The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an editorial asking readers how they think the more liberal fireworks law passed by the General Assembly is working in practice. Advance Indiana has a post mentioning a WTHR report about a 10 year old who lost his eye when he threw a bottle rocket in the air when it shot back and struck him in the eye.
There are certainly strong policy arguments in favor of stricter controls on fireworks. But I’m not sure there is a practical difference between the new law which is very permissive and the old law which was theoretically stricter but unenforced and unenforceable. I know I didn’t have a great deal of trouble obtaining and using bottle rockets as a youth. I recall riding my bike no-handed while lighting and throwing bottle rockets. That can’t be safe.
For me, Daylight Saving Time makes fireworks more of a problem than the new fireworks law, just because people are setting them off later than they used to. 4th of July fireworks going off at all hours don’t bother me — that’s just the nature of the day. It’s the 5th of July fireworks that are really annoying. The kids are in bed, I’m just settling into bed myself. BANG BANG BANG BANG down the street. The dogs start barking. Repeat periodically for the next hour or two. Grrr. But I suppose that’s as much a function of my evolution into a grumpy old man as anything else.
DST and fireworks, here we go. I live near the IPFW campus, where Fort Wayne holds its annual 4th of July fireworks show, and could (just barely) tolerate its 1100pm (EDT) conclusion. But ithat was followed by the efforts of imitators until about 1am (EDT), followed by the garbage pickup, in the dark, at 500am (EDT), all of which I heard. On Wednesday I felt as though I had been through the first night of the Battle of the Somme which, as it happens, began in July.
Thank you Mitch for your efforts to make Indiana such a pleasant place to live.
At least you saw fireworks. I’m a morning person, and so I go to bed pretty early. ‎Thanks to DST I missed this year’s fireworks. Lucky for me there is another display ‎locally on Saturday. I’ll just make sure to take a nap during the day.‎
The new law smacks of a defeatest attitude by lawmakers…it was “slipped past” most everyone when it was passed, and would it have been put to a referendum, it would have failed. And it DOES run contrary to CURRENT NOISE ORDINANCES to boot. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the south side of Fort Wayne, we have PLENTY of noise already with gunshots, boomcars, kids screaming, grownups yelling, horns honking, brakes squealing, Harleys rumbling, and dogs barking (which never seems to get addresed as it is). We surely do NOT need “legal” fireworks available to these “Intards” every day of the bloody year to ADD to the cacophony.
It’s like being in Khe San during Tet!
Where these “people” even GET the money to BUY all these mini-SCUDS eludes me. Most of these huge aerials and other assorted ordnance cost a few buckolas, and the “average joe” can’t blow the wad on these regularly.
But with the drug trade so active, I suppose some of the funds are funneled into annoying what few decent people STILL reside down here, trying to intimidate THEM into moving away, as so many others have done in the past.
I feel the CITY can step up and BAN ALL these wannabe fireworks within the city limits, allowing them ONLY in the county, BUT…it takes some backbone to ENFORCE that, and with so many seemingly “unenforceable” laws the city has ALREADY (and we all know EVERY law IS enforceable with the right tactics), this might become a moot point.
Consider the fact that it is illegal to shoot off my GUN to “celebrate” anything, but morons can shoot off aerials that pack just as much black powder than an average round of ammunition, if not MORE. Now I don’t WANT to shoot my gun just for the hell of it anyway (it’s a responsibility thing), so what the heck is the difference with these fireworks.
Chemical reactions are chemical reactions….made the same way with the same results.
Maybe…just MAYBE the lawmakers will put DOWN their *meds* and wake up and smell the cityscape burning.
We can but hope.
S.C.
Not really addressing your larger point, but I think the biggest difference between firing a gun and launching fireworks has to do with the piece of lead traveling extremely quickly after discharge of a firearm.
The Indianapolis Star tried very hard to put a good face on the late fireworks with a picture on the front page and interviews with attendees who said daylight time made no difference to them. What the Star didn’t report was a crowd estimate and a comparison to previous years’ attendances. Very interesting.
With any freedom comes the responsibility not to encroach on someone else’s freedoms. The law needs to be amended to specify how late and on what dates anyone without a fireworks license can set them off.
