Banning things is so much easier than addressing the root cause of the problem. It’s absolutely tragic that a boy died, but I don’t think banning fireworks will stop young lads being chased by police.
Maybe we could consider the factors that cause young people to have fuck all better to do than mess around with fireworks in the street and try and improve the conditions that lead up to this stuff instead.
What are people even using to argue against fireworks licences? So far all I’ve seen is “it won’t stop antisocial behaviour”, which is true, but it will make it a lot harder for people to throw lit fireworks at other people.
I mean, seriously – is there any good reason why everyone in the country needs to be able to buy and use fireworks whenever they feel like it? As far as I can see, the only reason people don’t want licenses to be introduced is because they think fireworks are fun to play with and don’t want to have their toys taken away.
Dont really see why they’d do that to be honest. Surley it should be a greenhouse licence!
Why punish the majority law abiding citizens over some stupid kids. Its not their fault its the person misusing them. They should give harsher sentences to people and sell to over 25s and monitor shops selling fireworks so they don’t sell to children. Increase fines. Give a few years in prison and they will soon stop. Banning things are not the answer. Next we will be introducing tea spoon licences.
Many in UK don’t know that Northern Ireland has had a fireworks licence requirement for years now. You need a licence to let off fireworks in your own home that are not sparklers or for display purposes. I think the number of antisocial behaviour issues and injuries with fireworks has decreased markedly since its introduction. In practice however, it’s a bit of a poor tax. People with money will pay and have fireworks at their home, and people less money add 20% or so on to the cost of their fireworks display. While people who are intent on using them for vandalism can likely still acquire them illegally.
Pretty sure shooting fireworks at people is already illegal. GoT A LIceNse To shOOt tHaT PeOPle?
Please government please take away our rights. We can’t be trusted to make our own choices
Anyone else hate fireworks? Yeah they’re pretty cool looking and can be fun, but they’re bad for the environment, both scare and harm (directly and indirectly) animals and hurt humans too. It’s really just short sighted and selfish fun at the detriment of others. There’s many better ways to have fun without polluting the place and harming innocents.
I don’t care one way or the other and I can see both arguments, but the environmental impact with all the leftover shit is really not something we should be encouraging these days. And they don’t need to be as loud as they are, which would appease the majority. Also the boys death appears to have been caused by going through a greenhouse somehow, so fireworks are really nothing to do with this particular story. Plenty of horrendous burns throughout the country during the busiest weekend of the year for our emergency services, though. So there’s that.
Ah yes more fucking licences. Just what Britain needs. FML
I wish for this every year. The amount of rubbish it causes in parks, it’s dangerous to wildlife, humans and really stressful for pets and people with certain disabilities. We could do it like in france whereby they are only legal for 1 night a year, and banned the rest of the time. I think that would be fair (ish).
I don’t really like fireworks but didn’t he die falling onto a glasshouse when running from police? That could happen from literally any reason of running from police
It all comes down to lack of respect. For peoples’s property, for manners, for lives… What the hell has happened to people.
I hate fireworks anyway. All they do is scare pets, pollute the air and just consist of a loud bang with a flash – is that still fun 600 years after they were invented? How low-functioning does your brain have to be to get kicks out of that?
That said, I appreciate young kids might still like them so yeah, take them out of shops and just have them at organised displays. At least then it’ll be good quality ones that actually look pretty or whatever, there can be orchestrated and timed explosions to music etc and the risk of injury from idiots abusing them is minimised.
He didn’t even die from the fireworks, rather the police chasing him, this is an incendiary headline peddling misinformation
The boy was causing trouble with many others that night, police got involved, they ran, and sadly he lost his life.
Fireworks and bonfire night isn’t the issue here, it’s stupidity and a lack of common sense, people all throughout time have died from their own stupidity, they will continue to do so for all time.
