Fireworks in the Netherlands and Firearms in the US

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just an interesting parallel I thought I’d share.

The Netherlands have strict gun laws.

However, the use of fireworks is up to the individual. Come New years Eve, the Dutch each buy their own fireworks and set them off. And as can be expected when you allow explosives in the hands of amateurs, every year in the Netherlands sees milions of damages in vandalism and cleaning up costs, and about 800 people more or less seriously wounded.

While most people use simple and safe fireworks, many enthusiasts import illegal firework, or assemble their own. Some fireworks that get confiscated have the capacity of low grade military explosives. Those self-made bombs that don’t get confiscated just go BOOM, often taking the hand or eye of the drunken idiot that lit them.

While fireworks are regulated, the regulations are inadequately enforced. That is why whe have those numbers each year of eight hundred wounded.

Our Green Party has, for the first time this year, petitioned for a ban on consumers fireworks. Not just for the danger fireworks pose, but also because of the pollution and the nuisance they cause for pets and livestock. Pyrotechnics, the petiotion said, should be left to professional companies, and counties should do the organization.

While the petition got a lot of sympathy, surveys say about 90 % of the Dutch is against it, claiming fireworks is a part of Dutch culture and “Aw, let them have their fun”.

So…is setting off pyrotechnics for individuals, or for professionals in the US? If so, congratulations: you’re more civilized then we are.

2

Same in the UK. Fireworks are freely available and set off by amateurs all over on 5th November, aka Bonfire Night.

3

It varies from state to state, and within states, even from one place to another.

You have places like Chicago which bans all or nearly all fireworks for the non-professional. You have places much more like the Netherlands where almost anything goes.

We do get some injuries every year, and there are certainly some wanting to ban fireworks as well. However, banning fireworks does not eliminate them and places where they are illegal still see injuries and even deaths.

4

Depends greatly state by state.

5

I guess the parallel I saw was: would the same mindset that is fanatical about firearms solely because of the BOOM !-factor in one culture, be fanatical of fireworks in another?

And yes, I do believe that for most pro-gun people their reasons are far more serious and are mainly about self defense.

6

As is true of many things in the US, laws regarding fireworks are mostly set at the state and local levels. Some areas are much more permissive than others. When the folks living in the more strictly-regulated areas agree with the local laws, there are no problems. When they don’t…

When I first moved to Omaha, the city had some pretty strict laws on the books: basically anything more powerful than a sparkler was banned. However, both Iowa and Missouri had looser laws, so everyone just drove to Council Bluffs or Kansas City to purchase the banned fireworks. I rarely go to the professional shows on the Fourth of July because there’s no need: the shows being put on by all my neighbors are literally just as good. By midnight the whole neighborhood smells of gunpowder. The first time my parents drove out to visit me for the holiday, I told them as sunset fell “Welcome to Bagdad” (this was during the height of the Iraq War.). And I wasn’t entirely joking; the neighborhood literally looked like it was launching a full-scale anti-aircraft barrage, there were so many rockets going up all around. And my neighborhood wasn’t unusual; pretty much every neighborhood in the city was the same. There was simply no way to arrest everybody who was breaking the fireworks laws, even if every police officer in Omaha sent the evening of July 4th doing absolutely nothing else.

Eventually Omaha gave in to the inevitable and loosened its fireworks laws. There was no point in keeping them on the books when they were being so widely ignored.

I think that’s something the “Just ban it!” crowd doesn’t always want to accept. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking, fireworks, guns, drugs, booze, fast cars, or anything else: unless a sufficiently high percentage of the population agrees with the ban, it just won’t work. People feel justified in breaking laws they believe are silly or unjust.

7

Not only do laws differ from state to state, but enforcement is wildly variable within a state. All fireworks, down to sparklers and those little bang snaps, are illegal in MA. But plenty of NH fireworks stores advertise heavily in MA in the spring & summer, and depending on the town, you can hear & see some pretty impressive backyard fireworks shows all night long on the 4th & surrounding weekends.

8

Indeed. I live in Santa Clara county (in CA), and technically fireworks are illegal. But… they are legal in Gilroy, which is a rural city at the southern end of the county. It is, of course, illegal to set them off in the rest of the county, but lots of people do and it’s a pretty difficult law to enforce.

I think a lot of people in the US view fireworks like they do speeding. Where it’s illegal, they know it it’s illegal, but figure they will be safe lighting them off, at least on the 4th of July. Many of us grew up at a time when that was an annual tradition. I can remember setting off M80s when I was a wee kid, and my parents were generally pretty strict.

9

True.

