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Our patriotic tradition of blowing things up must be protected

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It’s a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up. ...

Fireworks are as American as apple pie and not kissing people when you greet them. A merchant at one of my local fireworks emporiums (we have three) explains, “A guy was in here the other day and said his neighbor called the cops on him for setting off fireworks and the dispatcher was like…so?” ...

“What do you like about fireworks?” I ask a few folks. They stare at me a second and sort of frown, as if to say, “What do you mean, ‘Why do I like fireworks? That’s like asking, ‘Why do you like fair weather and free pizza?’”

I’m happy to say the right to keep and bear firearms is mostly alive and well, and the “rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air” will give proof through the night that our constitutional rights are still there (in most states, at least). The Pennsylvania legislature has actually made fireworks laws less restrictive in recent years.

“It used to be mortars were illegal,” my tent vendor tells me. “Now you can launch and sell mortars, which the people love. I know a lot of people would go out of state to get them and bring them back.”

That’s good news for us yinzers, but we still have work to do. No one should be forced to travel to “haven states” for safe and legal fireworks access. And I don’t think even Amazon employees get a stipend for doing so. It’s clear the time has come for Congress to codify the right to keep and bear fireworks into national law.

Back in 2020, the oozing governor of California, Gavin Newsom, took it upon himself to all but cancel the Fourth of July. Newsom issued a statement encouraging towns and cities across his state to shut down any fireworks shows they might have planned, so as to prevent people from congregating and spreading Covid. The reliably meddlesome Los Angeles County then went a step further, banning displays of fireworks altogether.

The people of LA considered this. They stroked their chins. And they said, “You know what? I don’t think this is for me.” The night of the Fourth, Angelenos sent up so many fireworks that the next day a local authority had to issue an air quality warning. ...

This is a country founded on a document that took the most powerful man on earth and trashed him as a “Tyrant” who was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” That king, by the way, was hardly the most oppressive monarch in European history. George III was far more influenced by Enlightenment values than he ever gets credit for. But we pushed him out anyway. American defiance, it’s worth noting, exists because of this British patrimony, not in spite of it. English ideas of liberty and checking authority were well established here; so too (this is often overlooked) was Irish insolence, with those of Irish lineage making up the backbone of the Continental Army. ...

Yet what is a populist except a middle finger to the ruling class (even if the populist has his own ambitions to rule)? Consider that our most famous populist, Donald Trump, was elected because he was willing to flaunt norms, not undergird them. Trump said things that Americans had been told for decades they weren’t supposed to say. Given the chance to smash taboos, half the country said yes please.

Jonah Goldberg in his book Suicide of the West recalls a wonderful observation by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. During the 1970s, the federal governments of both the United States and Canada decreed that their countries should switch to the metric system. Within six years, every road sign in Canada had been converted to kilometers. Americans, meanwhile, gave their usual shrug. Two centuries earlier, the United States had bucked the British while Canada had become a haven for loyalists; today, that difference still holds. ...

And while I’m sure there’s something to be said for living in a quiet communitarian paradise, I can’t help but think that the great California fireworks revolt represents everything I love about this country: the defiance, the audacity, the messiness, the joy. May the United States live to thumb her nose at many more Gavin Newsoms to come.