Who are you to say I can’t light a fuse, realise the firework is a “dud” and walk up to the not yet ignited stick of explosives putting my face right next to the top of the near ignited fuse?
Clearly you’re some sort of authoritarian Stalinist!
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I live in the most diverse county in the U.S. You can go to the grocery store and hear 8 languages being spoken any given day. The people on my block FUCKING love fireworks. New Year’s Eve, Lunar New Years, 4th of July. There are probably $150,000 worth of fireworks popped in the street within 1/4 mile of my house.
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Fireworks are fucking idiotic. Ban the whole lot of them for all I care. Lots of people get hurt, it’s a nightmare for animals and getting quality sleep. They do a great job of property damage as well.
Of course I loved them as a kid until I damn near blew my hand off so now maybe I’m just an angry old get off my lawn man.
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As a teenager my friends and I would have bottle rocket fights with those little black cat bottle rockets and steel pipes with a plug in one end (yeah, we were idiots at the time).
It was all good fun until one hit me and exploded on my thigh just short of the family jewels…
I say ban them. They start way to many fires here in Florida every year.
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Ha. Completely agree man.
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Me too, but we wore paintball masks. I distinctly remember a friend putting a Saturn rocket array on his shoulders like a mech (anyone remember the old Mech Warrior video games?) And running at people.
I regret nothing.
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Oh yeah, I forgot the humidity levels in the West are much lower.
To illustrate this, you CAN’T start fires no matter how much you try rubbing sticks together or using any similar methods that you can use there. It’s almost impossible here.
Fireworks would do a shitload more damage there if you let idiots handle them.
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If I can’t have my fireworks display then I am not free.
No seriously, I believe this is approximately my governor’s argument for why we need a firework show at Mt. Rushmore. It’s not like we’ve basically stopped since 2009 because of concerns for wild fires/property damage, which are dumb anyway because
“It’s all stone”
- Trump
lol
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Call me a provocateur, call me naive… But I think guns are a hell of a lot more dangerous than fireworks both to the individual and the greater population given how many people firearms kill in proportion to fireworks.
The environmental damage mediated through any firework malfunction induced forest fires triumphs any amount of property damage a conventional firearm has the capacity to induce though.
Do I advocate for banning guns/firearms or fireworks? No
I advocate for keeping idiots away from them (i.e kids having bottle rocket rights, adults blowing up the neighbourhood on NYE despite only owning tiny plots of land unsuitable for the use of such explosives, some paranoid conspiracy nut hoarding 100 assault rifles).
Don’t “ban” fireworks, make sure people are properly taught how to handle them. Mandate one has taken safety courses, stores the products in a safe and secure environment, limit purchases to those above 18 etc etc.
The “just ban it” schtick irritates the hell out of me because it almost never works. If bans on fireworks were effective I wouldn’t have seen them go off in the sky over every second and third house years back (before I moved more rurally). If a near blanket ban on firearms worked we wouldn’t have the same firearm homicide rate we had prior to the Port Arthur massacre (in Aus), if a near blanket ban on fireworks worked we wouldn’t see them getting set off all over the place on the 4th of July.
If a ban on drugs worked in the Phillipines the quantity of methamphetamine manufacturers over there would have dropped when Duterte ordered police to shoot users/manufacturers on sight (also advocated for extrajudicial killings).
My point being… You can’t just ban things, you need to enforce a cultural shift to remove the allure behind a taboo. As can be seen with how Australians are more scared of astrazenica than they are of covid-19
With the whole regulatory schtick… I advocate for some regulation, not overt and extensive regulation. The latter becomes a nightmare seeped in red tape and nonsensical bylaws that make it very difficult for legitimate applicants to acquire what they need.
Fireworks aren’t a necessity. Guns are.
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5 posts were split to a new topic: Are Guns a Necessity?
I understand the topic of guns was brought up in relation to the fireworks issue, which was brought up in relation to bribing police (I think), but it would be best to go full-throttle on the gun issue in the separate thread that was just created: Is Civilian Gun Ownership a Necessity?
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NOOOOOO… I’m not getting drawn into a gun control debate LMAO!!!
I’m not from the US. I don’t know what it’s like in the US. I don’t know how easy it is to obtain guns illegally in the US. I do not know what kind of procedures are required to legally obtain one. All I was commenting on were the logical inconsistencies WITHIN THE MOVIE in the other thread FFS.
E.g, I wasn’t being anti-Christian when I ripped apart Assassin 33AD even though it was financed and made by Christians as a Christian movie. It was so fucking dumb it virtually had a “kick me” sign pasted on it with a bullseye drawn on it’s ass. I’ve said many times I’m a Catholic. It doesn’t mean I can sit through “so bad it’s good” crap like The Trump Prophecy without laughing my ass off lol.