But another parallel with firearms is that the ones buying and setting off fireworks have the attitude: “” I can handle this, I’m a safe user". Just like with fire arms. And yet, just like with firearms, accidents happen, hands and eyes are lost. No limbs would be lost if fireworks were banned.

I guess I’m just trying to find parallels to better understand the pro-gun stance by translating it to a similar Dutch phenomenon. I didn’'t know that private fireworks are a thing in some US states just like here, though. In the Netherlands, people often cross the border to Belgium that has less regulations and sells heavier fireworks.

Maybe cars are a better example. Like most urban Dutch, I don’t really need a car, I could do everything with a bicycle, a cart, public transport and maybe a shared or rented car on occasion. Yet I own my own car. And so I’'m contributing to cars causing pollution and causing lethal traffic accidents. (640 dead a year, for a national population of 17 million)

10

For clarity: no fireworks are allowed without a permit outside New Year’s Eve. Sale of fireworks is only allowed on Dec 28, 29, 30 and 31. The minimum age to buy fireworks is 12, with specific fireworks (more dangerous ones) requiring higher ages. Shops need a permit to sell fireworks and only certain safe fireworks are allowed to be sold.

There are certainly a lot of homemade and illegal fireworks around on New Year’s Eve, and in combination with drunken stupidity they cause terrible accidents. The regulations are perhaps inadequately enforced, I’m not sure exactly how to judge that.

I think last year two boys died while detonating “bombs” they had made themselves. This year I don’t think there were any deaths. While their deaths were very sad, what they were doing is against the law and something that they almost certainly were warned against in school. There are usually extensive programmes before NYE to warn children about the dangers of fireworks, telling them to let adults deal with the big ones and how to light the smaller ones in a safe way.

11

Fireworks are illegal in the republic of Ireland but you wouldn’t know it each Halloween or New Years.

12

The bolded part above speaks to a problem with gun bans.

As stated above, lots of people still lose limbs, even in areas where fireworks are banned, because people break the law. If they were totally outlawed, you’d still have people making their own fireworks, and would have more injuries from unsafe manufacture.

With guns, there is a rough parallel - if we ban guns from household use, guns would still be there, but only as illegal weapons. That increases the likelihood of injury and misuse.

13

In Ohio, you can buy all kinds of fireworks so long as you sign a document saying that you’ll take them out of the state to use, cross your heart and hope to die.

You can guess how well it works.

14

Very similar to Pennsylvania. If you are a resident you are very limited as to what you can buy. If you are a New Jersey resident you can go there and buy anything short of a tactical nuke. But you have to sign a form saying you are taking it out of PA and you also have to put down that you are taking it to a state in which it is legal. Of course you find these stores ten feet past the Delaware River from NJ. State Troopers sometimes case the stores around July 4th and pull the cars over if they go across the bridge.

15

Unlike fireworks (and, indeed, cars) guns are designed and intended to kill or injure. That is what they are for, really. Fireworks are a quite different case.They are intended to entertain (and cars are intended to provide transport) and only cause injuries when things go wrong. People who use them are making a trade off: the amount of fun they and others are going to get out of the fireworks versus the (statistically quite low, despite everything) risk that something will go wrong and someone will get hurt.

With guns it is quite different. A gun isn’t really doing its job properly unless some person, or at least some animal, gets hurt. (OK, there is target shooting, but that is really just practicing for using guns to hurt or kill things.) I think the ethical situation is quite different.

16

Sigh. No, it really isn’t. Competitive target shooting is an activity unto itself. Training to shoot another person is very different. That’s why cops & soldiers don’t do the normal competitive shooting courses, and don’t use the same firearms that target shooters do.

17

Any fireworks professionals on the Dope?

18

The worst drought in over 20 years didn’t seem to deter many of my neighbors from their annual backyard pyrotechnic shows.

19

Indiana used to be that way, but a few years ago they decided to dropped the subterfuge and just admitted that yeah, Hoosiers really do blow up their backyards on July 4th and New Year’s (and some other times in between). The booms have to stop at set times at night (later hours for 7/4 and New Year’s). Oddly enough, this works - where before you’d have fireworks blasting away until dawn the last few years they actually did stop at firework curfew.

Despite the doomcrying, there were actually fewer accidents the first couple years of the new system. I think the accident rates are back to “usual”, but despite predictions making them actually legal didn’t seem to increase the injury rate.

20

Of course, but I meant the mindset of the owner.
With regard to doing something that poses real risks to themselves and others, is (arguably) unnecessary, and yet theze people have the attitude “you’ll pry my fireworks/guns from my cold dead hands and stop being a nanny government”.