is just people being massive douchebags.
Flying into London on November 5 a decade or so ago I was struck by how similar things looked to WW2 bombing run photographs, except it was in colour.
A moment of pause.
(The Australian War memorial has a museum with the nose of a Lancaster bomber, and they run footage inside it (or a mock up, they have a lot of stuff) projected onto the floor and forward view taken by bombing observation film crews during the raids on Germany)
Many fireworks are designed to explode at altitude. The biggest risk is probably if the firework is ingested into an engine (also a major risk for bird strikes).
Given the sheer quantity of energy that's already being continuously released in an engine would a small firework actually pose more danger than a bird? There's no bones in a firework after all.
Even small bird strikes are usually a non-event, as the engines are designed to withstand them (there's a very well-known YouTube video of frozen chickens being fired into one, and those are already a lot bigger and harder than most birds they'll encounter.) It's the big ones that make the news.
I loved playing with fireworks as a kid, and surprisingly have all appendages and senses intact, I even considered pyro as a job - so I definitely get the appeal.
I just think it's time that we left it to the professionals. Unless you are engaging in science or physics, I don't see the value in letting them off yourself.
~~It's also weird that America's birthday is celebrated using a Chinese invention.~~ Edit: bad point, I stand corrected.
Maybe leaving it to professionals would make more sense, but the majority of people aren’t in favor of it. I’m not even in favor of it and I had a couple fireworks bursting right outside my balcony last night. I was on the balcony and a ducked, though I would have been fine if I didn’t. Maybe require a brief safety training before purchasing? I’m not sure exactly what is going to reduce stupid behavior with explosives.
Yes, because what I was doing was objectively dangerous. Dueling used to be a commonly accepted practice, yes even killing - pity that ladder was pulled up! What about the children's chemistry sets that included uranium, mercury, and cyanide?
The uranium wasn’t really dangerous, unless you swallowed it. Common U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, so it’s not actually very radioactive. The most dangerous thing about it is its toxicity as a heavy metal, but plenty of other elements of a chemistry set are at least as dangerous.
I think consensual duels should still be legal. Numerous states have laws about mutual combat where it is perfectly legal to beat the fuck out of each other.
I concur, this would be good for developing cheap drone warfare capabilities. I mean, I love loud explosions and the sound of freedom because I'm not a wuss, but we need to get our drone game on China's level.
That would unironically be an amazing festival activity. A drone lightshow open to public participation where the different colors are tied to swarms engaged in a battle royale.
I also can't wait for the return of traditional blood sport events with bipedal robots as the contenders (but I digress).
freedom loving Democratic socialist here, this stance is very St Thomas Aquinas of you. let people continue to do the things you did without pulling up the ladder behind you. it's just for a night or two, the animals will live.
Everything needs to have a reason. Fireworks don't have a good reason, even ones that are professionally done. Just because its tradition doesn't mean it should be auto accepted.
If there is actual harm being done, i.e reason to ban them, then sure.
In the case of video games, I ironically agree on ban for kids on video games with online multiplayer. Kids should be forced to socialize in person in way greater ration that their online time to see that online personas are not real
In the case of sex before marriage, the opposite is probably true.
No, everything does not need to have a reason! "Just because" or "I just wanted to" do not inherently make the activity useless, nor mean that it should be discontinued.
If an activity is harmful is some way, but not beneficial in any other way (just because one "likes" it doesn't count"), the reasons to ban it outweigh the reasons to keep it
I see way too many trashy people setting off commercial grade illegal fireworks in the middle of crowded cities and neighborhoods. It is incredibly disruptive and damaging. Vets are traumatized. Dogs are traumatized. And sleep deprived parents have to repeatedly put babies back to sleep. It is insane that police do not enforce laws against these criminals.
> It is insane that police do not enforce laws against these criminals.
Not that I've known a ton of people who work for local police departments, but the majority of the ones I have known are exactly the type of people who are likely to partake in illegal residential fireworks around the 4th of July.
And hence why lots of people don’t want to live in dense cities, and then we end up with NIMBYs who want strict housing codes so they don’t have to live near people who set off fireworks.
Living in a city shouldn’t have to mean tolerating lawlessness.
Plenty of places people can move without others around. I might feel a bit of empathy for someone living surrounded by farmland and having a city built up around them, but that is incredibly rare and even in that case that only makes their property far more valuable to sell and move to another cheap rural area. If someone moves into an expanding suburb or right on the edge of a city and complains about the city expanding, zero empathy, they should of thought about that when they bought the property.
Then if you move out of the city, people become even more adamant that they shouldn't be considerate of their neighbors and you end up with the same problem.
If you move to a rural area your "neighbors" should be far enough away that they and you won't care if each of you are banging plates of metal together, shooting guns, revving engines, blowing things up, or whatever else.
My city did not have these issues. Population changes and cultural changes have brought in a large enough number of anti social people that then make things bad for everyone else. It’s not about being in a city, but the fact that a small number of selfish people think they have a right to disrupt everyone else.
"Population changes" and "anti social" being codewords for anyone not in your small group of acceptable people who follow your rules and share your priorities. You were there first so why can't you be the boss?
Laws are laws, and they still exist. Being anti social means acting in ways that affect others in society negatively. That’s what setting off fireworks late at night is. Yes, they need to follow OUR rules because we live in a society. And they should share my priorities. If they were doing things that ONLY affect them, that’s different. But we’re talking about waking everyone else up. Spare me your virtue signaling.
Fun fact: “Midway” is also the name of an American manufacturer of video and pinball games, and a Pacific theater of war in World War II, the most important victory in US Naval history. (The airport took this name in July 1949, according to the English Wikipedia.)
I recently moved to the St. Louis area for a software job at Boeing. I'm actually in a nice quiet neighborhood in St. Charles right under the flight path for planes landing at Lambert Field.
The fireworks last night were insane. All around me folks were setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking, my dogs were freaking out, one of them had a seizure. The air was filled with smoke and smelled of gun powder. It was one of the craziest things I've ever experienced.
Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.
I don't know what the planes were doing; I didn't hear or see any landing with all the smoke and noise.
40-50 years ago, fireworks were largely unregulated across the US and were a major part of the 4th of July cultural experience. Dangerous, slightly reckless, and incredibly fun. I have fond memories of this as a child. It is a big part of American culture, like turkey on Thanksgiving.
Every country has rules that exist but which are culturally unenforceable. Today, fireworks are outlawed in much of the US because safety. Americans refuse to comply across such a broad cross-section of people that it is effectively unenforceable. The cultural contradiction is too strong, people won’t give up their traditions for mere safety reasons. Even the nominal enforcers don’t believe in it. No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
This may be unsatisfying for many people but the impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans in the US captures an important component of the American zeitgeist. It is annoying for me sometimes but I recognize that this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
I realize as a Californian we may not count as "American" in this particular zeitgeist stereotype. But FWIW we have a firework ban in Nevada County that is widely respected. There are very few violations and the law is actively enforced.
The difference is we are in a no-joke dangerous fire situation and everyone recognizes it. Most people know better than to set off incendiary explosives in a forest. Anyone who shot off illegal fireworks would immediately be shamed and censured by their neighbors. I guess it's a form of commune-ism.
Yeah I think that’s the difference. On the east coast in July, the big safety risk with fireworks is generally to your own person.
I too live in Nevada County. While I largely agree with the claim that most people recognize and respect the safety implications, most years I still see (or hear) illegal fireworks. It’s clearly the odd individual doing it and not the majority of people, but the asymmetric risk they impose is a real bummer and I would love to see more/better enforcement of the restrictions on such individuals.
I grew up in southern CA, in a dry pine forest. I can assure you the children I knew traded and set off fireworks. We were all envious of the families who brought them back from Mexico — they had the best stuff.
I guess rules-followers assumed we were all doing as they did.
It’s all fun and games until you burn down a few thousand houses.
Not entirely sure, but this fire aligns with July 4, and has one death:
https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/wildfire/update-numerous-stru...
The biggest forest fire I know of in Southern California this year was caused by a boater using his government mandated safety flares.
If there was not a law regulating the use of these incendiary devices, Santa Rosa may not have burned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Rosa_Island_Fire
Your own link contradicts the assertion you’re making about the origin of the fire.
It's funny that CAs own "environmental" laws actually created the tinder box conditions in the forest. So their solution is more laws, of course.
The premise of this statement is wrong.
I'd argue the conclusion is wrong. The premise, that places like CA are currently such tinderboxes as a direct result of preventing natural burning and continuing to develop in areas that need to burn to stay healthy, is extremely well supported.
There was a similar cultural shift in the Portland OR area after fireworks caused the massive Eagle Creek fire 9 years ago. This is the first year that it seems like firework activity returned to the pre-fire levels.
250 baby! (/s)
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I saw a video of fireworks over LA from the window of a descending airplane in the last several years and it was pretty beautiful. They were everywhere.
I genuinely don't understand how this has never been a news headline throughout my entire life until now. We have closed air-spaces. We know when fireworks will be deployed. The article didn't specify any reason this would be different, but I would think there is a reasonable explanation. Maybe this happens all the time and I just haven't noticed.
There's nothing libertarian about Cali... you're thinking of New Hampshire.
Cali is fairly split between all shades of the socio-political spectrum (big difference bewteen Central valley and the coast, for example).
Greed and cultural narcissism is what you are seeing. It's a "gold rush" culture. It's been that way for a very long time.
Back around 1982, fireworks were a big no in my neighborhood. My friend across the street had some bottle rockets and he decided to shoot one off in the middle of the street. We didn't have a bottle to put it in to light it, so we wedged it between two bricks. He lit it and a split second before it went off, it tilted to point directly down the street. It fired off blazing down the middle of the road. At the same time a cop car just happened to turn the corner and that damn thing popped on the hood of the cop car. We scattered like ants. My friend that lit it ran inside, I hid in his garage under his moms car and the other two hauled ass home.
Well the cop parked out front and knocked on his door. His dad answered and they spent which felt like an hour (probably 10-15 minutes) talking about what happened. He got in big trouble and grounded. I stayed in the garage until the smoke cleared, then ran home. I didn't see him for at least a week.
Your post reminded me about that incident. They were regulated in Fort Worth Texas 44 years ago. I haven't thought about that day in years! LOL! Thanks for the fun memory.
Yea, I think OP is wearing rose-colored glasses. I'm 50 and I don't remember any time in my life when anything bigger than sparklers or tiny firecrackers were legal. To my young eyes, they've always been illegal. The differences now are 1. a more belligerent and careless population and 2. plummeting police enforcement. You can read a lot of comments here from places (mostly CA) where people care to do the right thing and enforcement is actually happening, and lo and behold it's at least helping. Fireworks bans are not any more "culturally unenforceable" than masking during COVID was.
It helps when your local culture is respectful, cooperative, and intelligent enough to understand why we don't light fires when every tree and blade of grass within 200 miles is dry as a bone. It hurts when your local culture is "Fuck everyone else, I'm going to do what I want!"
