When sparklers are outlawed…

..only outlaws will have sparklers.

(That, however, is emphatically not a sparkler, but it is celebrating a birthday next month, at the height of what is apparently the Unimaginably Horrible Sparkler Season.)

Fresh from the, “I Wonder What in the Fuck You Trying to Distract Me From” Department, the Chicago Tribune reports out this rancid slice of overweening Nanny State idiocy…

Aldermen move to ban sparklers

By Gary Washburn
Tribune staff reporter

June 20, 2005, 8:04 PM CDT

Aldermen voted Monday to advance a measure that would add sparklers to the list of banned fireworks in Chicago after hearing a mother's emotional account of her daughter's excruciating experience after a Fourth of July accident last year.

The initial trauma to Maddi de la Cruz, who was 6 at the time, was followed by weeks of pain, at-home treatments applied "while she begged and screamed to stop hurting her" and surgery, said her mother, Michelle Maloney.

"It was very hard to see my daughter in so much pain," she told a joint meeting of the City Council's Police and Fire Committee and Traffic Control and Safety Committee.

Maddi was at an Independence Day party when another child threw down a sparker that landed on her left foot, burning a hole through the top of her shoe and igniting the inside. Afraid she would burn her hands if she tried to take off the shoe, the youngster received second- and third-degree burns before help came.
…

Ald. Thomas Allen (38th), a co-sponsor of the measure, acknowledged that people determined to get sparklers could obtain them elsewhere, just as they do other banned fireworks.

But he said the council would be providing a public service nevertheless by putting the spotlight on something that many unsuspecting parents believe is harmless.

"The message is, [a sparkler] is safe, that it must be safe" because it is available on the shelves of supermarkets, Allen said.
…

"There is emotional pain that goes with it too," said Barry Bennett, a social worker at the Loyola University Medical Center. "It continues with them throughout their lifetime."

Sparklers accounted for 14 percent of all fireworks-related injuries around the 2003 Independence Day holiday, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

Allen said he expects criticism for "trying to over-legislate" and for being "the Grinch that stole the Fourth of July."

"But if we can save one person from going through the suffering that Michelle and Maddi had to endure, maybe we make an effort," he said.

…

Let us stipulate if it really needs stipulation that I’m sorry this kid got burned. No kidding: that sounds really painful.

That being said, I got burned by a fucking Pop Tart that my heartless and obviously-underlegislated mother bought at the grocery store. The damned thing flipped over into my hand and the frosting stuck like napalm. OK, not like napalm, but it stuck and burned like a sonofabitch, and running cold water over it only hardened the outer carapace and left the brutal, molten core to burn me with the heat of a thousand suns.

OK, not the heat of a thousand suns.

What I got was a trip to the ER and once the parents learned that I wasn’t going to have anything lopped off, they cycled right from "Concern" over to the "Stern Lecture" setting with a tacit but palpable “Exactly how big a dumbass are you?’ leitmotif.

Same thing when I yanked too hard on a snag when I was fishing. The line when ker-whang! and in slow motion my 20 lb. test line sailed back at me like a popping whip. I managed to sink a barbed hook the size of the Grim Reaper’s Scythe into my thigh, which is funny, because I don’t remember it being nearly that big when I baited it.

My old man clipped the eyelet off and pushed it through my flesh with needle-nosed pliers until the tip of it looped out far enough where he could catch ahold of it and pull it out.

Same trip to the ER. Same lecture.

Man, did I ever come to know that lecture. I got it, oh, let’s just say a lot. A whole lot.

But what I didn’t get, what it never even occurred to my very intelligent parents to get, was special legislation passed to cocoon me and all of my little idiot friends away from the consequences of being little idiots.

I’m not an ogre, and I believe that we shouldn’t, say, make playgrounds out of silver mine tailings, culvert pipe, barbed wire and whatever the hell else the school’s contractor happen to be overstocked with the week he was scheduled to build a play lot for the kinder.

But sparklers? Fucking sparklers?!

I mean I was hanging my hand out of the car window on a long, hot trip to Nebraska and a bee happened to impale itself in my palm. So shall we now Nuke the West? To save all the little driftglasses who are whiling away the hours of a long, flat, family vacation pretending the rows of the cornfields rushing past like a flip-book are really Sideways Running Men, and cutting their hands through the slipstream and pretending that they're a zooming Spitfire?

And if we do, what about the mutants?? For God’s sake, has no one seen “Them”, or “Night of the Lepus” or “The Amazing Collosal Man”?

Or, “The Attack of the Unbelievably Overprotected Children”?

And to reiterate, I’m sorry this kid got burned. Really.

So to the adults and older kids out there, here’s your warning about this staple of American Celebratory Ritual that we must now explicitly caution against: you light them up and they hiss and spark and basically gout fire for about a minute.

Don’t look right at the fire, or it’ll hurt your eyes.
Don’t touch them to anything that you don’t want to burn.
The little sparks that fly off of them can sting.
After they burn off, the wire can stay really hot for a minute or two.

And BTW, you can buy M-80’s, quarter-sticks and shaped charges that will crack the planet’s mantle about an hour’s drive from where you live, and if you don’t know exactly how to get there, ask any 12-year-old.

(And speaking of nuclear mutation and things that go Bang! that you should actually be worried about, the 60th Anniversary of the first atomic weapon even detonated in human history is coming up fast, so I hope you all bought that Special Someone something nice. It happened July 16, 1945 outside of Alamagordo, New Mexico.

And according to protocol, the 60th is “diamond” so it’s gonna cost you. With a little thought you can be romantic AND economical, but don’t be cheap, or you’ll pay for it for years to come.)

But no, you do not pass legislation so that you can maybe, possibly “save one person”.

I mean what is this, Florida?

What are we, Republicans?

And if you have never read an excellent story by Jack Williamson called “…With Folded Hands” that summed up the terminal logic of this kind of Nanny Statism Gone Wild all the way back in 1947, I commend it to your attention.

And finally let me state for the record that you can have my Stardust 140 Shot Serene Barrage when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.