Heckman explains that the spike in sales can be chalked up to the slow liberalization of fireworks laws. In 1998, consumer fireworks generated $284 million in profit today, 20 years later, that number has jumped to $945 million. The industry continues to multiply its bottom line. The irony here is that despite all the arcane restrictions, most states do see the benefit of making fireworks part of their economic plan. In many ways, it is far more legal to shoot a gun in Iowa than it is to light a firecracker Combine that eternal fear with the sheer age of some of these laws ( New York banned fireworks in 1909) and you can see how teetotalism became a tradition. Chapman tells me he found predictable roadblocks in his campaign for legalization in Iowa the emergency services and medical contingency were wary of reintroducing combustibles to the state. In 2018, Americans consumed an all-time-high 277 million pounds of fireworks, with an estimated injury-per-100,000 pounds ratio of 3.2 - the lowest that number has been since the mid-’70s. The moral panic isn’t justified by the numbers, either. That itself is an issue of arbitration the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives directly regulates the importation and manufacturing of all display fireworks, and while anyone producing consumer fireworks does need to receive a federal explosives manufacturing license, Capitol Hill has no hand in coordinating the distribution or storage of the merchandise.
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The vast majority of these laws specifically target “consumer fireworks” - the stuff you buy in roadside tents - rather than “display fireworks,” which are the professional sky-scorching arrangements that Disneyland lights off every night. In many ways, it is far more legal to shoot a gun in Iowa than it is to light a firecracker. It is odd that the United States has such a strange, tenuous relationship with fireworks, especially considering how shoppers’ liberty is one of our defining doctrines. (In 2017, Pennsylvania reversed course, finally granting its citizenry explosive equality.) New Yorkers would pack their coffers with contraband before retreating back over state lines, essentially taking advantage of one law in order to break another. Instead, those stores catered to out-of-towners from New York, a state that maintains its restriction on everything but the boring stuff like sparklers and smoke bombs. For generations, you could live across the street from a seasonal fireworks tent on the outskirts of Allentown, and by the letter of the law, you were committing a crime if you ventured inside to buy a pack of air bombs.
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Until very recently, Pennsylvanian fireworks stores were free to sell all types of fireworks to anyone … except Pennsylvanians, who were quarantined to a very strict subset of explosives. In Ohio, for instance, it is legal to purchase certain fireworks like firecrackers and bottle rockets, but it is illegal to set off those same fireworks within state borders. Julie Heckman, the executive director of the American Pyrotechnic Association, tells me we’re living in a golden age for fireworks in America, with a rampant increase in legalization over the past decade and only one state (Massachusetts) maintaining an outright ban on the merchandise.īut the literature in the local precincts is downright Kafkaesque. Redefining holiday explosives as a normalized consumer product remains a longstanding taboo for so many states. Chapman was staring down an issue that’s vexed hundreds of policymakers before him: America’s beguiling network of messy fireworks laws, which seems to mutate and contradict itself every day. Jake Chapman when he sponsored a bill to legalize fireworks in the state in 2017. Ironically, sparklers were never outlawed.Īll that baggage meant it was an uphill battle for state Sen. The devastation was grave enough (although there were no deaths), and the outrage was fierce enough, that the moratorium on firecrackers, bottle rockets, and Roman candles remained the status quo in Iowa for more than 80 years.
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According to the folklore, he accidentally dropped a lit sparkler into a crate full of other, more combustible pyrotechnics, which created a blaze that quickly tore through the isolated town. The alleged culprit? A local kid, who was taking refuge from the summer heat in a corner drugstore. The local Congress moved to action after an infamous inferno engulfed the tiny heartland town of Spencer in 1931, destroying 80 businesses and racking up $2 million in damage. On January 1, 1938, Iowa passed a law that banned the sale, possession, and use of fireworks within state borders.
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