Just to add to the anecdotes:
I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.
I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.
Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.
My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.
I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.
In the mid-90s I had a brief but enjoyable hobby of model rocketry. I guess the #1 obstacle in this pastime is finding a safe launch site.
I had assembled a gorgeous SR-71 Blackbird rocket. I took it to a vast lawn space at Warren College, UCSD, on a quiet weekend, and set it on its maiden voyage. The very lopsided SR-71 immediately went horizontal and landed softly within a swimming pool fence where I had no access.
Some time later, I chose the neighborhood public school yard on a weekend. Nevertheless, the preparations drew a curious crowd of unaccompanied minor children who were younger than me. I told them to be careful and stay clear, and set off the rocket. By the time its parachute deployed, a security guard was driving his car around the field to meet us all at the landing site and give us all a stern warning.
So I abandoned that hobby forever and found less explosive things to tinker with. This week I grabbed two boxes of glow-sticks at the hardware store, and had myself a very glowy 4th.
Should have launched it off from Geisel library
That’s what I remember too. Fireworks in the city limits was a no-no. People would do it but you were risking a visit from the local police car. In my neighborhood (OakCliff in Dallas) the police have completely given up, people cruise Jefferson Ave shooting AR15s out of the back of their trucks every Sunday night. July 4th and New Years is completely out of control, it’s going to take a house getting burned down or some other horrible tragedy to change it.
We were setting off fireworks in the street in the middle of the afternoon (cause you'd buy a bunch and gradually deploy in the days leading up to the event). We shot off a rocket, which was one of mine. There were fire trucks shortly after putting out a blaze in an open lot. 1980s, I was <10 years, my older brother and his friend were pretty sure we caused it.
I have no way to know if we started that fire, but regulations exist for a reason and people who live in at-risk areas understand that they could lose their homes.
Some friends and I lit a wheat field on fire with Roman candles in Oklahoma when I was 18.
We were having a blast driving down the road shooting candles out of the car window when we topped the crest of a small hill and looked back to see smoke. We drove back and the field was on fire. Fortunately we were able to put it out before it spread any further and the area was so isolated no one saw us.
The dumb kid always runs through their own front door
So regulated kids could get them and use them without supervision eh?
You're right but in my experience in Washington state - Park rangers, forest fire marshals, and reservation police will all rigorously enforce the bans in places that are prone to wild fires. The local community won't have much sympathy either. People get how dumb that is. You also see bans enforced in very well off communities that basically have their own police force too. It's fascinating how these micro-cultures all self-regulate.
> this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
Yeah, and that’s the problem. A whole country full of people belligerent enough to say “fuck you” to anyone who tells them “hey you probably shouldn’t blow your hand off”. What a wonderful place.
But this is none of your business. I live in Germany, where everything is regulated by well meaning people. Going so far to regulate what you ought to say or to watch.
It is hellish. I don't recognize the country any more in which I was born and raised.
> But this is none of your business. I live in Germany, where everything is regulated by well meaning people.
Assuming you haven't lived in the US I think you're severely underestimating some of the stupidity going on.
So let's say your house has a thatched roof in California where it's bone dry and hot. At that point, the person lighting the fireworks will still say it's none of your business. Even if it's illegal and every year houses burn down as a result.
I don't think you get how much of an 'I don't care about anyone else, because FREEDOM... Murica' mindset exists unless you've lived there
You wouldn't be allowed to have a thatched roof house in California specifically because of the fire risk.
And if someone wanted to and had a bunch of reasons why it was a good thing you would turn around and be all "but the law" and point to the fire risk.
Fine, bad example. The point being, people light fireworks in places with extreme fire risk. And don't you dare tell them they cannot. None of your business is the kind response
> So let's say your house has a thatched roof in California
You mean like a temporary shelter in woods or maybe it’s a translation issue?
> Assuming you haven't lived in the US I think you're severely underestimating some of the stupidity going on
Speaking of, having a thatched roof in a dry fire prone area would sort of fall in the same category.
A thatched roof?
Thatched roofs don't exist in CA.
Oh no we cannot allow plebs to do anything that has the possibility no matter how small of a bad outcome.
Let's say you don't live in a California. Say you live near the East coast somewhere, as 2/3rds of the country does.
Sure, but our economy stomps most East Coast states (hello, New York!) and we aren't neighbors of the confederacy.
> Going so far to regulate what you ought to say or to watch.
Native born German. Calling BS on that crap.
I recommend reading up on "freedom from" vs. "freedom to". Explains quite a lot of differences between the European tradition of ensuring people are "free from" an potentially oppressive state vs. the US tradition of "freedom to".
In each "freedom of speech" index I know, Germany fares better than the US, or Britain, or Australia. Or quite a lot of different countries tbh.
RSF World Press (lower is better): - Germany 14/180 - Britain 18/180 - Australia 33/180 - USA 64/180
Freedom House (higher is better): - Germany 95/100 - Britain 92/100 - Australia 95/100 - USA 84/100
Edit: Typo
I can't take these indexes seriously when Germany is about to outright ban an entire political party. The US takes the first amendment very seriously.
That "political party" is the modern-day Nazis.
Like, actual Nazis.
If you think Nazis should be given a seat at the political table, especially in Germany, then I don't think I can take you seriously.
Faring better than some other country doesn't mean its good.
Try calling up rt.com via a German phone network.
And calling our chancellor a liar will get your house searched.
No one actually believes their BS and I doubt you actually do either.
They use so many bullshit and mental gymnastics to "score" Germany well despite their appalling "free speech" laws. I think it's very fair to say anyone appealing to either of these index's isn't even attempting to argue in good faith.
How did that work out for Alex Pretti, the protesting nurse that was murdered by the Feds recently?
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Don't you guys foam at the mouth about the 2nd Amendment? Which one is it, does he have a right to bear arms or does he not?
Got a source or just adding to the daily ragebait?
Seems like Trump always has an explanation, and is always the aggrieved party, and only seems to lose unfair/hoax elections vs his integrous ones
Isn't carrying a gun another right?
In Germany you will get arrested if you publicly talk about Gaza and Israel
To be fair, that'll happen in New York if you protest the internationally-illegal sale of real estate in Palestine taking place in a synagogue. Here's the event, a law was passed protecting religious institutions from protest (but was really for this).
https://theintercept.com/2026/05/11/real-estate-expo-israel-...
German here. The law as written actually permits most of the speech: As long as you avoid a number of banned phrases and don't voice explicit support for groups classified as terrorist organizations, your speech is protected - in theory.
In practice, wondrous things may start to happen already long before you reach that threshold, such as police forgetting their own laws, your venue, backup venue and second backup venue suddenly all deciding they cannot host you, politicians trying to fire you - or you suddenly realizing that you're unable to access any kind of bank account or credit card because the EU put you on a sanctions list (behind closed doors, without telling you, with no option to appeal).
But none of that has to do with overregulation - on the contrary, those measures are often in violation of the law and courts have frequently decided in favor of pro-palestinian activists and axed them.
Can you cite that please? Theres more going on with a lot pf the Gaza/Israel stuff (that im not unsympathetic to) that can blur the lines somewhat
https://www.the-berliner.com/oyoun-cultural-centre-to-close-...
This article does not say someone was arrested because of a public talk about Gaza and Israel. A local government has cut funding to a local org because of a disagreement. Nobody was arrested.
One of the problems I have with the right wing is they literally just decry anything and everything that doesnt only benefit themselves and when they get in office they do exactly the same thing with the subtext being "Tough shit, now I get to wear the Boot"
What does that have to do with people being arrested?
Having had that exact discussion with someone in Alexanderplatz right in front of the police building, nope.
This is just BS. I had and saw many public discussion also on German Marktätze on this topic, some quite heated. Nobody was arrested or removed from their job or otherwise sanctioned. But of course people were disagreeing. The right to free speech is not the right to freedom from contradiction!
> But this is none of your business.
The culture described extends far into things that are my business, like being able to walk around without being shot.
I was referring to"hey you probably shouldn’t blow your hand off”. I am not against regulations per se, I am German after all.
But a sane discussion should be had how far this should go. Regulating things which are dangerous to the person taking a risk knowingly is over the top in my book.
Best fireworks show I’ve ever seen in my life was in the middle of the German ruhrgebiet, on a small hill overlooking a shallow valley full of villages, each one setting off a seemingly-infinite round of colour and sound for the hour or so, New Year’s Eve, early 2000’s…
It was a panoramic display of unregulation.
Have you experienced Silvesterabend (New Year's Eve) in a major German city? It feels like a warzone. In the context of fireworks specifically, this image of Germany as an over-regulated nanny state feels particularly at odds with my experience of Germany.
I am sure they had all their permits and contingencies required perfectly done and everything was executed in perfect compliance.
I don't know when you were born but I'm pretty sure Germany was regulation capital of the world already back then and this is just your nostalgia bias speaking (also I agree with you Germany is currently way way overregulated but also outsiders have no way to really understand the degree of overregulation).
But also the US pretty much care too much when you for example try to blow your head off with drugs instead of a gun or explosives so the grass is not that green on the other side either.
The regulation from Europe is worse. They literally use satellite pictures to check and fine farmers..
No the regulation "from Europe" whatever that means is not worse, that's just the usual dumb anti-EU propaganda. If by that you perhaps mean checking EU agro subsidies against the actual size and use of declared fields, then that is not regulation, it's just checking the subsidies are not defrauded, which is a huge issue. Every farmer is free not to ask for the subsidies. But for most of the EU regs, the member country can choose how to implement them. Usually countries manage to not overburden their people with that. The German problem is homegrown.
HN is flooded with anti-Europe sentiment recently. I don't know how much of it is Americans genuinely believing or, or if it's astroturfing.
It's truly amazing how far the propaganda against the EU (for all its legitimate faults) has gone.
I wish you would have to life one with that bureaucratic nightmare / crony employment program that you put on your fellow human. I have no stronger curse.. The eu had one job - to protect europe, from war, from statesized companies like china and get it competitive again before the innovators take itall. It has failed in all fields.
...What?
I live in the EU. There is no war in the EU, that's surely a success by your own count. And it's cute to mention several "jobs" as one job. Perhaps you would like to narrow down your argument, if there is one.
Ukrainewar is a direct result of the change by trade policies. Libya, syria and algeria are barely stable. major industries are dying or migrating away, and the solution to this is firesales of smaller industries to incentivize "partners" to lower trade barriers and sell for a limited timemore from major industries.
The solution of choice in tech seems to be rent-seeking by institutions. The eu is dying and good riddance. Maybe its successor can be better.
Reality be the absolute and not a social construct at all. Either deal with it or become another USSR that tries to wing it while lying to itself to the bitter end.
You are completely wrong in everything you just wrote.
Well, it's a 60 day old account. Totally legit.
Fine farmers for what? Without context I have no idea whether this is a reasonable use of satellite pictures or not.
Depends which side of the wall you were born on…
Apparently, West...
Edit: before 1989.
If you are in the same insurance pool as me (state funded or otherwise) it is at least some of my business, yes?