I still think fireworks should be illegal for sale to under 25’s as clearly teenagers can’t be trusted to act smart or intelligently especially when they are most likely under the influence of alcohol or are being rambunctious little gits, but then you will still hear of things like this, you’ll still read news posts about some darling pet dieing from the shock or from being hit by a rocket, you’ll still read about malicious use of fireworks against people and their property.
You can’t fix stupidity.
> The 17-year-old crashed through a greenhouse as he fled police chasing as many as 80 youths firing rockets in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
That’s the key event.
The British “solution” to everything – ban and license, because if you’re willing to aim a firework horizontally and fire it at a person – you’re really gonna worry about having the appropriate license.
smh
I love fireworks. It absolutely amazes me that any moron can buy them. They should only be available to people who can prove they know how to use them. Letting them off anywhere other than approved locations shouldn’t be allowed.
Bonfire night is an odd celebration. A failed catholic plot to blow up parliament resulted in no explosion and Fawkes was then hanged, not burned, for his part in it. No explosions, no fires. Why anyone gives a shit about it anymore is weird in itself, and how it has descended into a free-for-all with explosives being freely available for kids to turn cities into war zones is as bizarre as it is depressing.
When you think about it, it is utterly mental that we allow the utter dregs of society to walk into a supermarket and buy a bunch of explosives every November. Surprised more serious firework-related incidents don’t happen to be honest
You got a loicence for that fun snap mate?
Maybe address the problems behind the incidents instead of banning or restricting that thing for people that use them properly and safely.
Even before hearing of this death I was thinking licensing made sense for them.
It’s mad how lax things are these days with fireworks casually available in shops for a not insignificant chunk of the year.
Even safety aside and purely thinking of quality of life, it’d be nice for October to be peaceful and keep the fireworks for a big celebration around the 5th and a weekend nearby.
I don’t particularly care for fireworks – can’t go to them with my autistic child anyway, and am sick to the back teeth of “fireworks night” becoming more and more like “fireworks month” as morons fire them off over our densely packed neighbourhood and terrify all the pets for weeks rather than getting it out the way in a single night. At the least I want there to be more quiet ones for sale and the loud ones phased out.
However, this was beyond your average idiot who pisses others off but does just want to put on a display for friends and family. This kid and his mates would’ve been menacing people with something else like knives or rocks and would’ve come a cropper running from the police for something else. Tragic loss of a young life, but come the fuck on it’s not the fireworks fault.
Would you rather live in a society where one needs a license to let off fireworks; a license that might conceivably only be granted to organisations, not individuals, all because a portion of society’s dregs behave abominably with them? Or would you rather live in a society without such dregs?
As always, the move to ban/restrict whatever problem individuals are lately engaged in being problematic with, is, though intolerable *per se*, a grave distraction from more fundamental issues.
Okay, the last time I said this on here I was shouted down, clearly by people who didn’t live in the kind of place I did. I HATE private fireworks and I’d LOVE to see them banned. I don’t think people who live in comfortable areas realise the suffering that private fireworks cause.
I’ve since moved to a far better area and-almost immediately-I’m feeling so much less negative about private fireworks, so sanguine, so positive! I wonder how long it’ll take before I start to spout off about how “unfair” and “illiberal” it would be to ban fireworks now that I’ve moved somewhere where it doesn’t matter. A year? Maybe two?
It’s not uncommon to require a firework user to possess a firework license and pass a safety inspection conducted by a fire services officer due to the flammable nature of the materials present in fireworks.
In Hong Kong where the system of common law is adopted, it is illegal to use fireworks without a firework permit. An HK police officer can arrest anyone using fireworks without a valid said permit. However, the law is not strictly enforced during the Chinese New Year unless complaints are lodged with the police.
I honestly don’t understand why domestic sales of fireworks are even legal? If limited to organisations it’s safer and could help promote events. 100 quid of home fireworks are both dangerous (yes I’m in my garden pitch black, pissing down with rain, 3 beers in trying to light a weapon) and disappointing. Even If it’s a tenner each for a Pro Display in park or pub garden these last at least half hour usually and are much better.
