Or, if burning down buildings, or blowing yourself up, isn’t interesting enough, one can always shoot off a firework into a jetliner:
Bet a bunch of people are right now preparing very thorough explanations of how they were over in Rockford or Gary at that hour…
Baby gurl was freaked out last night by Momma Nature’s fireworks.
Then at some point I hear something so I open the porch door. Some is setting some off in the downpour. Ummm, why? 
I guess they looked at radar & got tired of waiting?
As I noted in another thread, my neighbors put on a very tepid 4th firework-fest.
Are some of my neighbors too illiterate to read a calendar? I’m hearing fireworks booming again this evening.
And one more tragedy Sunday.
Yet more:
I know exactly where this one is; it’s about a mile from where I grew up.
Police said officers responded to the scene after receiving reports of a large gathering at a pool party involving more than 100 juveniles who were setting off fireworks. According to police, officers requested assistance to disperse the crowd after a large number of teens were running through the neighborhood and onto private property.
If this all happened in one place there would be a major call for reform and the real danger might sink in to the populace at large. But because the occurrences are a smattering everywhere across the country, I do not think the breadth of the problem is apparent to many.
As you’ve just admitted, the “problem” is a pinprick on an elephant.
We collectively should not care because the numbers collectively amount to nothing.
An individual may choose to partake of booms & flashes or not. Individuals can choose to care or not about their personal risk profile. Society should care not at all.
Well, I’d like to see the incidents divided into two groups: a) Victim is the perp. b) Victim(s) are not the perp. It doesn’t help me to be a non-partaker if I can still be the victim.
I just pissed myself laughing!
Probably if fireworks were less dangerous or less intrusive to others they would lose much of their appeal.
I agree, but I think those two appeals are quite distinct. One group loves the personal danger, another group loves the heedless freedumb to inflict something on society at large, and yes, there’s some folks that love both.
They’re correlated in some people, but IMO neither is causation of the other.
Mower sets off discarded firework.
I don’t buy this, for reasons including the following:
- The incidence of fireworks injuries is increasing over time in the US. Even if the absolute numbers remain pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things, that’s not the way we want the trend to be going.
- At 7-8000 occurrences annually, fireworks injuries are about as prevalent as other forms of rare injuries that we do take seriously, such as venomous snake bites. We encourage people to avoid venomous snakes, we routinely provide identification and behavior advice for people who enter venomous-snake territory, etc. We don’t assume that we shouldn’t care about this problem just because it’s rare.
- Fireworks, unlike other rare injury causes such as venomous snakes, have a relatively high likelihood of injuring other people besides the person who was being careless around them. There’s also the knock-on impacts of property damage, which doesn’t significantly manifest in other rare injuries like snakebite.
Personally, I don’t mind neighborhood fireworks (though I greatly prefer that their use be kept within whatever legal limits prevail in that jurisdiction) and have no personal experience with, or expectation of, the statistically quite infrequent harm that they do. But I don’t think that harm should be shrugged off at a societal level with the sort of complete and total indifference you’re recommending.
Not to mention up to 18 people dead and 15000 hospitalized every year. 30000 fires- And thus well over $100Million in property damage, plus of course increased insurance rates.