Inside the mind of a legislative flop

by: Eric B.

Mon Jul 09, 2012 at 09:26:20 AM EDT

Today, the state is pulling itself out of its collective bomb shelter, it's eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. Seems the Legislature de-regulated fireworks last year, and like all acts of deregulation not terribly well thought through (might be a lesson in there somewhere), it ended with a lot of people comparing life in last week's heat wave to a day in Iraq, circa 2007.  Neal Rubin at the Free Press I think did the best job of anyone in the state -- and it's something everyone is talking about -- of laying things out. I have to caution you ... he has nice things to say about Richard LeBlanc.

State Rep. LeBlanc, D-Westland, hears perfectly well, mind you, and like most of us, he's been tired of the bigger, louder, more obnoxious and newly legal pyrotechnics since before Memorial Day.

But that's not why he regrets voting to allow them.

Basically, the law has been a miserable failure all the way around. It placed the rights of people to get a decent night's sleep behind the rights of drunken idiots to fill the sky with lights and noise, and it did so in a way that made collecting the revenue it was supposed to generate difficult.

I'm going to be charitable here in saying that probably things will calm themselves down once the novelty of legally launching loud fireworks has worn off. I say that because a) I launched illegal fireworks most of my post-10 year old life, and b) it's super expensive. I could by wrong on that, by the way. It could be that lots of people simply take it as a challenge to pay for more complex, bigger fireworks celebrations or just like the idea of bottle rocket fights (I did this growing up, by the way).

I've also heard word that the Legislature plans to take another look at this law when it comes back into session. What our experience with fireworks ought to tell us is that the Legislature did a terrible job of winding down a law I think everyone agrees was probably a bit silly (I don't think people losing limbs is funny, but there's also something to be said for not using government to protect the stupid from themselves). When they do fix it, I hope they get rid of the stupid federal holiday exemptions altogether, and let local communities sort that out. I mean, we allow townships and cities to be dry when it comes to alcohol sales. We ought to allow local governments to set and establish not only times where people can shoot these things off without fear of John Law showing up, but also places. Yes, that means letting communities let people use parks and school grounds (with input from local districts, of course) for fireworks displays (they're usually not as thick with tree canopy and provide public safety with easy-to-follow landmarks when the drunken hillbillies who live down the street manage to injure themselves).