I'm fine with idiots blowing their own hands off, I just worry about wildfires.
that is until you can't have a hospital bed due to those idiots.
Is that the line for regulations you're okay with holding on to? If so you better start regulating how many beds each hospital has as well, if bed demand is the bar you must control bed supply.
of course in Germany hospital bed supplies are regulated by the local states via LKHG law
We were talking about the US here though. Its very different when the government already effectively controls healthcare as a whole, of course they would control or have a large say in hospital bed numbers, for example.
For better or worse the US healthcare system is largely private. If the government isn't running the hospitals or directly paying for all care they shouldn't be stipulating quotas for access to various kinds of care.
As is any rationally run state.
Is your point that the only rational model includes the government having fill control over healthcare and the medical industry?
Yes. I am.
Government is democratically elected by the people, therefore, they are the ones that can make decisions for the people.
Why healthcare specifically, and where so you draw the line? Are you okay with democratically elected officials making any decision for the people as they see fit?
Don’t they do that when they make laws?
Well that's effectively my point? Are you okay with elected officials having the power to write whatever law they wish simply because they were democratically elected?
Surely there must be a line and you aren't granted the elected body control to do literally whatever they want.
the line is the constitution
We couldn't get people to wear masks to reduce the spread and help keep beds open for all the other typical needs, why would they let harm from fireworks impede them?
That has more to do with hospitals hyper-optimizing for profit. And a regular demand actually improves the situation here.
It's still bad for emergency services if everyone does it on the same day.
They’ll just run triage and tend to people who are easier to fix first and leave the more suicidal ones for later.
It's funny because I read the parent comment and thought that was actually kinda cool.
Lots of things we do are really stupid from a purely productivity, health or safety perspective.
American's were probably wrong to oppose alcohol prohibition. They probably should ban motorbikes. Fireworks should be largely banned to members of the public. Pizza should be illegal. Etc..
Part of what makes a country a place you'd want to live is the fact they don't create an excess of rules and regulations to optimise for what's best on paper, but allow people to do stupid things and allow them to live the life they want to live and take the risks they want to take where risks are not too excessive.
Commercial fireworks are dangerous, but not that dangerous. It's inadvisable that someone would use them without proper safety training, and it probably makes sense to have some rules around selling them to try to limit use, but in reality this just isn't a big problem.
Obviously people who live on flight paths should be more careful.
Rules come from lawsuits.
When you can get sued, safety fences get put up, quite quickly.
America has very aggressive lawyers. We live in a country, where being stupid, can be financially rewarding.
The threat of getting sued only motivates people with something to lose. If we let lawsuits largely drive what the rules are, how do you govern people who are so poor they are "judgement-proof."
True, but this is how it actually works, in the US.
Lots of stuff is not anywhere close to ideal, but it is what it is.
people refusing to understand that, doesn't help. Change usually comes from people who first, understand and accept, then they know what to do, to actually make change, as opposed to tilting at windmills.
Beats the pants off "please sir, may I have some more" as seen in many other places
Nah, I’d rather beg for money than be run over by some dipshit driving a truck on swampers that’s 3 times as big as they’ll ever need. Oh, wait, in other countries you don’t have to beg and plead to receive healthcare.
Comes in handy when the government agents are rounding up your neighbors. Except when they direct that energy at the neighbors instead of the government agents.
In my experience, the cycling and native-plant gardening types of Minneapolis are the ones ready to throw the tear gas cans back, and the fireworks-loving Texans are salivating over the boots.
No it doesn’t. The reactionary people are the ones cheering on the people doing the rounding, as long as it’s against people they don’t like.
That’s the problem with the mindset - if it was genuinely anarchistic it would be better. Instead, it’s just privileged and focused on creating an out group.
It is, yes it is. You should leave immediately if you dislike what you found.
Aren’t people on this website supposed to be like, smart? If I wanted someone to tell me “if you don’t like it leave it” as if it’s an actual position worth arguing I could just go to the bar.
Americans are always funny,... being proud they can have one day a year where they can breath a highly toxic air created by others or are forced not to ventilate their house and spend their day with a >2000ppm CO2 headache/drowsiness (or from the other PoV, proud they can inflict this on fellow Americans, even better).
"And if you don't like this, you can just git out!"
All the while they're stripped of dignity in the eyes of people abroad, by their aggressive/genocidal government's foreign policy actions.
No, the issue is migrants.
Now vs 80s and the 90s.
Fireworks on holidays were also a huge part of Chinese culture, but they've been banned now in cities and the ban seems to be mostly effective.
China even has the same issue as the US, where they aren't banned at the national level so you can still drive two hours and buy them legally. And whatever your stereotypes, China has plenty of scofflaws who aren't going to give something up just because the government tells them to, and its police are, very broadly, less heavy-handed as the US
I suspect banning firework sales in the US would have a significant impact.
China goes up and down on this. In Beijing in 2002, fireworks were pretty muted, there were some but not many. In 2008, completely different, they even burned the facade off of that CCTV cultural center.
Note that Beijing is where the central government is the strongest, although Beijingers aren’t as law abiding as residents of south Chinese cities are. Still, they were selling fireworks (when they were allowed) inside the third ring, you didn’t have to go out to Hebei to get them.
As for what the policy is now, I couldnt tell you, and wouldn’t assume it was one way or the other.
China's a police state where the government has absolute power and isn't limited even slightly by the constitution, with a disarmed population, it's completely incomparable.
So is the USA. It's comparable.
Our government has absolute power without a constitution binding it and our population is disarmed?
We have seen the “checks and balances” were held together by decorum alone. We are now seeing what happens if decorum is absent and government officials regularly lie and mislead the public and other government officials without facing any consequences.
I absolutely agree that things in the US seem to be going in a bad direction, but we haven't yet lost our constitution or system of checks and balances.
There's a big difference between the Constitution, law, and doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, was little more than policy and had nothing to do with law or constitutional rights.
Our checks and balances are still there, the problem we have today is the lack of willingness for those with the power to actually use them. Congress can stop Trump on many of the things he's doing, for example, they just don't want to and have instead continued a decades long pattern of Congress ceding power to executive. The judicial branch has at least stepped in at times, they really don't have to as the Supreme Court can choose to simply not hear a case.
The issue of lying politicians is as old as governments. If we want to focus on Trump as the issue here, and he's a big one, you only have to go back to the pandemic to find politicians on the other side of the aisle blatantly lying to the public without consequence.
> but we haven't yet lost our constitution or system of checks and balances.
> the problem we have today is the lack of willingness for those with the power to actually use them.
What they do is illegal, sure, but, unless they face consequences for that, they'll continue doing it. There are trillions of dollars to be made, and nothing to stand between them and the money.
> The issue of lying politicians is as old as governments.
It could be solved by making it a criminal offense (with attached loss of political rights and hefty prison time) to materially mislead the public while holding office (elected or nominated).
> It could be solved by making it a criminal offense to materially mislead the public while holding office
The problem would be how you define that in law and enforce it in the real world.
Its already hard enough to legally distinguish between a lie, misrepresentation, and someone telling what is wrong but they honestly believe to be true given what they know at the time. How do you define that?
And for politicians who are regularly working with state secrets, politically sensitive information, confidential/classified documents, etc how could you ever actually catch them in a lie?
> Its already hard enough to legally distinguish between a lie, misrepresentation, and someone telling what is wrong but they honestly believe to be true
You can’t and you shouldn’t. People in power need to be careful with the information they give the people they serve. If it’s wrong at the time it was communicated, too bad. The person should have been more careful.
I'm not sure how that could work. If we can't distinguish between those how would you write enforceable laws or regulations?
Its all well and good to have a blanket statement that politicians shouldn't lie. It entirely different to codify such an aspiration.
Yes.
Given American policing culture, I really don't buy that the police can't show up and start arresting you for public endangerment. They may not want to, but that is different
I was talking to someone that hosts commercial-grade fireworks, every year, in his backyard.
He said the trick is to invite a couple of cops.
The "trick" I've seen is just doing it with enough space to be safe and with property owner permission. The cops are likely caring about safety not the letter of culturally unenforceable law on July 4th. Problem is this don't work in the suburbs and cities, it's just to dense.
We are very much in the suburbs. It can get crazy.
If you have a cop or two at the party, and, often, a volly firefighter running the sparks, it seems to be OK.
A few years ago, one of our neighbors was running one, and a mortar fired into his second story. It was a 5-alarm fire.
I remember this from the 80s. There were city-sponsored shows, or you had a cop "supervising" your neighborhood show.
If they did this people like me would start setting off fireworks in protest.
If you set off a firework in front of a cop to protest fireworks being illegal, that would be illegal and you'd go to jail
But if you arrest him, I’m going to set off fireworks in protest. The market of stubbornness can remain solvent for a long time.
Classic Internet Tough Guy boast. Imagine thinking that, when the police come to fine you, your neighbors will break the law in front of the police "to show them!". Your neighbors may be just smart enough to not invite the police to fine them, too.
The "market of stubbornness" is about one deep at any given moment.
Cops have arrest quotas to meet - they don't mind arresting you too.
They actually do mind, which is why they don’t do it. Did you forget the reality of the situation?
They mind because they are completely outnumbered. Policing only works if you can point out a small minority and say “these people are causing harm to the majority of us”. With something like fireworks (or cannabis protests in many places) the police are severely outnumbered and they don’t have enough room in their jails anyway.
you don't have to arrest everyone, just make the likelyhood of being arrested non-zero to deter people
Are you really planning to stage a riot over fireworks being banned? And you have enough co-conspirators to outpower the police?
LOL, 25 years ago my neighbors and I were setting off fireworks over a yet-undeveloped part of our neighborhood. We saw police pull into the neighborhood. My family were the cowards who went inside. Our neighbors had to pay a fine. If we'd hung around we'd have paid a fine too.
I don't know what it's like now but that sounds like Europe in the 1980s. I remember going there from a country that restricted anything fancier than a sparkler and being amazed at all the cool things you could get. Blowing holes in snow forts with the larger Chinabölller was particularly fun.
Can only speak to my experience here in Washington, but 40 years ago you still needed to go to the reservation for the fun stuff. Even basic small firecrackers were outlawed in my county.
At least for where I grew up, you seem to have history backwards. 40-50 years ago fireworks were largely outlawed - the best I could play with as a kid were smokebombs, snaps, sparklers, and small fountains. Now fireworks are pretty much completely legal, even municipal grade cannons. This is why they are going off all over the place on July 4th.
> Today, fireworks are outlawed in much of the US because safety
Hang on, fireworks are banned in the land of the free? But every kid should own an assault rifle?
There are some states where you can still buy them year round. Holiday or not. South Carolina comes to mind because I was there a few months ago. They have giant stores all over the state.
As a Canadian, the earliest memories I have of driving into the United States were seeing the giant "fireworks" billboards lining the interstate. I know it depends on the state, but it's one of those things you notice as an outsider.
Yes, proper fireworks are banned in much of America. Guns aren't a total free for all, either.