Tom Joyce, who is leading the struggle to keep Knox County (Vincennes) in the central zone, has requested stories about the problems the lateness of the sunset on July 4th caused. He can be reached at stopthecommissioners@yahoo.com. Letters to the Vincennes paper can be sent to http://www.suncommercial.com/letters/.
I scanned eastern time zone newspaper websites the morning after the 4th looking for attendance estimates and found not a single one. Just exercises in bliss and happiness of the “everything is just peachy” sort. The real story may be rather more like Holme’s observation about the dog that didn’t bark.
To support S.C.’s point, I KNOW where my bullet will go when I pull the trigger, mainly because I would only pull the trigger into the ground or a target with some sort of stop, like a earth mound. Even when a professional fires a firework, they can’t be nearly as certian that the firework won’t explode at ground level.
If you say that you can’t fire a gun in the city because some people would not take precautions, then you should assume that people also can not be trusted to use explosives in the city.
A follow up on fireworks attendance. Today’s (7 July) FW-News-Sentinel reports that the FW police estimate that between 5 to 7 thousand people attended the city fireworks show here Tuesday, down from between 20 to 40 thousand last year. The story nowhere mentions DST as a possible cause. Instead it points to a competing fireworks presentation at Parkview Hospital, which was put on last Saturday night (and which was much smaller). A casual reading of the story though illustrates that the combined attendence estimates for the two shows (20 to 27 thousand) is less than the estimate for last year’s single show.
A producer from radio station WOWO is quoted as commenting that she had heard “some people say that they wern’t going to come because they have to be at work.”
Doug, are you saying that when you were a kid fireworks were still (blessedly) illegal in Indiana? Frankly, I’ve lost track of how long we’ve been subjected to them.
And yes, even back in my day somebody would show up with Roman candles and cherry bombs brought back from Tennessee. Plenty of potential for injury, but nothing like what’s going on out there now with the legislature’s blessing. (Funny how that happened; the constituency for setting that stuff off is generally too young to vote, or too indifferent to do so when it is.)
We have, naturally enough, one house in the neighborhood where the habit has become an addiction over the past few years, and where the drunken festival of July 5th shook everybody’s house for three hours, until the stroke of 11. It took me four calls to IPD to find a sympathetic ear and one which understood that disturbing the peace is different from violating a fireworks (or noise) ordinance. And I’m now spending time organizing the neighborhood into a zero tolerance patrol. Thanks again, America’s Third Worst State Legislatureâ„¢.
Peple actually set fireworks today at 130am. That’s very annoying because most people are sleeping and it’s already 9th of july. The other thing is they set up fireworks right under the tree, making the tree looks like a christmas tree when it go off. What worries me is that it might burn the tree or the houses which are very closeby. Also, that will hurt the animals living on the tree, if not the flame, the gas/smell of the fireworks will.
It’s just commonsense that outdoor movies and fireworks are incompatable with ET/DST in Indiana.I was always one who didnt think id care about DST. Ive been in Indiana for a while recently around Indy and its not so much that the sun sets late,but that the day is unevenly divided/day-night.In W. Wisconsin and Minnestota we had sunsets after 9 pm on CDT but sunrises were still about 5:30 am. Somehow that becomes very important.But I cant remember fireworks were ever an issue,and cant remember what time they started..It’s truly ‘weird’ to have such a late sunrise( almost 6:30 am)in summer with a late sunset( 9:30 pm).But maybe it’s a matter of getting used to.Fl has late summer sunrises about 630 am and sunsets , about 8 pm. That somehow doesnt seem weird either as it’makes a balanced day,light vs dark.The day doesnt ‘start’ til noon in S Fl anyway. Also in NW Wisconsin in Winter sunrises were past 8 am and sunsets just past 4 pm so it was the worst of both worlds,but again that was ‘normal’ for there.
Ive always thought that in Indiana time is a CULTURAl war and defied all reason,but what do I know, not having been raised there?
I have a new beef to take up with the fireworks and what it does for this state’s image. After all, our governor told us not observing DST was giving Indiana the same image problem Arizona and Hawaii suffer from. He then turns around and signs into law the bill legalizing fireworks.