Also limits scaring the shit out of my cats so I’m always gonna get pissed off with fuckers who set off garden bang bangs.
I would love a ban on public fireworks sales – Tower Hamlets has sounded like a war zone for the last month. Awful.
As always, a couple of twats can’t be trusted so we’re all forced to lose freedoms. I thought he was hit by one but turns out he was just being an absolute shit and running from the police. Instead of pointing the finger at society, try questioning the parents and figure out what events led to him and his friends having fireworks in the first place
Fireworks have been fine for all these decades. Don’t go all Nanny State and ban stuff like we have in Australia.
What’s falling through a greenhouse got to do with fireworks ?
Fireworks might be the subject Reddit is most out of touch with compared to the public and that’s saying something. They’re never going to banned.
In this thread, greatest hits:
>>> Look, nobody’s saying we should ban them, but fireworks should be licensed so only your local council can set them off
>> What if your local council doesn’t run a show though? That’s effectively banning them.
> Good, I hate them and they should be banned anyway
and
>>> We should ban them for people’s safety – just look at that poor boy who died
>> He died because he jumped into a greenhouse while running from police. Should we ban greenhouses too?
> *crickets*
Can we stop trying to ban things because the minority can be fucking idiots with it?
Regardless of the story, we need a licence on them.
It’s not just kids messing about with these. I live next door to a family, very nice, very respectful, very quiet, who decided to set off some fireworks the other night. The man setting off the fire works is in his 40s. The very first one hit my window. Had my window been open it would have hit someone extremely flammable things that I had in the corner of my room.
They didn’t know what they were doing. But nobody asks questions when you go and buy fireworks that you can get from literally anywhere. Worst case scenario, they could have set fire to my home and killed everybody inside by accident.
These are dangerous things in the wrong hands. I’m more surprised how easy they are to get hold of than anything else because they can cause so much damage.
36 comments
Banning things is so much easier than addressing the root cause of the problem. It’s absolutely tragic that a boy died, but I don’t think banning fireworks will stop young lads being chased by police.
Maybe we could consider the factors that cause young people to have fuck all better to do than mess around with fireworks in the street and try and improve the conditions that lead up to this stuff instead.
What are people even using to argue against fireworks licences? So far all I’ve seen is “it won’t stop antisocial behaviour”, which is true, but it will make it a lot harder for people to throw lit fireworks at other people.
I mean, seriously – is there any good reason why everyone in the country needs to be able to buy and use fireworks whenever they feel like it? As far as I can see, the only reason people don’t want licenses to be introduced is because they think fireworks are fun to play with and don’t want to have their toys taken away.
Dont really see why they’d do that to be honest. Surley it should be a greenhouse licence!
Why punish the majority law abiding citizens over some stupid kids. Its not their fault its the person misusing them. They should give harsher sentences to people and sell to over 25s and monitor shops selling fireworks so they don’t sell to children. Increase fines. Give a few years in prison and they will soon stop. Banning things are not the answer. Next we will be introducing tea spoon licences.
Many in UK don’t know that Northern Ireland has had a fireworks licence requirement for years now. You need a licence to let off fireworks in your own home that are not sparklers or for display purposes. I think the number of antisocial behaviour issues and injuries with fireworks has decreased markedly since its introduction. In practice however, it’s a bit of a poor tax. People with money will pay and have fireworks at their home, and people less money add 20% or so on to the cost of their fireworks display. While people who are intent on using them for vandalism can likely still acquire them illegally.
Pretty sure shooting fireworks at people is already illegal. GoT A LIceNse To shOOt tHaT PeOPle?
Please government please take away our rights. We can’t be trusted to make our own choices
Anyone else hate fireworks? Yeah they’re pretty cool looking and can be fun, but they’re bad for the environment, both scare and harm (directly and indirectly) animals and hurt humans too. It’s really just short sighted and selfish fun at the detriment of others. There’s many better ways to have fun without polluting the place and harming innocents.