I find it really amusing to see people carrying their assault rifles to grocery stores as if they are expecting a zombie outbreak or an alien invasion anytime now.
> impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans
Because fireworks are not usually homemade, enforcing bans is pretty easily done by cracking down on retailers who illegally sell them. They are easy to find (have to advertise) and have a lot to lose by breaking commerce laws. Notably, cannabis grows naturally in many climates in the US (so retail not strictly necessary) and we still ban it.
IIRC our state long prohibited the kind of fireworks that go into the air (roman candles, etc.) and only allowed sparklers and similar ground-effect pyrotechnics. Of course, the odd person would drive hundreds of miles with fireworks in their trunk, but overall the ban was fairly effective.
> No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
All that said, I am a fan of removing laws that continue to exist only as a pretext for targeting disfavored groups. A lot of the rot in the country is downstream of us not really being a nation of laws.
> This may be unsatisfying for many people but the impossibility of enforcing fireworks bans in the US captures an important component of the American zeitgeist. It is annoying for me sometimes but I recognize that this reflects an aspect of American culture that you can’t just erase.
I've taken to describing this aspect of Americana as "the fatal need to have a pretty good time", after the Minced Mockingbird post[0].
[0] https://www.mincingmockingbird.com/products/fatal-american-n...
The twenty something guys in my neighborhood set off fireworks from a small boat in the river behind my house. Same guys took an ATV out on the ice when the river froze this winter. They haven’t died yet!
I draw the line at setting the tinderbox that’s california on fire however.
> Even the nominal enforcers don’t believe in it. No one is motivated to actually enforce it.
Case in point, the ATC on this very flight said something along the lines of "Thanks for the report, I'll pass it on, but I doubt they'll be able to do something about it"...
I don't agree. I think it's a choice that each area has made between law enforcement and local governance. Regarding the St. Louis area, it really depends on which jurisdiction you are in. St. Louis County has over 90 municipalities. The neighboring counties are also fragmented but to a lesser degree. There are areas (mostly more rural) where it is legal and loud, some where it's not legal but enforcement is lacking, and there are quiet areas in which I assume enforcement does happen.
Yea, people have tried for decades to ban deepavali fireworks here in india with zero effect. It's simply not enforceable. The police themselves burst.
The police erased fireworks explosions in my neighborhood in the Bay Area.
Two years ago, I heard thousands of explosions in the month of July, same as every year. Then last year, the police posted signs reminding people that fireworks are illegal and that they would begin issuing fines to violators. The number of explosions was about 30% of usual (i.e., still many hundreds of explosions). This year I've heard exactly one explosion (on July 03).
I unambiguously welcome this change. You mention safety, but fireworks are also hard on neighbors with PTSD.
Is littering also in your opinion "an important component of the American zeitgeist"?
Bicycle theft?
Do you know where they are legal/illegal? Multiple places I know of have legalized them.
Illinois prohibits unlicensed individuals from buying or setting off commercial grade fireworks. People buy them in Indiana. Some of the largest fireworks stores in the country sit right on the Indiana side of the state line.
Illinois bans nearly all fireworks, not just commercial grade. You can basically only buy sparklers or tiny fountains.
You have to visit Wisconsin or Indiana to get anything that pops, spins, bangs, or flies. Even those little ground spinners are banned in Illinois and they are hardly “commercial grade”.
In Texas, you have to go outside of the city limits. South Carolina you can get them year round. There are other states that are legal year round, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
Yes, the typical endangering or hurting others for the sake of fun culture, very very precious and rich culture indeed! : /
You could say the same about guns.
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As Eastern European - please don't go to Eastern Europe. Keep your bullshit with yourself, we don't want Americans who will then wake up that we aren't their "Conservative, Christian paradise".
As someone living on one of the westernmost parts of Europe, I’d ask them respectfully to not come here unless they are asking for political asylum (which we consider an inalienable human right). And, in their case right now, a very understandable one to want to exercise.
I, for instance, would have done that the first time, in 2016. I wouldn’t wait for the circus to be on fire to leave.
Imagine thinking you are saying something positive about American “culture” with your comment. Wow. You would have sounded more true to it by just writing “MMMURICA, AMIRIGHT!?!?”
> Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions
Fireworks are not legal to shoot in pretty much any city. They are not legal in my city. That did not stop them from being used. In fact, they are going off around me the night after too
In rural places where wildfire risks are very high, firework bans are usually enforced and respected.
Depends on the state.
They're legal to buy like an hour out of the city unfortunately
Also the 2A wingnuts think banning fireworks is akin to gun control https://www.tully-weiss.com/blog/fireworks-and-the-second-am...
My opinion about how people use fireworks changed when I adopted a dog from a shelter and discovered how deeply traumatizing booms are to her. From chatting with other dog owners this seems to be common. If my neighbors could see the extent fireworks affect the same friendly, silly pup their children love greeting everyday, they would probably think twice about how they use them. We can manage the night of the 4th by traveling out of town, but the 1-2 weeks of random booms that follow the holiday are really tough for us.
You certainly have a higher opinion of neighbors than I do. As far as any action that negatively intrudes on others, it seems the most likely responses are either that they are allowed to do what they want and you need to deal with it, or to do it even more now that they know it bothers you as punishment for you daring to ask.
Yeah first 4th of July as a dog owner. He did relatively OK inside but we had a hell of a time taking him out for a walk. Every time we thought everyone was done blowing their loads someone else refueled and things started over again.
I used to love the tradition of lighting fireworks but I think the way people have been using them has changed in the last decade. Everything seems to transform into a war zone and some people do incredibly dangerous things.
Its become a dick waggling contest. It will be quiet all night and then one person sets something off. Some other person "well ill show them who has better booms" and gets a bigger one, sets it off. Next thing you know its 30 minutes of booms and pops culminating in the largest boom possible, its goddamn irritatibg
> one of them had a seizure
It's insane to me how much dogs are supposedly loved by such a large chunk of the pop, and yet people proceed to go apeshit with fireworks fully knowing how badly this affects them.
My guess because we just read of the seizure stories online but 95% of dogs are ok with it. Mine is. There's a limit to dealing with edge cases that most people have.
Not saying this is how I feel or act though.
My dog, now passed after a long and happy life, loved fireworks deeply. It was his favorite day of the year. He would chase and pretend to bite, bark, and run around with joy.
To be fair, I am quite certain he was an outlier.
We have three dogs of different breeds and ages, none of them handle fireworks well. They don't have seizures, but one of them turns into a quivering, shaking mess and the other two try to hide under couches and beds. I wish they were okay with it, but my wife and I have to plan our 4th around the dogs because of how they react.
from OP:
>setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking,
I'm in Bellevue, WA, and experienced house-shaking fireworks for the first time this year. I was inside with my cats - theyve always been more or less fine with fireworks, just hiding under the bed - but this year's house shakers were on another level. When the first one went off, I thought an accident had happened and a cache of fireworks had exploded. Scared the hell outta me. Then there were about 5 more like that spread across the next 5 hours. 0% of pets would be ok with these ones, I guarantee it. Idk if theyre new this year or what but Ill be doing the same as OP next year.
I think you’re probably right about people’s feelings on the matter.
Though in my experience dogs that are ok with fireworks are the edge case.
I've had two dogs. One didn't like fireworks but would just turn his head towards the noise then walk over to the nearest human, and the other completely ignored them.
However! The first was a Labrador cross and the second was full lab. Breeds intended for use as gun dogs might not react to gunpowder and explosions as much.
Yeah, my dog either looks at them or ignores them. Same with thunderstorms.
no, 95% of dogs are not okay with it.
95% of the dogs in your home are okay with it.
this study from Psychology Today finds that 83% of dogs freak out when they hear loud noises:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202202...
That study doesn't say "freak out". It says 83% ever showed "any fear" of fireworks, which is a huge variation. My doesn't like going outside when there are fireworks, but the sound of rain freaks him out way more.
Our dog is not ok with fireworks or gunshots. He either goes into the basement (normally off limits) or into the bedroom (mostly off limits) when he hears them.
However it also took him quite a few years to get over his fear of thunder.
I think he'll survive even though he'd be included in the 83%.
Not just dogs; more than a few humans don’t cope with loud noises of various kinds.
Good thing we didn’t have too many of those people during the revolution or we would still be part of Great Britain.
I guess you had more of those people after the revolution.
Many combat veterans react to anything resembling gunfire and explosions. And you can add drone noise to that these days.
Hey, we cannot be patriotic here. The only fighting we support is the genocide in Gaza and helping Ukraine because "russia bad".
Most dogs in my neighborhood are ok with them. My own dog loves them. I try to keep him inside only because I think it might be bad for his hearing if he gets too close. Beyond basic temperament I wonder if owner training is implicated, as more people become annoyed by fireworks they don’t expose the dog to them at a young age.
How on earth would you even presume to know this?
Just as you don't need to be a vet to know the difference between a dog and a cat.
I own a dog and it's common sense that a dog is a reflection of the owner, and when you have a dog you know every other owner and dog in the neighborhood (and the ones that use fireworks have dogs that don't mind fireworks). If you don't enjoy fireworks then you tend not to introduce the dog to fireworks at a young age, and the dog will tend to be afraid of them. Look up "optimal age to train a dog".
I’m not a dog owner but aren’t you supposed to play fireworks on your TV at increasing volume in the preceding days to get them used to it?
That seems a better option than expecting everyone else to change their behaviour because of a pet you chose.
Loud action movies seem to help a friend of mine's dog who otherwise acted like fireworks were the devil incarnate.
I've never heard that, like fireworks homeopathy or something? Where did you hear that?
Here is the first non-Reddit link from Google: https://www.royalkennelclub.com/health-and-dog-care/health-d...
> Getting your dog used to loud and sudden noises can make them more relaxed and less reactive when the fireworks outside get going. There’s a good range of CDs and playlists of fireworks, storms, and loud noises available, and playing these can really help your dog desensitise to the noise.
> Start by playing the sounds at a low volume, and as your dog gets used to it you can slowly increase the volume over a period of time so that they become used to the noise. This can work especially well with young dogs and puppies, and can let you nip any problems in the bud before they even arise.
interesting!
What do they do during thunderstorms?
The degradation of canine genetics and behavior to the point where loud noises cause seizures is pretty absurd. I love dogs but I grew up around working dogs. City people have pushed dog breeding to the point where the desirable dog is riddled with some pretty extreme codependency and anxiety that they mistake for affection and companionship. The poor animals spending their lives in a few hundred square feet and completely alone for a large majority of their lives kinda sickens me.
Jeez, just imagine a ballistic missile hitting your neighbour's house, with no indication or alert coming ahead. I would bet a good 50€ that you'd be freaking the shit out.