Now we already had a fireworks image problem under our “out of state” rule. A consequence of this I was reminded of last Saturday while returning with my son from Grand Rapids, Michigan. You know the billboards pushing “Cheap Indiana fireworks just across the border” usually coupled with “Buy one, get two free”, or words to such effect. I’ve always been told that first impressions are important, and, I would guess travelers from Ontario, or new residents of Michigan, might get their first impression of our state from a series of really cheezy billboards encouraging people to buy the nastiest fireworks on earth, and who, upon entering the state, are greeted by a slummy fireworks supermarket.
But rather than rid ourselves of these eyesores and thereby doing something substantive to improve our image our Governor agreed to “let her rip” and threw away any remaining resraints on fireworks. Now we not only have the billboards and the shacks, we have the incessant noise to go along with it.
Maybe these sorts of things don’t bother Mitch and those friends of his he so desperately wanted to join in the quiet retreats of Hamilton County. But as a resident of a border county (minor places like Lake, Vanderburgh, St. Joseph, Allen, Wayne Counties, a.k.a. the “provinces”) and who, as a consequence, suffers the presence of these establishments and the negative image they produce, I am apalled.
Let me tell you something about the “quiet retreats of Hamilton county”. I live there; Hamilton county is the home of spoiled children who’s parents give them everything they demand just to keep them out of their hair. That includes fireworks fired-off incessantly every evening (and morning) during the summer. That includes the boomy car stereos that rattle my walls and keep us awake. DST has been like gasoline added to the fire. During the DST debate, the only argument that I ever felt had any legitamacy was the one about the kids waiting for the school buses in the dark mornings during the winter. Since the golfers who negotiated this insanity on the golf courses decided that Eastern Daylight Time was the best for Indiana, how in the hell is that going to help the school kids waiting for the buses when we “fall back” in the autumn?
The fireworks thing is all about tax revenue and the DST was a ploy to provide more golfing time in the summer. We are losing lots of sleep and becoming very angry!
There were some great selling-points for this new fireworks law–and we are now seeing the difference between fantasy and reality.
No fireworks before nine and the morning or after eleven/midnight at night. Should do away with someone being awakened by explosions at two in the morning–but it hasn’t!
No fireworks sold to people under 18 years old. A BIG selling-point, as kids have no business even buying sparklers, fountains, and snakes, because those things can be dangerous, too, if not used correctly. Adult supervision should be part of ALL fireworks use. But that doesn’t seem to be enforced very well, either.
Fireworks must be contained on your own property and/or the property of someone giving permission to use them. Sounds ideal! No firecrackers thrown under cars or set off in front of people walking their dogs on a sidewalk. First off, the flying ones don’t usually come down on the property from which they’re set–and, in spite of promises made, there seems to be an inability to go after the ones responsible for the litter/property damage. And how about the NOISE? The noise doesn’t stay on the property, either, obviously. As for the firecrackers being lit in the street and across the sidewalks…this might have cut down some on this, but I’ve still heard of its happening–and the people doing this getting away with it.
And what kind of setting specific hours for fireworks is nine in the morning until eleven most nights anyway? That doesn’t sound like any sort of true restriction.
Time for the common sense approach:
Make ALL fireworks that explode or have a flight-path that it isn’t possible to control illegal for both sale and use in Indiana by non-professional consumers, just as they were before the loophole started all of this problem back in the 1980s.
Either that or leave only one day open for the exploding kind of fireworks–that being July 4. As for the flying kind–only legal on July 4, IF your property is off by itself with no neighbors for at least 1000 feet from where you’re launching them.
Keep in the part about making it illegal for people under 18 to buy ANY of them right down to snakes, and keep in the part about where they can be used.
the noise and booms in my neighbor hood , are so bad my windows
shake and my dog is shaking like a leaf .the houses on both sides and across the street ,sounds like beruit . i think that every body who buys these stupid thinks ,shoud have to pay a extra fee ,and be required to attend at least 4 hours of instruction for the small fire works.
also be required to pay and extra fee and another 4 hours of instruction
on the the bigger bombs.
Idiots!!!…….; Need I say more?
So that you will not be confused to whom I am referring to, let’s just say that there are proponents on both sides of this issue to whom this applies.
Better life brought to you by the General Assembly and its number one idiot, Mitch Daniels.
And better life brought to us by those that take advantage of and violate the terms of this stupid law.