As for fireworks, I really don’t give enough of a damn to think about it.
When it comes to the efficacy of regulation to outright banning of anything, it depends on a myriad of factors and is also dependant on what the item in question is. It works in some countries for some things. It doesn’t work for others. You won’t see any guns or illegal fireworks available in a country like Singapore, but you’ll see heroin and meth users there.
You do bring up an interesting point here. But I’m NOT getting into a gun control debate lol.
However, even my doctor/occasional training partner here told me never to get an AstraZenica jab. I never bothered to ask why since I already had my first Pfizer jab at that time. I’m NOT getting into a vaccine debate either! Just stating what the dude said. I don’t even know he based this on.
Perhaps the Australian government should give people more alternatives like Pfizer and the latest non-mNRA one - the one made by the US, NOT China. Don’t fucking use Sinovac unless you really need to travel to China since the fuckers won’t allow anyone vaccinated with any other one in. It’s ok to get 2 different vaccines if that’s the case from what my doc told me.
I had astrazenica
I died seven times. I’m typing postmortem right now
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You were told last year, we needed to defund the police, to eliminate the police," “You were told we really needed more social workers and psychologists, you were told crime would go down if there were fewer cops. You were told there are things sociologists could work through that a guy with a gun and a badge could not…You knew that was a dumb idea when you heard it. You knew we really don’t want social workers showing up when someone is breaking into our homes or shooting up the neighborhood.”
“They won’t ever apologize for this lethal mistake. Even if they did, it is really hard to hear apologies from the grave.”
“Unfortunately, there were some who did not understand the idiocy of defunding the law enforcement, and tragically some of those people serve on city governments in some of Americas largest cities New York, Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, Seattle some are of the cities that cut funding for law enforcement. And what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, that violent crime is going up,” he went on.
"Crime is spiraling out of control in many of the same cities…people are being assaulted, robbed, stabbed, killed in tragically high numbers during this summer and spring of criminal carnage. Crime is the most insidious tax of all on the poor."
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Leftists have never apologized for their policy disasters. Not once in all of history. It doesn’t matter if they were wrong about the outcomes of their policies. What matters to them is that they support these easily predicted policy disasters for what they think are the right reasons.
Woke reasons.
To paraphrase Reagan, it’s not that liberals are ignorant. It’s that they know so much that isn’t true.
That’s why Democrat leadership is once again blaming guns for their rank incompetence and abdication of duty. They are sociopathic power mongers people allow in government for some reason.
Coming from Reagan, that’s rich. BTW, what were his beliefs on gun ownership? How did trickle down economics work out? Beirut? Granada? Iran Contra? The right’s shit doesn’t smell any better. And the poor will still be the ones who end up knee deep in it. Let’s not ignore the effects of a failed drug war and puritanical approaches to sex education.
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That was coming from me. I wrote the post. I was paraphrasing Reagan because the words are extremely pertinent to the subject at hand.
Defunding the police and the resulting violence lays squarely at the feet of leftists. It boggles the mind that people even feel the need to reach for Republican equivalence.
There is none. That’s why people are bringing up policies from the 80s or suggesting that mundane voting reforms in GA somehow wash away the combination of sociopathy and stupidity of defunding the police, along with every iteration of that argument.
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Does anyone else find it funny that USA is the richest country in the world yet it has poor and homeless people. I believe in prison reform (Prisons similar to the ones in Norway). I do not believe in defunding the police atm because there is a rise in crime but, I think if poverty is slowly attacked then crime will decrease. But it’s as if the stupid gov’t doesn’t want to attack the root of crime. The country as a whole operates like a business. The prison system and police force operate like a business. Prisons in USA are for punishment not rehabilitation.
Because the effects of the drug war, which started in the 70s, have no bearing on today? The ghettos suddenly appeared this year? You can still see burned out buildings in places like Newark from the race riots of the late 60s and early 70s.
It’s about believing that one side is somehow going to save the day. If you look at when marriages among blacks started to take a steep decline, and we know the negative results for children in fatherless homes, it was in 1970, under a Republican’s watch. And Reagan did nothing to reverse that trend. Neither did Bush 1. Why would I be foolish enough to think the GOP has the answers?
This doesn’t mean that defunding the police was a good idea but, it’s not like crime didn’t exist before that became a rallying cry of the stupid. And when we look at who champions that cause, it’s mainly educated elites (white and black). Which again gets to my point that no one really cares about the poor and the crime which affects them. I would even argue that many of these right wing “news” sites that bring up the rise in crime in the inner cities do so not because they care about the people most affected but for political reasons.
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