I agree, but luckily my terrier apparently doesn't give a poo about fireworks. Probably nobody jad thrown fireworks at him yet. My inlaws' country dog (also a fox terrier mix with the same temperament) growls at people, especially teens, smelling of powder and barks at fireworks and motorbikes. Good thing he's not a Malinois to nip those teens and chase the motorbikes. So it'a more of a nature vs. nurture thing.
dog behavior is strictly a reflection of their owner
Given that most dogs are adopted from shelters, dog behavior is often a reflection of early upbringing. The current owner can train and teach their dog, but some behaviors and fears set in fairly early on.
Moreover, many dogs are beaten or worse when they’re young, and undoing that fear and trauma is a lifelong (for the dog) struggle.
Thus, dog behavior is far from “strictly a reflection of their [current] owner.”
Nearly all animals are afraid of fireworks:
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-devastating-effects-o...
Fireworks are a traumatic and disruptive intrusion on their environment akin to a temporary war. We (humans) already do enough traumatic and disruptive intrusions on the lives of wild animals, that doing this wholly unnecessary “just for funsies” thing is particularly cruel.
It’s rich how you’ve decided to call out “city people” as being responsible for the situation rather than the trash individuals who set off illegal fireworks.
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I mean I think most people would agree it's completely irresponsible and borderline absuive to own a dog and stay in nearly any city in the USA during the 4th.
People rightfully blame the owners it's not like this is a surprise for them.....
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All other animals too. There are tons studies about the effects of New Year’s Eve fireworks on birds, for example, that are devastating.
Most people just don’t care about anything but themselves. It’s disgusting me to no end.
Like 80% of dog owners treat dogs like possessions. When I say "like possessions" I mean they abuse them by physical means or by locking them into small apartments and not meeting the animals basic needs. It's wild how people trap dogs into small city/suburb boxes and then 'train' them to be good(break them). I stand by 80% if you account for global numbers and not just western/developed nations.
In much of the developed world it's weirdly mandatory to have a dog or cat. The way folks treat them is so messed up. Then these folks turn around and claim they love animals. It's nonsense. Most people don't need a pet nor do they treat them like an animal lover would.
But words have no meaning nowadays. Everyone is everything they want to be.
A few years ago, on July 4th one of my mom's dogs freaked out, somehow managed to escape, and got hit by a car before my mom found her. She loved that dog, regularly attending nose work competitions with it. One of your pets getting a seizure must be harrowing for both you and the dog.
I don't light fireworks.
My female Weimaraner was terrified of thunderstorms and fireworks. Once, she managed to squeeze herself under my Mini Cooper. I didn't know at the time that panic vests were a thing. The breed is a gun dog ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I forget how we managed to get her out from under there, but it took a bit. My Akita doesn't care, he checks the balcony, yawns, and back to his toys. But he is a afraid of air balloons and blow up Christmas Santas. Go figure.
Fallas festival in Valencia is not your thing then. But at least I realized why there is an audiologist on every corner.
I moved across states a few years ago. In the old neighborhood, people would be drunk and lighting that crap off for hours and hours. Completely moronic and thoughtless.
Here, it is illegal. First offense is a fine, second offense is jail.
As another STL resident, fireworks are illegal everywhere in the County (not sure if St. Charles as well, but probably), and our local muni PD even sent out multiple warnings about prosecution.
But our inner ring suburb was similarly full of smoke last night and the smell of many amateur fireworks shows.
Only a few in my neighborhood, but they were quite the production. I remember firing a few bottle rockets as a kid, but these were definitely a few steps above that! Sounded like mini mortars, maybe those boxes with a bunch of shells timed to go after each other.
That description sounds like every New Years Eve in The Netherlands.
Few days ago a law that forbids non professionals to set off fireworks started applying... We'll see if that makes any difference.
We'll see if we ever get something like that in Spain. I guess not, fireworks are just too deep in the culture here.
Denmark too. Aarhus looks like a war zone from the smoke on new years.
STL is famous for having a large number of folks shooting guns into the air on New Years. So much so that there are warnings to not go outside. Stay safe.
There have also been incidents of people being hit by those bullets. It’s just so reckless and dangerous for people to do that. But there’s always someone doing it …
It would be more practical if major cities had "fireworks zones" with ambulances on call and perhaps some safety advice.
> out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.
You have quite the faith in code enforcement.
I spent a year in Germany and Oh God do Germans shoot off fireworks for the New Year. Most of the time Germans live up to the stereotype of neat, clean, quiet, polite but the next day there is a mess of firework wrappers all over the street.
-having lived in MO, yeah, pretty scary
-don't miss the hill restaurants
-maybe still stick around if you own a house such as to help prevent it being set ablaze that night inadvertently...
>one of them had a seizure
People might say you just made this up for internet points. But this is real, this is an actual thing that happens to dogs (and other pets) when exposed to prolong fireworks noise!
Yeah, it really happened. But to be fair the little dog in question is prone to seizures and all the booming certainly set this one off. She was fine after things calmed down around midnight.
Given your statement of "hundreds of feet" I guess I can take the rest of your post with a large pinch of salt, too.
I don't know fireworks that well, but these appeared to be the commercial type, with a large lift-charge that lights the sky up with a lightning style flash followed by a sky burst and the house-shaking boom of the sort I usually associate with shows put on the city or whatnot. I had two of these "shows" going on just north of me and one to the south.
And I have a pretty good idea of heights around here. I mentioned I work at Boeing on flying things so I track the ones that fly over me. They're usually about 1000 to 1500 ft. AGL on approach when they go over my house and about 200 knots. Southwest has the most flights into and out of St. Louis so it's usually a 737, and those have a wingspan of just over 100 feet on the newer models.
So yeah, I'd say these fireworks were going up at least 300 feet.
My apologies. Apparently my own estimate about how high fireworks generally go was way off.
On Reddit last year, I found a link to a City of Phoenix dashboard that monitors all the county-wide emergency dispatch calls that are not suppressed for privacy/security reasons. I watch it throughout the day and night, especially on holidays like this one.
I counted upwards of 23 fires on the map at any single point in time, between sunset and 11pm. Most of those calls indicated either debris fires, or Dumpster fires, but there were also roof fires and vehicle fires, including one police-involved car accident.
I stayed inside all weekend after attending church on Saturday evening. The Air Force flyover was not visible in my area. I immensely enjoyed the celebrations on live streaming. And singing my heart out, creating new playlists.
> Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.
Opposite for me, I plan on vacationing to somewhere I can have more fun with my kids.
Howdy, neighbor! (We are on Main Street)
> Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.
Then like me you can just worry about whether some dipshit is going to burn your house down while you're away.
It'll be fine; the house is insured. ;)
Luckily it's so wet here at the moment the fire risk is minimal.
They really should be controlled a lot more - a nearby house was hit by some sort of Roman candle thing and completely burned down the other night.
There was at least a lot less "illegal fireworks" when people had the drive two states away to buy them.
Doesn't help in California because people buy them in Nevada and resell them. Apparently that's easier to do nowadays due to the Internet?
https://oaklandside.org/2026/07/01/illegal-fireworks-police-...
> Despite strict fireworks bans in many cities, including Oakland, they’ve become a year-round nuisance in the Bay Area. And one of the primary ways they’re spread is through the enterprising but illegal work of small-time dealers who obtain the contraband from licensed shops outside of California, sneak it into the state, and then sell hundreds and even thousands of pounds of explosives out of homes, vehicles, storage units, and even corner stores.
When I was in North Carolina on a trip the chap I was visiting said I'd know if I was crossing over to South Carolina when I saw all the fireworks shops as it was illegal to sell them in NC but not SC. Funny to see.
(No idea what the actual rules are, just repeating what he told me)
Same in the NY/NJ/PA tri-state. Ahead of the 4th a NY state trooper sits in the parking lot of the Phantom Fireworks in Matamoras, presumably calling in NY plates for their buddy to go pull over.
We just took the back roads home instead of the highway.
The Kentucky/Indiana border has always been that way in my lifetime. Kentucky restricts fireworks sales to just "sparklers" and Indiana has much more latitude in what they can sell. The thing about Indiana fireworks stores that has long confused me has been how many of them are gas stations. That always seemed like a problematic pairing to me.
In a lot of states, Indian reservations can also sell them. And they’re basically completely unregulated. It’s illegal to bring them or set them off into other towns but people do it. Hundreds of people. And tens of thousands have to be repeatedly woken up because of their selfishness.
Yeah not sure why that changed, when I was a kid you could only get sparklers and small stuff that stayed on the ground. Today I could get everything for a near-professional show if I wanted to spend the money.
When I was a kid you could get actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite. Now you can only get little firecrackers that don't even blow up little green army men.
It's really dependent on your state laws. My state allows fireworks, so you can get most things but they are very limited in size and explosive content.
What it amounts to is that most cities/counties don't enforce their existing laws in this area because people would have a shit fit, and they would arrest so many people that it's kind of impossible.
Something something banning things doesn't really work to do anything but make criminals out of every day people.
> actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite
Not even close.
A military M80 [0] is ~5g of flash powder, an inconsequential amount of low-explosive albeit enough to seriously injure yourself. The consumer "M80" are even weaker. These are used to simulate real explosions by the military.
The smallest standardized military demolition charge contains ~110g of TNT, in a similar small cylindrical format. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in power between an M80 and these demolition charges.
A "quarter stick of dynamite" isn't a standard thing. But if it was, it would probably come in around 50g of TNT equivalent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-80_(explosive)
Btw, flash powder (at least the pyrotechnic variety as opposed to that used for camera flashes) is actually a primary high explosive.
Primary = easy to activate, doesn't need an explosive initiator. High explosive = detonates rather than deflagrates.
And for bonus points, most flash powder is self-confining in very small quantities. Means a little pile of powder will detonate even if not enclosed.
You could sure make decent explosives with OTC fireworks though - in the early 90s we would buy hundreds of those whistling fireworks, hammer them, cut the bottoms off, and then fill various bottles with all the powder. We made a shockwave with one of our makeshift bombs and decided we should probably stop after that.
In most states you can go buy all the tannerite you want. That's an actual explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VaLtf_EIVQ
The old school whistling fireworks were often based on picrate chemistry. Picrates famously have the ability when burned to hover between normally deflagration and true detonation; the whistling is a side effect of this. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history (see below) was a picrate explosion. These aren’t used anymore for safety reasons; they don’t have a great stability profile and picrates are true high-explosives.
Over the years they have found alternatives for and phased out most high-explosives used in fireworks. Many high-explosives will just deflagrate/burn but can spontaneously detonate with considerable power if the conditions are right, which makes them dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
Have advances in explosives, fuses and quality control made fireworks safer in the last 40 years?
Or perhaps the safety improvements are offset by sellers now offering bigger fireworks (either because those are now actually safe and both buyers and sellers are more comfortable with them, or just because of a general hedonic improvement).
Or perhaps they are safer for their users, but worse for starting fires or interfering with low-flying aircraft.
Either way I would be interested in reading more about this, something more nuanced than "fireworks dangerous". At the least it's a counterpoint to what happened with illegal drugs which seem to have become more dangerous as a result of regulation and bans.