I don’t care one way or the other and I can see both arguments, but the environmental impact with all the leftover shit is really not something we should be encouraging these days. And they don’t need to be as loud as they are, which would appease the majority. Also the boys death appears to have been caused by going through a greenhouse somehow, so fireworks are really nothing to do with this particular story. Plenty of horrendous burns throughout the country during the busiest weekend of the year for our emergency services, though. So there’s that.
Ah yes more fucking licences. Just what Britain needs. FML
I wish for this every year. The amount of rubbish it causes in parks, it’s dangerous to wildlife, humans and really stressful for pets and people with certain disabilities. We could do it like in france whereby they are only legal for 1 night a year, and banned the rest of the time. I think that would be fair (ish).
I don’t really like fireworks but didn’t he die falling onto a glasshouse when running from police? That could happen from literally any reason of running from police
It all comes down to lack of respect. For peoples’s property, for manners, for lives… What the hell has happened to people.
I hate fireworks anyway. All they do is scare pets, pollute the air and just consist of a loud bang with a flash – is that still fun 600 years after they were invented? How low-functioning does your brain have to be to get kicks out of that?
That said, I appreciate young kids might still like them so yeah, take them out of shops and just have them at organised displays. At least then it’ll be good quality ones that actually look pretty or whatever, there can be orchestrated and timed explosions to music etc and the risk of injury from idiots abusing them is minimised.
He didn’t even die from the fireworks, rather the police chasing him, this is an incendiary headline peddling misinformation
The boy was causing trouble with many others that night, police got involved, they ran, and sadly he lost his life.
Fireworks and bonfire night isn’t the issue here, it’s stupidity and a lack of common sense, people all throughout time have died from their own stupidity, they will continue to do so for all time.
I still think fireworks should be illegal for sale to under 25’s as clearly teenagers can’t be trusted to act smart or intelligently especially when they are most likely under the influence of alcohol or are being rambunctious little gits, but then you will still hear of things like this, you’ll still read news posts about some darling pet dieing from the shock or from being hit by a rocket, you’ll still read about malicious use of fireworks against people and their property.
You can’t fix stupidity.
> The 17-year-old crashed through a greenhouse as he fled police chasing as many as 80 youths firing rockets in Halifax, West Yorkshire.
That’s the key event.
The British “solution” to everything – ban and license, because if you’re willing to aim a firework horizontally and fire it at a person – you’re really gonna worry about having the appropriate license.
smh
I love fireworks. It absolutely amazes me that any moron can buy them. They should only be available to people who can prove they know how to use them. Letting them off anywhere other than approved locations shouldn’t be allowed.
Bonfire night is an odd celebration. A failed catholic plot to blow up parliament resulted in no explosion and Fawkes was then hanged, not burned, for his part in it. No explosions, no fires. Why anyone gives a shit about it anymore is weird in itself, and how it has descended into a free-for-all with explosives being freely available for kids to turn cities into war zones is as bizarre as it is depressing.
When you think about it, it is utterly mental that we allow the utter dregs of society to walk into a supermarket and buy a bunch of explosives every November. Surprised more serious firework-related incidents don’t happen to be honest
You got a loicence for that fun snap mate?
Maybe address the problems behind the incidents instead of banning or restricting that thing for people that use them properly and safely.
Even before hearing of this death I was thinking licensing made sense for them.
It’s mad how lax things are these days with fireworks casually available in shops for a not insignificant chunk of the year.
Even safety aside and purely thinking of quality of life, it’d be nice for October to be peaceful and keep the fireworks for a big celebration around the 5th and a weekend nearby.
I don’t particularly care for fireworks – can’t go to them with my autistic child anyway, and am sick to the back teeth of “fireworks night” becoming more and more like “fireworks month” as morons fire them off over our densely packed neighbourhood and terrify all the pets for weeks rather than getting it out the way in a single night. At the least I want there to be more quiet ones for sale and the loud ones phased out.
