Mon, 03 Jul 2006

With injuries up, feds eye fireworks laws

More Safety Nazis™ on the loose: but I sincerely wish the executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association would shut up, before she gives the bureaucratic bozos any ideas for mandated warning labels:

"The largest safety problem is product misuse rather than product failures, [Julie] Heckman said. "It's teenagers having bottle rocket wars, parents giving sparklers to 2-year-olds and people having too much to drink and putting firecrackers up their nose."

Warning: Placing fireworks up your nose, especially while drunk, can cause spontaneous rhinoplasty!

AP - On the eve of the nation's noisiest holiday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission responded to growing fireworks injuries by quietly reopening the question of how it should police explosives for backyard entertainment.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

/Humor | 1 writeback | permanent link

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On 7/4/2006 10:14:15
Bjorngrímnir wrote

Oh Puh-leeze

Over here in Germany, the fireworks go off for New Year, and I have never witnessed anything like it. Imagine at night it sounds like a war zone right outside your window. In the morning, everything still smells like fireworks, there is trash and pulverized muck everywhere, even a bit of smoke left on the air if there isn't a breeze, and you can still hear a firecracker or two going off in the distance. That's in a relatively small town...the bigger towns are much worse, and measure their fireworks trash in the tons. Common things that I have seen include bottle rocket wars, blowing up mailboxes, setting off bangers under cars, and even parents showing their kids how to set off bangers under cars (there goes the theory of "Not to be used without parental supervision"). My father-in-law launched a Roman candle in his livingroom one year, and he is not the first German I've heard of who has done that. It's like the whole country just goes nuts and tries to blow itself to Hel and back every year. By comparison, the most dangerous-acting idiots I've seen in America on the 4th of July are quite tame to the average German. Warning labels wouldn't do a damned thing over here. At least for Germans, suspension of common sense is part of the festivity - the warning labels would just give Germans something else to laugh at while getting drunk or stoned, and a few of them might complain that Germany is becoming like America, with warning labels on everything. Laws would do nothing, either. The police are outnumbered on this night, and they know it. They don't bother so much with proactive or preventative measures, they sit back and wait until something actually blows up. Then, after the fire dies down a bit, they might poke their noses around a bit to see what actually happened.

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