I think the improvements in consumer fireworks safety has been incremental. The fuses are more reliable, they’ve reduced the use of mercury and other heavy metals in pyrotechnics, and they’ve moved toward more stable chemistries. That said, I think regulation is marginal at best so who knows what a random firework will actually do. There are also practical constraints on the kinds of chemistries that make good fireworks e.g. you don’t want potential high-explosives to be something you can buy over-the-counter by the kilo.
There is a parallel in military explosives research. For example, the US military is slowly moving toward “insensitive munitions” which use explosive chemistries that are nearly impossible to detonate accidentally due to fire or impact. This originated in nuclear weapons research but has spread to other weapon systems.
Fireworks are intrinsically dangerous in the hands of incompetence, ignorance, or stupidity. No amount of engineering can solve that problem unfortunately.
M80s were more like 1/8th of a stick, I think. My uncle bought quarter sticks of dynamite one time. Wow. Quite a bit bigger and louder than an M80, and M80s were LOUD! My dad's cousin blew off most of his thumb and parts of several fingers with one. It was old, and it had a flash fuse. He was planning to toss it, but it went off instantly. (Don't hold fireworks when you are lighting them.)
A couple of years ago my brother got some flat triangles from a guy on the side of the road. First thing I've seen in years that was like an M80. We put a flat soccer ball over one, and it went 50 feet in the air. Very fun.
> Today I could get everything for a near-professional show if I wanted to spend the money.
Not unless you're purchasing on the black market or (illegally) manufacturing it yourself.† The professional stuff is substantially larger than anything sold on the consumer market.
† Which is surprisingly trivial to do BTW but please be extremely cautious and very thoroughly master the underlying theory if you decide to go that route.
Yep. I volunteered for a real fireworks show in California once. The size of the mortars was… so much bigger than the stuff I was used to seeing people get at fireworks shops.
Along with the reminder from the safety coordinator that each firework was capable of completely talking your arm or leg off. The “consumer” grade fireworks aren’t capable of that, although they’re still dangerous.
I'm not sure if being homemade was the reason, but I just heard about a medflight for somebody hit by a homemade firework.
I say this as somebody with a book on how to make them, but I've always been a bit too scared to try.
Being homemade is (almost) never in and of itself a reason. A lack of knowledge or judgment certainly can be. However often the motivation for DIY is to circumvent regulations to go big but of course one of the primary reasons for such regulations is that the associated consequences when things go wrong are dire. The story could well have turned out the same even if the item had been purchased from a reputable vendor. There's a very good reason the professional shows use barges or large fields and set up a huge exclusion zone around them.
When I was a kid growing up in Iowa in the 90s, my friends and I would hold Roman candles and bottle rockets in our hands and try to shoot them at each other. We're lucky we didn't get seriously injured, but it was all fun and games back then as long as you didn't tell your parents.
Did you move? There are huge differences between states in what’s available, all the way from “just sparklers and other tiny stuff that doesn’t fly” up to “anything that doesn’t require an explosives license”, and within states areas near cities often restrict fireworks sales.
Some places, I’m pretty sure they just waive the explosives license too.
I hate sparklers so much. Watchings kids wave those things about makes me feel so sick.
Capitalism. Get rich or die trying.
Rather than regulate fireworks out of existence wouldn't it be better to fix the problem at the root? Why do we permit such fire prone housing to be built just to save a few dollars?
The root problem is drunk people lighting off a bunch of rocket-propelled explosives, actually. Even if the houses were fireproof concrete bunkers, they'd still be starting wildfires in the grass/brush/trees. (And of course, it's more than "a few dollars.")
> Why do we permit such fire prone housing to be built just to save a few dollars.
I know you didn’t mean it, but this question isn’t a question. It’s a statement formed as a question. It’s a judgement. It’s not a curiosity legitimately asking why.
There are so many good reasons why houses in the US are built the way they are. Some of which are…
1. Concrete/Brick houses retain heat and are often harder to cool. They also don’t insulate well. US Houses have been built as a means of controlling moisture, humidity, and cooling efficiently.
2. Stick built houses cost less to repair. Brick/Concrete houses require much more demolition to repair, rebuild, or change. While replacing a load bearing wall in a stick house can be done easily, concrete and brick require the entire wall to be torn down.
3. Humidity, Moisture, and Wind matter. When moisture gets into concrete and brick then freezes it can cause huge structural cracks. Whereas in stick houses, it’s not as big a deal. I had a house with a raised driveway and a walkout basement. The basement and driveway had to be completely demolished due to moisture cracks. If the entire house was concrete it would have been a write off.
4. Soil composition matters. In some areas the soil is not capable of holding the weight of all the concrete and brick. Causing structure issues later and endangering folks.
Modern building codes today in most places are pretty solid. They require 2x6 framing, they require testing of the airways in the house to ensure proper air leaking/sealing. They require the structure of the house be built with specific bolts. They require the framing to be done in a way that resists wind sheer and twisting.
The US Building codes have been revised consistently over time. This started with the nuclear bomb testing in the 40s and onward. They built houses, and then bombed them to find out how to make them better. We’ve learned from Tornados, Hurricanes, and more. These all have resulted in major improvements to building houses.
Today in the US we have no shortage of housing methods. We have SIP Framing, ICF Concrete Framing, Recycled ICF, Modular designs, etc. Most still go with stick built because it’s the better option for the majority.
I lived in a 2x4 house in TN that was built poorly and improperly. I spent 200k in 4 years repairing that house. Now I live in a 2x6 built slab house. This house was built by a luxury builder properly.
The difference between the two is astonishing. The TN House couldn’t go less than 82 degrees when it was hot and humid. The luxury house is in Vegas, it can be 50 degrees inside when it’s 120 outside. You can cut costs on stick built, but you can also make some of the best houses with it.
Also, to add to this what we’ve learned about fires and houses is that.. it’s less about how the house is built.
Whether a house catches fire or not is almost always due to the landscaping, maintenance, and roof of the house.
Traditional house siding and roof will resist flames and fires. However, if an overgrown bush catches fire it will cause enough heat to the side of the house to break down that protection and set it aflame. Same with leaves in gutters, etc.
Since we're on a wild tangent here, the US house construction is also held back by the sheer momentum of wood-framed buildings.
For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build. Yet approximately nobody in the US uses it.
> For example, aerated autoclaved concrete has better structural strength, doesn't need additional insulation, completely non-combustible, and is cheaper to build.
Apparently it ages out though and becomes unsafe when it does, resulting in a scandal in the UK:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66686864
"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) as building material or system. Many buildings from the 60s and 70s built from many materials are now having problems due to inadequate maintenance, and old age."
I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean. I've never heard of this problem with regular brick or concrete structures.
Not really. AAC was used to build floors without enough of additional reinforcement, and this is a bad idea. Just like regular concrete, it's weak in tension and is even more brittle.
If you use it to build walls and then use regular concrete or wood to build floors, it has none of these issues.
It's an amazing material, very light and it can be cut with a special handsaw on site.
No, it really was a question. Please don't inject your own biases and assumptions when interpreting my words.
It seems that you've invented a false dichotomy where the only options are wood frame or brick and concrete and then assumed me to be advocating for the latter. I was not. There are a variety of ways in which wood frame structures can be made less prone to external sources of fire. At least a few jurisdictions in california have adopted some of these methods into code as of late.
My question implied judgment to an extent, sure, but it was also genuine in that I truly do not understand why we as a society are not more proactive about these things. It isn't limited to fires either. In the face of all sorts of natural disasters we consistently optimize regulations for cost rather than safety. Consider the myriad examples of structures being built in flood prone areas.
What alternative do you propose?
Off topic but I went to a local town’s medium-sized professional fireworks show this weekend and there were none of those small flash really loud fireworks that shake you to the core. Not even in the grand finale. Oddly they are what I enjoy most. Have they gone out of fashion or do they mess too much with pets?
My town of <1k population had their fireworks tonight. I want to say at least half of the fireworks rattled your bones and jimmied your organs.
There are such a wide variety of fireworks available now there is probably less need for those specifically. The show I was at still had enough loud booms to set off dozens of cars' alarms repeatedly during the twenty minutes.
I believe those are called "salutes".
That's what I know them as too. We used to go out to a family friend's farm for a fireworks show he'd put on every 4th, and he'd always have a bunch of those interspersed. They used to be my favorite growing up, because of the anticipation between when it launched and when it would explode.
I miss those too. I remember as a kid one display that shot a bunch of really bright white flare-like fireworks that were blinding and hung in the sky followed by dozens of those small but loud ones and it was memorable.
They sure haven't gone out of fashion on the streets of SF. My ears were ringing!
All were purchased already I assume.
You mean mortars ?
As a European reading these comments I never would have expected fireworks in the US to regulated at all. In my country you can buy whatever you want. The most popular time to use them is at New Year, and even in supermarkets they have popup stalls selling then. If you go out at midnight you can see fireworks in every direction.
I live in a capital city thats surrounded by forest. I've never heard of any forest fires caused by them, but I guess it's because winter - we often have snow that time of year.
It definately has a big effect on air quality though, the smell of gunpowder lingers until the next day. We are far from the sea so there is little wind that time of year, and the cold temperatures cause the smoke to stay close to the ground (same issue with wood burning stoves which are common in older houses).
What is sad is that a few irresponsible people are always what end up ruining something that most can manage to do without endangering others. Growing up it was a yearly thing where my family would go somewhere safe away from public and set off fireworks.
Fireworks are a lot of fun. Sure not everyone's thing but many enjoy them and can manage to use basic safety and not endanger anyone.
I just can't believe a firework going off right at an airport was not intentional. I believe someone was most likely thinking "I'm gonna lite this off right by a plane for all to see my awesome show!". Not trying to hit the jet but rather just look at me people isn't this awesome!? No it is not.
This is the type of thing that ends up getting fireworks banned or more controlled for the rest of us.
Reminds me of the idiot who flew his drone over an active forest fire while crews were actively fighting it causing the helicopters or water bombers to have to disengage the fire until the drone was gone. Then drone rules get tightened for the average guy just wanting to have fun responsibly.
>What is sad is that a few irresponsible people are always what end up ruining something that most can manage to do without endangering other
This only happens because we (you, plural) let it. You can simply not let it be ruined despite the irresponsible people.
My uncle's house is under the landing path for Midway Airport. His whole house shakes when a plane comes by. From his front yard you can easily read the numbers on the plane's body.
Parts of the fence surrounding the airport is across the street from a neighborhood. You can sit and watch planes landing not too far above your head. I'm not surprised a consumer grade firework was able to hit one of those planes.
I am a bit surprised someone with a house placed like your uncle would feel it’s ok to light up fireworks under an airport approach path.
From his house, no I don't think a consumer mortar could hit a plane. The planes weren't that low.
But the area surrounding the airport is very densely populated. Given all those people, I'm not surprised some dumb kid (or adult) lit fireworks near the airport.
Also, most fireworks are illegal in Illinois. But it's only a 30 minute drive from Chicago to Indiana.
