To Our Readers
WE don't get too much mail about difficult issues like Rice v. Cayetano, tertiary water purification or standards-based public education. Nope, it takes a hot-button, shoot-from-the-hip kind of beef, like fireworks, to get the cards and letters flowing. Douse the fuse on fireworks
Everybody's got an opinion about New Year's fireworks, about laws the Legislature ought to pass or not, about which kind should be legal and which shouldn't, about what the police should do and about where the guy down the street with the inexhaustible supply of cherry bombs ought to stick them.
Many people were outraged by the toll of dead and maimed birds. One reader was upset that we printed a picture of a man hosing spent firecrackers off the street -- they went down the storm drain and out to the ocean, where they presumably annoyed the fish. Then there was the tragic story of the dog frightened by fireworks that ran into the road and was killed by a car.
Even quiet Kalama Valley put on a real show last week. We stayed home for the first time in years and watched an aerial display that continued for hours. We even lit some firecrackers ourselves. It was such a 20th-century thing to do.
Smoke from the amateur pyrotechnics obscured the big, taxpayer-funded, professional laser light show on Diamond Head. Lawmakers would be willing to look the other way on that one, but they can't escape the fact that a man died this year when an illegal aerial bomb exploded inside a fiberglass mortar in Waialua, releasing a hail of lethal plastic shrapnel.
Of course, somehow the Leg has overlooked the need for a motorcycle helmet law for decades. Could they creatively combine all this mayhem and let people launch bottle rockets from motorcycles as long as they wear a helmet and eye protection?
No, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Virtually every other state manages to control fireworks effectively. It's time Hawaii did, too.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.