eric smith is the long island man who blew his left arm off lighting some heavy-duty fireworks.
police are “considering criminal charges“. what useful purpose would that serve? haven’t been able to find any updates on these weighty police “considerations”, though i’ve got some better ideas on how they might address the situation.
if he survives, of course. the arm — or what was left of it — could not be reattached, and smith remains in critical condition.
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This is one of those topics that makes for some very interesting discussion. I have felt the same way when a mother loses her baby because she turned her head for a second and the child slipped in the tub. IF the child was not an abused or neglected child, i think the mother has suffered enough. I recall being a young mother myself and reaching back for the phone or a towel and my baby slipped down a bit and I caught her. Tragedy happens to people everyday, not intended. However, fireworks may be aother story simply because they are explosives, even if minor. In PA, they are legal, of course, and we have always gotten ours from there. Are there dangers? Yes. But everytime you get ina car to drive it, you are operating a potentially lethal weapon. There are a zillion dangerous things out there we operate, do, use everyday. Punishments must be tailored to the Individual circumstances. I can see fining this man for using the fireworks ‘recklessly’, but i think he suffered enough.
i agree that he suffered enough, and i don’t think a fine would accomplish anything — god knows what his medical bills will be, and he may not be in a profession that he can do with just one arm.
got a lot of direct comments on this one, on FB and via email, that surprised me. people feeling he shouldn’t get off “scot-free” and so forth. but he hasn’t gotten off scot-free at all: i’m sure if given the chance he’d rather pay a fine or do some time in jail or both rather than lose his whole arm.
can you imagine how it might feel to live with something like that? knowing that you mutilated your body for no good reason, either through a stupid mistake or being a show-off? the shame, remorse and self-loathing must be unimaginably huge.
it’s interesting. what i was getting at in my video was trying to find a way that something positive could come out of this tragedy, but most of the replies have centered on whether or not this guy has been punished enough. in a case like this, punishment accomplishes nothing — as it’s already a pretty sure bet he won’t be messing around with fireworks again!
I wish I could call this a “victimless” crime but you nail it in your subject line.
You know, I hate fireworks. I don’t think they offer, literally, enough bang for the buck. I can see the local fireworks here from my apartment, and invariably I end up going to bed before the pooped-out finale. As far as smaller fireworks, I have never understood the point of undersized bombs like M-80s, since they’re not even fun to look at. Can’t remember the last time I saw a sparkler, but needless to say, “home” fireworks are really frowned upon in the desert.
I do like the idea of his visiting schools, though. On the order of “Scared Straight”!
I wish I could say I was surprised about the amount of emails and messages you said you received on Facebook saying that this man is getting off “scot-free”, but I can and it makes me sad that there are people out there who see absolutely nothing but the “law” and how everyone has to follow the law and if they don’t then it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, they need to go to jail. So many people just look at jail as the place where other people go–never them because if it were them they would be arguing the same points you’ve brought up here–when they have disobeyed the law and that’s just the end of the story. No one thinks about how much money it takes to keep non-violent people who are not criminals but have broken some ridiculous law in jail, but are all over talking about the tax breaks they should be awarded. Seems kind of backwards to me and I agree with the idea of this guy speaking at schools and talking about what happened to him, but it takes a lot more than that to scare kids straight. After going to public school all my life and from the sixth grade on being told about how horrible it is to smoke and seeing pictures of black lungs and people with lung cancer, I’ve been a smoker for more than a handful of years now. In the long term, scared straight just doesn’t work and people will almost always have the mindset that it won’t happen to them. Along that same vein, kids and teenagers can talk to a guy who blew his arm off lighting a firework and then go out the next fourth of July and do the same thing because fireworks are cool and the kids who light them off are even cooler.
i agree that he suffered enough, and i don’t think a fine would accomplish anything, god knows what his medical bills will be, and he may not be in a profession that he can do with just one arm.
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