I haven't lived in Indiana in over 20 years, but is the law for mortars still:
Legal to posses
Legal to buy and sell
Not legal to use
That was always a bit silly to me. Stores would even have you sign a waiver that you weren't going to use them in Indiana.
There is a fireworks store near me in Pennsylvania that is off I-95 at maybe the first exit over the Delaware line. When you enter the building, you go into an atrium with two doors that go into two separate sub-stores divided by a wall. In the atrium, they check your driver's license. If you have a Pennsylvania license, you have to enter the store that only sells non-explosive, non-aerial fireworks (no rockets, mortars, firecrackers, Roman candles, etc). If you have a Delaware license, you can go in the other part of the store that sells the good stuff. It's illegal to possess explosive and aerial fireworks in Delaware. They also have a waiver to sign that agrees you will use the fireworks legally.
I guess in Pennsylvania it's illegal to sell the good stuff to PA residents, but not to out of state visitors.
In one of the MD boarder counties (Montgomery maybe?) it at least used to (and may still) be illegal to posses even sparklers or fountains. And they were serious about enforcing it. Cops would stake out VA fireworks stands and radio in license plates to cops in-county. Since even possession is illegal, it's a confiscation and fine the moment you cross the boarder.
I am a bit surprised they let people be there. All that security and anyone can buy a gun and shoot down planes? :D :D :D :D
> they let people be there
"there" is in people's front yards. This reddit thread shows how close the planes are to houses.
https://old.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1ntyavt/i_wanted_t...
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
Just a few days ago HN assured me nobody ever got injured from fireworks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48711981
When I lived in Beijing (10+ years ago), CNY would be constant fire crackers and fire works (but more bang bang than flashy lights) from 9PM to 3 or 4 AM. And I don’t mean just constant fire works, I mean what it must have felt like being bombed by multiple fleets of bombers in WW2. You should just hear constantly fire work shrapnel hitting your window.
I flew in once on CNY and could see constant flashing all below during our descent into Beijing capital. The whole country side looked like it was exploding, and the villages were nestled on mountains or in mountain valleys to great effect.
Here in Salt Lake City, a prolonged drought has made it a tinderbox. Home fireworks are prohibited, and there's signage up all over the place warning of the danger. And yet, the firework stands popped up in grocery store parking lots like they do every year, and people lined up. Bananas.
Luckily no new fires started around here, but we also have the local "Pioneer Day" on July 24 that starts up a fresh round of pyrotechnics.
This is more of an issue with operating during the week before and after 4th of July in Chicago. As I'm writing fireworks are going off.
Fireworks (display) kinds are illegal in Illinois and there are absolutely no fireworks shot off the before and after 4th of july. Nothing happens nothing to see here.
Am I the only one who thinks the risks are worth the reward? People are celebrating, kids are having fun. Yes a few people blow their hands off, but are we going to remove everything, one by one, in the name of safety?
I have a beautiful memory from a summer night long ago, in Barceloneta on the evening of the summer solstice—the festival of Saint Joan [0]. I didn’t know it was coming, which was its own special sort of astonishment… walked in to eat dinner, walked out to a mountain of furniture on fire in the intersection, air thick with gunpowder smoke, bands of youths firing Roman candles at one other…
The specific image that comes to mind, though—I remember dozens upon dozens of ambulances lined up at the ready along the waterfront, their crews hanging out enjoying the madness until they would be called upon.
Having been raised in pretty cautious circles, that image struck me: the powers-that-be knew some proportion of bad stuff would happen. I figured that meant they’d “just make a law against it.” Instead of trying to stop it, though, they focused on preparedness and timely response.
Since then, of course, I’ve learned that The Law has a lot less raw power than I’d imagined against tradition and popular will…
Since then I’ve accepted as creed that the best and most human parts of life reach their most salient in the moments of paradox between principles. “Avoid safety risks” is correct, “living fully requires accepting risks” is also correct.
[0] https://www.barcelona-tourist-guide.com/en/events/sant-joan/...
Nope, completely with you on this. The logical conclusion of banning everything dangerous is everything in existence being banned. There are many things people do that I think are dumb or dangerous but that doesn't mean I think they should be banned from doing them.
Not true. I support anyone doing anything that is harmful to themselves. I don't support doing things that are harmful to others.
By the nature of even existing you do things every single day that others would consider harmful to them. This isn't a personal attack fyi.
edit: I don't believe it's ridiculous or pedantic, but you're certainly welcome to your opinion.
Don't be ridiculous. There is very little value in such pedantry.
I’m with you. I shoot off small fireworks for my kids and my immediate neighbor on our quiet street, and we have a neighbor a few doors down who invariably calls the cops. This has been going on since the 2000s when she moved in. If I’m fined, I just pay it.
You are above the laws if you have the money. Wonderful teaching for your kids. The world knows where that is leading.
Yep, a great lesson, and a relatively low price to pay for teaching my kids the honorable act of civil disobedience.
A great lesson to show that you have no morals, indeed.
Lawful does not equate to moral.
If breaking the law is immoral, what are we celebrating on the 4th of July but a massively immoral action? It was certainly not legal for the the colonies to secede from England.
Come on, it’s not a choice between complete anarchy and complete restriction.
It is very, very fair for society to be like “hm I think X activity is easy to abuse in a way that hurts innocent bystanders,” and then limits the activity to people with licenses and training or things like that.
Like no, it’s totally not cool to give a free pass to people who are putting other people’s lives and homes at risk. How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
I don’t care if it’s just your own life at risk. But you’re essentially saying that people should be free to play around with explosive devices in dense city neighborhoods. Fuck no, it’s fucking concerning to have an explosion rattle your windows. The people most likely to do this shit in the streets have no clue what they’re doing.
> How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
Probably the same way I'd feel if it burned down because my neighbor did some other stupid thing, like drive into it with a truck or try stealing electricity. There would be many feelings probably, but none of them would be "trucks/DIY should be illegal".
What if there was one day a year where it was expected for people to speed through your neighborhood at 20 over the speed limit, which ends up with a bunch of people driving into houses with their vehicles?
It's not really the fireworks that is the issue. It's the alcohol, drugs, and overall attitude towards a dangerous activity. It's a bit different than a random mishap or whatnot.
> What if there was one day a year where it was expected for people to speed through your neighborhood at 20 over the speed limit, which ends up with a bunch of people driving into houses with their vehicles?
You mean All Saints Day (1st of November)? No, thousands of drunk drivers taking dozens of innocent lives and hurting hundreds more, year after year like a clockwork, is still not a reason to ban trucks, or any other car type. Or to cancel All Saints Day, if that's what you're implying.
Stealing electricity is already illegal. Driving a truck into your home could be a genuine accident, but it's more likely that alcohol was involved first (which is illegal with driving).
Do you think it’s legal to shoot a firework at someone’s house?
Fireworks don't need to be intentionally aimed at a house for a forest, or a city, to ignite one.
> Stealing electricity is already illegal.
So is shooting a house with fireworks. I'm against a general ban on doingelectrical work yourself, and against a general ban on fireworks.
Where I live, it's already illegal to shoot fireworks in the city limits, people still do that. Banning sales and importation is the next logical step.
According to what logic?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logic this one.
Ah, the one where invalid assumptions lead to invalid conclusions. Got it. Explains the invalidity of your conclusions.
> Like no, it’s totally not cool to give a free pass to people who are putting other people’s lives and homes at risk. How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
We quite literally have a long and rich tradition of laws to handle exactly this.
You are arguing against a straw man. It was never claimed or even implied that society can't or shouldn't regulate activities that cause harm. The cost benefit tradeoff in this specific instance was called into question and the broader implications of a consistent application of the same bar across all of society was inquired about.
> you’re essentially saying that people should be free to play around with explosive devices in dense city neighborhoods. Fuck no, it’s fucking concerning to have an explosion rattle your windows.
This is nothing more than emotional grandstanding. You could construct similar rants against a canister of gas or bottle of starter fluid. Obviously how you use the thing is important.
Lest you miss my point or think I miss the mark there are video footage of clueless people nearly killing themselves and others through entirely avoidable mishaps with gasoline abound.
The question is the amount of knowledge and judgment required, the likelihood of mishap, and the size of the consequences when one inevitably happens. Regulation needs to balance these things against utility and personal freedom.
> Obviously how you use the thing is important.
Is there a way to use large fireworks in a residential neighborhood that isn’t “light them on fire to cause an explosion”?
Large? When fireworks within the ATF limits for unlicensed individuals are used according to manufacturer instructions they explode on the ground or in the air in a way that does not endanger the surrounding structures. Of course you can't safely light them off in a narrow alley between three story buildings. Anyone doing that (or similarly foolish things) was behaving recklessly to begin with.
The comment was saying it should not be legal to cause “an explosion rattle your windows”, not just endangering the structure.
>How would you feel if your house burned down because your neighbor did something stupid?
Burning your neighbors house down is already illegal. You and they should already have insurance. House fires in human dwellings have been a risk since we started building houses next to other houses.
The issue is that we (and I mean worldwide) have gone from legalism as a method of settling disputes and advertising penalties for destructive behavior, to outlawing risk entirely.
The crux of the matter is that no one stops to point out where the line is. Laws will come in to penalise low probability risks, people make these arguments "wont someone think of the children" and then lawmakers turn on to even lower probability risks.
If you had even a benchmark, "more probable than x is outlawed" people would be more understanding. And its not a slippery slope argument, because the slope seems to be the point and without a line the destination appears to be all possible risk.
I'm gonna go ahead and assume you don't believe in driver licenses and speed limits either
I have nuanced views on both.
I am gonna go ahead and assume theres no freedom you wouldn't give away for safety if the government justified it in the right way.
It's not that simple.
Rules do not necessarily reduce freedom, they can in fact even provide more freedom on the longer term, when the system finds a new balance.
The difficulty of course is to find the proper rules and evaluate these effects from current system state.
>Rules do not necessarily reduce freedom, they can in fact even provide more freedom on the longer term, when the system finds a new balance.
The kind of rules being peddled by the kind of people who peddle rules in a fireworks thread are almost certainly the exact opposite of the kind that direct things at a freer equilibrium.
It's not that we can't have rules. It's that we can't have shortsighted people with bad morals writing tules.
>Rules do not necessarily reduce freedom, they can in fact even provide more freedom on the longer term
Back to my point above that there are laws and regulations that are fine, and then theres the pre-crime nonsense trying to reduce risk to zero that are being peddled today.
IDK what has been going on but people in my area seem to be getting their hands on professional-level fireworks that sound like bombs going off. It used to be the roman candles and the fountains and a gentle background noise around the neighborhood but now it's insane.
There are plenty of parts of the world where people are free to enjoy themselves but also considerate of others.
"Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make" was supposed to be a comically evil statement in Shrek
But that is the maxim which drives almost everything we do on a daily basis.
I hope the writer that penned that is fantastically rich!
AI tells me that the line was written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, and Roger S. H. Schulman. They also worked on Pirates of the Caribbean, Aladdin, and the Mask of Zorro. so, to answer my own question, yes they are.
