It's July So Yes, Someone Wants To Ban Fireworks in NH - Granite Grok

It’s July So Yes, Someone Wants To Ban Fireworks in NH

hb336 would ban some fireworks in NHEvery year hundreds of thousands of ’rounds’ of fireworks are discharged in New Hampshire–or elsewhere after having been purchased in New Hampshire–by regular folk hoping to make their celebration special.  You can hear them in your neighborhoods, sometimes well past 10 or 11 pm, all through July, and quite often throughout the year.

Fireworks can give any party a kick in the pants and New Hampshire still has its advantage: You can buy and use a wide range of them in the Granite State that are illegal in every state that surrounds us.

This year, as is the case every year, someone gets hurt using fireworks, and like clockwork, someone comes out and says we could have prevented that if we had banned them.  If we ban them now….

Right.

And we could save taxpayers a butt-load of cash, paperwork, and misery if we banned more busy-body bureaucrats.  Just saying.

This year, the New Hampshire State Fire Marshall, J. William Degnan, is asking for a ban on re-loadable mortars.

Two people in Pelham (what is it with Pelham?) were injured this year.

Fire Marshall Degnan says there are reports of 18 injuries tied to this device since they were made legal (again?) in NH in 2011.   Fewer than almost everything else that injures us, I suspect, at just 4.5 per year.  (How about –“Fire Marshall Degnan calls for ban on all lighters, backyard grills, boiling water, slippery floors, staplers, livingroom tables, folding chairs, backyard umbrellas, RTV’s, driving, anything pointy, walking, biking, climbing, hiking, riding, sledding, skiing, building, moving….living?”)

He thinks that because they used to be illegal, banning them again should be no big deal.  But Degnan is on the record as wanting to ban all fireworks in New Hampshire, so we should take this for what it is.  Incrementalism.  He wont be happy until the apointed experts have taken them all away from you.

To borrow from Bastiat

Whilst mankind tends to evil, they incline to good; whilst mankind is advancing toward darkness, they are aspiring to enlightenment; whilst mankind is drawn toward vice, they are attracted by virtue.  And, this granted, they demand the assistance of force, by means of which they are to substitute their own tendencies for those of the human race.

No ban on slippery slopes then?

I won’t bore you with hundreds of comparative statistics but fireworks are big business for New Hampshire.  So is Motorcycle week.  People get injured during motorcycle week.  People die.  It is sad and tragic but it happens.  It happens because people make mistakes, fail to follow the rules, or simply refuse or fail to respect the risk associated with the chosen behavior.  Someone screws up.  But no one is banning motorcycles or motorcycle week.  No one is banning cars, or bats or hammers either, even though they kill or injure more people.

That makes it political.

Coming from a man who claims a desire to ban all fireworks in New Hampshire, nothing he says about any one of them has much bearing outside that context.

Every year someone will be injured by something.  Are we to presume that, in the case of fireworks, this will be an ongoing  invitation to ban “it,” whatever the next ‘it’ is, until there is nothing left to ban?

I respect the fire Marshall’s desire to justify his paycheck, but as I pointed out earlier, taxpayers could save a lot of money by reducing the number of pencil-pushers feeding off their wallets.

Why don’t we begin a legislative agenda that starts with eliminating excess state level bureaucrats whose oversight could easily be administered (by a local or elected official) at a county or town/city level?  The distance between the taxpayers (fireworks user) and a supposedly competent authority would be greatly reduced, as would the steps to holding them accountable for what comes out of their mouths or the actions they claim to take in our names, as would the money trail and the trickle of lost revenue dropped on the path to get to there from here; money we could have used on something useful.

New Hampshire’s bureaucrat to taxpayer burden is one of the highest in the nation.  If you’d like to save people something why don’t we save them some money and consider incrementally reducing the number of officers sent to eat our substance.  We can use the  money we save to buy more fireworks, creating or saving much needed jobs, unlike the ones leaching off the real job creators in this state; the bureaucrats crowded around the taxpayer-funded water-coolers, filled with taxpayer-funded water (or should we ban those to prevent back injuries?) plotting their next thousand creeping Tyranny up in Concord.

H/T Boston.com / WMUR News 9

 

And yes, I found my “ball.

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