However, this was beyond your average idiot who pisses others off but does just want to put on a display for friends and family. This kid and his mates would’ve been menacing people with something else like knives or rocks and would’ve come a cropper running from the police for something else. Tragic loss of a young life, but come the fuck on it’s not the fireworks fault.
Would you rather live in a society where one needs a license to let off fireworks; a license that might conceivably only be granted to organisations, not individuals, all because a portion of society’s dregs behave abominably with them? Or would you rather live in a society without such dregs?
As always, the move to ban/restrict whatever problem individuals are lately engaged in being problematic with, is, though intolerable *per se*, a grave distraction from more fundamental issues.
Okay, the last time I said this on here I was shouted down, clearly by people who didn’t live in the kind of place I did. I HATE private fireworks and I’d LOVE to see them banned. I don’t think people who live in comfortable areas realise the suffering that private fireworks cause.
I’ve since moved to a far better area and-almost immediately-I’m feeling so much less negative about private fireworks, so sanguine, so positive! I wonder how long it’ll take before I start to spout off about how “unfair” and “illiberal” it would be to ban fireworks now that I’ve moved somewhere where it doesn’t matter. A year? Maybe two?
It’s not uncommon to require a firework user to possess a firework license and pass a safety inspection conducted by a fire services officer due to the flammable nature of the materials present in fireworks.
In Hong Kong where the system of common law is adopted, it is illegal to use fireworks without a firework permit. An HK police officer can arrest anyone using fireworks without a valid said permit. However, the law is not strictly enforced during the Chinese New Year unless complaints are lodged with the police.
I honestly don’t understand why domestic sales of fireworks are even legal? If limited to organisations it’s safer and could help promote events. 100 quid of home fireworks are both dangerous (yes I’m in my garden pitch black, pissing down with rain, 3 beers in trying to light a weapon) and disappointing. Even If it’s a tenner each for a Pro Display in park or pub garden these last at least half hour usually and are much better.
Also limits scaring the shit out of my cats so I’m always gonna get pissed off with fuckers who set off garden bang bangs.
I would love a ban on public fireworks sales – Tower Hamlets has sounded like a war zone for the last month. Awful.
As always, a couple of twats can’t be trusted so we’re all forced to lose freedoms. I thought he was hit by one but turns out he was just being an absolute shit and running from the police. Instead of pointing the finger at society, try questioning the parents and figure out what events led to him and his friends having fireworks in the first place
Fireworks have been fine for all these decades. Don’t go all Nanny State and ban stuff like we have in Australia.
What’s falling through a greenhouse got to do with fireworks ?
Fireworks might be the subject Reddit is most out of touch with compared to the public and that’s saying something. They’re never going to banned.
In this thread, greatest hits:
>>> Look, nobody’s saying we should ban them, but fireworks should be licensed so only your local council can set them off
>> What if your local council doesn’t run a show though? That’s effectively banning them.
> Good, I hate them and they should be banned anyway
and
>>> We should ban them for people’s safety – just look at that poor boy who died
>> He died because he jumped into a greenhouse while running from police. Should we ban greenhouses too?
> *crickets*
Can we stop trying to ban things because the minority can be fucking idiots with it?
Regardless of the story, we need a licence on them.
It’s not just kids messing about with these. I live next door to a family, very nice, very respectful, very quiet, who decided to set off some fireworks the other night. The man setting off the fire works is in his 40s. The very first one hit my window. Had my window been open it would have hit someone extremely flammable things that I had in the corner of my room.
They didn’t know what they were doing. But nobody asks questions when you go and buy fireworks that you can get from literally anywhere. Worst case scenario, they could have set fire to my home and killed everybody inside by accident.
These are dangerous things in the wrong hands. I’m more surprised how easy they are to get hold of than anything else because they can cause so much damage.