Briggs: Indiana lets people blow themselves up because it's good business

It's that time of year again when people across Indiana play amateur pyrotechnician — much to the detriment of cats, dogs, neighbors, veterans and their own limbs and homes.

State law permits the unfettered deployment of patriotic explosive devices between 5 p.m. and around midnight from June 29 to July 9. Every year, Indiana sets off enough fireworks to open a portal to hell, and every year it produces utterly insane stories about homes burning down, mortars hitting moving vehicles and exploding and children dying.

If anything else caused such mayhem, there'd be activist groups demanding change and politicians pledging to do something.

But, because it's fireworks, Indiana writes off death and destruction as the cost of doing business.

Quite literally.

I've written before about how Indiana's backyard fireworks season is too long and dangerous and how the Indiana General Assembly won't let cities restrict the state's open season on miniature bombs even a little bit when residents beg for relief.

Briggs' mailbag: How scary is Micah Beckwith, really?

Even as someone who's thought (and complained) about this issue for years, I was still struck by the excellent story IndyStar's Kayla Dwyer wrote about the history of Indiana's fireworks laws. The article lays out how the fireworks lobby gradually, and then suddenly, overcame safety concerns to make sophisticated explosives widely available.

Now, that lobby has amassed impenetrable power at the Statehouse to the point that even an incremental reduction to the days and hours of legal rocket launches is off limits.

No one bothers to pretend it's this way for any reason other than money. Even the Indiana Fire Chiefs Association, which is well aware of the harm caused by fireworks, stands down because lawmakers of yore shrewdly instituted a tax on fireworks sales that benefits firefighters to the tune of millions of dollars per year.

Lawmakers in 2018 dropped a requirement that hospitals and trauma centers report fireworks-related injuries to the state Department of Health. Although the data was imperfect, the reporting requirement at least amounted to an attempt to understand the toll of fireworks.

Now, we only have anecdotal headlines — of which there are plenty.

Kyrra McMichael, a Mount Vernon mother, told the Evansville Courier & Press she lost her fun-loving son to fireworks in 2022.

"Because boys are boys, they play with fireworks (and) he is gone," she wrote on social media, per the Courier & Press. "In the blink of an eye. Literally."

The cost of doing business.

Consumer fireworks amount to a legalized nuisance with no civic virtue. While they might appeal to some of the same notions of American freedom as firearms, no one outside of "Home Alone" uses fireworks for self-defense or any other constructive purpose. It's a form of entertainment, pure and simple, which, at best diminishes public health by keeping stressed-out neighbors awake into the morning and at worst maims and destroys people and property.

In the coming days, we know homes will go up in flames, lives will be shattered and people will die because Indiana lets consumers buy a product that should be left to trained professionals.

Indiana could do something about it. But it won't. There's too much money at stake.

Contact James Briggs at 317-444-4732 or [email protected]. Follow him on X and Threads at @JamesEBriggs.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana's fireworks laws accept death, destruction as cost of business