Fireworks affects others: fire danger, noise, lack of post-celebration cleanup. I've seen trash and unlit fireworks left in school yards that had kids coming in for summer school.
If people were more respectful with fireworks, this wouldn't be a polarizing opinion. Yet, here we are.
If it were limited to one night of the year and people just moved on it would be fine. These days it stretches out for half the summer, practically.
The HN comments are a case study in sampling bias.
No! You are not alone! That is very sad! : /
You know, there are millions of ways having fun that endangers no others. Millions!
(also small children have no fun, not at all! Woken up to be scared to shit, for f's sake, that's opposite of fun, the very opposite! Use your brain please!)
I am fine with the professional fireworks shows but people setting fireworks inside residential areas, in all hours of night, for weeks during summer is just people being massive douchebags.
Right.
On the evening of July 4, fine.
Setting off firecrackers in urban areas otherwise is simply antisocial behaviour and should be treated as such.
You're not the only one. There are few things I hate more than safetyists.
Like 10 people died in my state on the 4th. A few were not directly involved in celebrations but were just doing their own thing.
Does that really sound reasonable to you?
Died of what?
25,000 people die in my state every year, 10 in a day would be miraculously low.
Flying into London on November 5 a decade or so ago I was struck by how similar things looked to WW2 bombing run photographs, except it was in colour.
A moment of pause.
(The Australian War memorial has a museum with the nose of a Lancaster bomber, and they run footage inside it (or a mock up, they have a lot of stuff) projected onto the floor and forward view taken by bombing observation film crews during the raids on Germany)
Times have changed in UK.
We all grew up doing our own bonfires and fireworks, but now it's mostly organised large displays at public parks and other venues.
My children's school ran a great small bonfire and fireworks night that was well attended and received (and raised funds for the PTA/school).
Sadly after a conversation with the school's insurance company, we haven't been able to run one since due to the cost of cover.
Given the incident widely reported incident here in the UK, some years ago, I think people are more aware of the risk that running one of these events entails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_M5_motorway_crash#:~:text...
Get rid of fireworks, replace with drone shows. Sick of fireworks and the resulting pollution that comes with them.
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Delta said Sunday a post-flight inspection showed no damage to the aircraft.
Not surprising, as a firework is designed to disintegrate and the outer surface of a plane is not flammable. Bird strikes are probably a higher risk.
Many fireworks are designed to explode at altitude. The biggest risk is probably if the firework is ingested into an engine (also a major risk for bird strikes).
Given the sheer quantity of energy that's already being continuously released in an engine would a small firework actually pose more danger than a bird? There's no bones in a firework after all.
Even small bird strikes are usually a non-event, as the engines are designed to withstand them (there's a very well-known YouTube video of frozen chickens being fired into one, and those are already a lot bigger and harder than most birds they'll encounter.) It's the big ones that make the news.
99% of them also don’t have enough explosive force to do more than damage a hand.
What about the 1%?
Clearly the plane wasn’t hit by one, eh, or we’d have an entirely different headline.
I wouldn't be concerned about damage to the aircraft, I would be worried about whether it messed with the avionics.
When clowns are in charge the country looks like a circus.
The amount of downvoted posts here is quite indicative.
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I loved playing with fireworks as a kid, and surprisingly have all appendages and senses intact, I even considered pyro as a job - so I definitely get the appeal.
I just think it's time that we left it to the professionals. Unless you are engaging in science or physics, I don't see the value in letting them off yourself.
~~It's also weird that America's birthday is celebrated using a Chinese invention.~~ Edit: bad point, I stand corrected.
> It's also weird that America's birthday is celebrated using a Chinese invention.
Not really. America is an amalgamation of all the countries and cultures that emigrated to it. It’s one of the best things about it.
That’s such a strange thing to say. Should we only use things invented in the last 300 years on the 4th of July?
Now I wonder who invented wheat, or sugar (used to make cake)?
Also hotdogs are made with Wiener sausages, which are from...
> Now I wonder who invented [...] sugar (used to make cake)?
If you're talking about the refined product, then India. If you're talking about the plant, then New Guinea and Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
beef or pork if you’re lucky
In the production of these hotdogs no animals were harmed!
I tried tofu dogs for the first time on the grill, they were pretty good.
I highly recommend the ground tofu for taco's, you would never know they are meatless.
Das Auge ist (man) mit.
Austria! nothing bad came from Austria
The people of Frankfurt would like to have a word!
No more using the English language, either.
You mean since it was invented by Indians, Germans and the French?
And introduced by the English, instead of being properly American like Navajo or Lakota or such.
You literally just explained the value.
https://youtu.be/YPX__g3LpUY?t=9
Fell free to leave it to the professionals then. That has always been your right.
Maybe leaving it to professionals would make more sense, but the majority of people aren’t in favor of it. I’m not even in favor of it and I had a couple fireworks bursting right outside my balcony last night. I was on the balcony and a ducked, though I would have been fine if I didn’t. Maybe require a brief safety training before purchasing? I’m not sure exactly what is going to reduce stupid behavior with explosives.
> I just think it's time that we left it to the professionals.
Pulling up the ladder behind you, eh? So nice of you to think of the children.
Yes, because what I was doing was objectively dangerous. Dueling used to be a commonly accepted practice, yes even killing - pity that ladder was pulled up! What about the children's chemistry sets that included uranium, mercury, and cyanide?
The uranium wasn’t really dangerous, unless you swallowed it. Common U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, so it’s not actually very radioactive. The most dangerous thing about it is its toxicity as a heavy metal, but plenty of other elements of a chemistry set are at least as dangerous.
Yeah I played with those sets with my dad.
I think consensual duels should still be legal. Numerous states have laws about mutual combat where it is perfectly legal to beat the fuck out of each other.
Fireworks for me, but not for thee.
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I concur, this would be good for developing cheap drone warfare capabilities. I mean, I love loud explosions and the sound of freedom because I'm not a wuss, but we need to get our drone game on China's level.
Get the drone show up and open it up to amateurs trying to shoot down the drone show for maximum adversarial drone warfare preparedness!
That would unironically be an amazing festival activity. A drone lightshow open to public participation where the different colors are tied to swarms engaged in a battle royale.
I also can't wait for the return of traditional blood sport events with bipedal robots as the contenders (but I digress).
Drones have their own failure mode https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-27/sydney-vivid-festival...
Pollution too.
Microbits of plastic, atmospheric smoke, splintered pieces of wood, wildfires.
freedom loving Democratic socialist here, this stance is very St Thomas Aquinas of you. let people continue to do the things you did without pulling up the ladder behind you. it's just for a night or two, the animals will live.
Everything needs to have a reason. Fireworks don't have a good reason, even ones that are professionally done. Just because its tradition doesn't mean it should be auto accepted.
Agreed. No video games or sex before marriage either.
If there is actual harm being done, i.e reason to ban them, then sure.
In the case of video games, I ironically agree on ban for kids on video games with online multiplayer. Kids should be forced to socialize in person in way greater ration that their online time to see that online personas are not real
In the case of sex before marriage, the opposite is probably true.
No, everything does not need to have a reason! "Just because" or "I just wanted to" do not inherently make the activity useless, nor mean that it should be discontinued.
If an activity is harmful is some way, but not beneficial in any other way (just because one "likes" it doesn't count"), the reasons to ban it outweigh the reasons to keep it
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This is almost certain to backfire. Better: make drone shows more available, and maybe subsidise them with a tax on fireworks.
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You've never seen Berlin on New Year's Eve then. Residents are recommended to keep all windows tightly closed or a firework may slip inside!
Later wars too [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/190th_Fighter_Squadron,_Blues_...
How is this relevant? No one shot at the plane.
> No one shot at the plane.
It's hardly outside the realm of possibility here.
Ban celebration for everyones safety ffs
Anti-aircraft artillery...
Should ideally have an exclusion no fireworks/drones zone near airports esp. on such a day IDK that is just me.
I see way too many trashy people setting off commercial grade illegal fireworks in the middle of crowded cities and neighborhoods. It is incredibly disruptive and damaging. Vets are traumatized. Dogs are traumatized. And sleep deprived parents have to repeatedly put babies back to sleep. It is insane that police do not enforce laws against these criminals.
> It is insane that police do not enforce laws against these criminals.
Not that I've known a ton of people who work for local police departments, but the majority of the ones I have known are exactly the type of people who are likely to partake in illegal residential fireworks around the 4th of July.
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And hence why lots of people don’t want to live in dense cities, and then we end up with NIMBYs who want strict housing codes so they don’t have to live near people who set off fireworks.
Living in a city shouldn’t have to mean tolerating lawlessness.
Plenty of places people can move without others around. I might feel a bit of empathy for someone living surrounded by farmland and having a city built up around them, but that is incredibly rare and even in that case that only makes their property far more valuable to sell and move to another cheap rural area. If someone moves into an expanding suburb or right on the edge of a city and complains about the city expanding, zero empathy, they should of thought about that when they bought the property.
Then if you move out of the city, people become even more adamant that they shouldn't be considerate of their neighbors and you end up with the same problem.
If you move to a rural area your "neighbors" should be far enough away that they and you won't care if each of you are banging plates of metal together, shooting guns, revving engines, blowing things up, or whatever else.
Unfortunately it's not just dense cities, and all it takes is 1 neighbor to ruin your night.
My city did not have these issues. Population changes and cultural changes have brought in a large enough number of anti social people that then make things bad for everyone else. It’s not about being in a city, but the fact that a small number of selfish people think they have a right to disrupt everyone else.
A bigot is born
"Population changes" and "anti social" being codewords for anyone not in your small group of acceptable people who follow your rules and share your priorities. You were there first so why can't you be the boss?
Laws are laws, and they still exist. Being anti social means acting in ways that affect others in society negatively. That’s what setting off fireworks late at night is. Yes, they need to follow OUR rules because we live in a society. And they should share my priorities. If they were doing things that ONLY affect them, that’s different. But we’re talking about waking everyone else up. Spare me your virtue signaling.
I chose to live in a city with laws. The ones who are in the wrong place are the ones who don’t want to follow those laws.
we have multifelons (+10 arrests) running around and committing new crimes -often killing- in nearly all major urban centers.
What makes you think police are going to pay heed to teens with heavy pyrotecnic ordinance ?
And even if they did, would the DA prosecute ?
Fun fact: “Midway” is also the name of an American manufacturer of video and pinball games, and a Pacific theater of war in World War II, the most important victory in US Naval history. (The airport took this name in July 1949, according to the English Wikipedia.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20080414001228if_/http://www.fly...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cup_Soccer_(pinball)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Tigers_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampage_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day_(ar...
It’s also the name of a district/neighborhood of San Diego which takes its name from Midway Drive, particularly where it intersects with Rosecrans St.
Okay, “Midway” is a lot of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway
Midway's most famous and controversial game is, without a doubt, Mortal Kombat.
MK was the most controversial, but Midway was also the US manufacturer of Space Invaders and Pac-Man.