When I was a kid you could get actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite. Now you can only get little firecrackers that don't even blow up little green army men.

It's really dependent on your state laws. My state allows fireworks, so you can get most things but they are very limited in size and explosive content.

What it amounts to is that most cities/counties don't enforce their existing laws in this area because people would have a shit fit, and they would arrest so many people that it's kind of impossible.

Something something banning things doesn't really work to do anything but make criminals out of every day people.

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jandrewrogers 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> actual m80's that were like a quarter stick of dynamite

Not even close.

A military M80 [0] is ~5g of flash powder, an inconsequential amount of low-explosive albeit enough to seriously injure yourself. The consumer "M80" are even weaker. These are used to simulate real explosions by the military.

The smallest standardized military demolition charge contains ~110g of TNT, in a similar small cylindrical format. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in power between an M80 and these demolition charges.

A "quarter stick of dynamite" isn't a standard thing. But if it was, it would probably come in around 50g of TNT equivalent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-80_(explosive)

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Fezzik 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You could sure make decent explosives with OTC fireworks though - in the early 90s we would buy hundreds of those whistling fireworks, hammer them, cut the bottoms off, and then fill various bottles with all the powder. We made a shockwave with one of our makeshift bombs and decided we should probably stop after that.

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sidewndr46 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In most states you can go buy all the tannerite you want. That's an actual explosion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VaLtf_EIVQ

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jandrewrogers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The old school whistling fireworks were often based on picrate chemistry. Picrates famously have the ability when burned to hover between normally deflagration and true detonation; the whistling is a side effect of this. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history (see below) was a picrate explosion. These aren’t used anymore for safety reasons; they don’t have a great stability profile and picrates are true high-explosives.

Over the years they have found alternatives for and phased out most high-explosives used in fireworks. Many high-explosives will just deflagrate/burn but can spontaneously detonate with considerable power if the conditions are right, which makes them dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion

	▲	dmurray 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Have advances in explosives, fuses and quality control made fireworks safer in the last 40 years? Or perhaps the safety improvements are offset by sellers now offering bigger fireworks (either because those are now actually safe and both buyers and sellers are more comfortable with them, or just because of a general hedonic improvement). Or perhaps they are safer for their users, but worse for starting fires or interfering with low-flying aircraft. Either way I would be interested in reading more about this, something more nuanced than "fireworks dangerous". At the least it's a counterpoint to what happened with illegal drugs which seem to have become more dangerous as a result of regulation and bans.

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jtbayly 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

M80s were more like 1/8th of a stick, I think. My uncle bought quarter sticks of dynamite one time. Wow. Quite a bit bigger and louder than an M80, and M80s were LOUD! My dad's cousin blew off most of his thumb and parts of several fingers with one. It was old, and it had a flash fuse. He was planning to toss it, but it went off instantly. (Don't hold fireworks when you are lighting them.)

A couple of years ago my brother got some flat triangles from a guy on the side of the road. First thing I've seen in years that was like an M80. We put a flat soccer ball over one, and it went 50 feet in the air. Very fun.