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Imagine this picture. It’s November 5th and you’re sitting on the deck after a barbecue and a couple of beers. The neighbourhood is echoing to loud bangs and explosions and some spectacular bright lights from colourful fireworks light up the night sky.
You didn’t invest a couple of hundred dollars in fireworks but wait – you have a shotgun and some blanks inside. You unlock your shotgun from the safe then calmly sit in your back yard and add to the already substantial cacophony bursting all around you by discharging a few shots into the sky.
The neighbour, who’s calmly been letting off an assortment of fireworks with cute names like “Mighty Cannon” for the past half hour, sees you sitting there with your shotgun and promptly dials 111 and, within minutes, the Armed Offenders Squad screams up, your house is surrounded, the police helicopter is hovering overhead with a spotlight on you and loudhailers are calling for you to surrender and come out with your hands up.
Of course, you’re going to be arrested for discharging a firearm in a built-up area and quite rightly so. But in reality and from a purely logical perspective, the only difference between what you did and what you’re neighbours were doing is the method of delivering the bang.
Mighty Cannon sounding like a shotgun = OK. Shotgun sounding (and looking) like a shotgun = not OK.
Yes, I know, it’s a ridiculous and probably meaningless analogy but so is the argument about banning everything from fatty foods and sugar to playing on monkey bars and swings because someone might get hurt.
On the other hand, I get that the loud bangs scare the hell out of animals and cause issues for the elderly and disturb the peace and, of course, some people are irresponsible and some will get burned or even worse.
But you can’t just keep banning things because they’re dangerous or annoying.
The issue surely has to be how to bring the irresponsible idiots under control without affecting the responsible majority.
Reducing the sales period has achieved part one of that. This year, we haven’t been subjected to two weeks of random explosions throughout the neighbourhood. It’s only been three nights and that is about an 80% reduction in annoyance for humans and animals alike.
Maybe, instead of banning fireworks and treating our entire population like fools, our authorities could look at restricting the private or personal use of them to a set period on a set date – maybe 8 pm until 11.00 pm on the 5th November.
That way, pet owners can ensure pets are taken care of. The rest of us can then live peacefully without several hundred neighbours taking turns at annoying the hell out of everyone at will for several days before the event. Then, hopefully, everybody will be happy!
