Last night I was on the couch listening to the scanner app on my phone running, doing what I’ve done for more years than I care to count now — tracking traffic across different states and several Michigan counties, half out of habit and half because it’s just who I am. Most holiday weeks you brace for the predictable stuff. A spent mortar shell landing in dry grass. A shed roof that caught a spark. Somebody who didn’t think about which way the wind was blowing. That’s the ordinary cost of the season, and departments plan around it.
What I wasn’t braced for was how many of last night’s calls weren’t accidents at all. They were neighbors, on purpose, launching fireworks onto each other’s property. Onto houses. In one case I heard unfold in close to real time, a dispute over where the fireworks were landing turned into an altercation, and the altercation turned into a handgun being pulled and fired.
I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it’s worth sitting with.
The Line We Crossed
I’ve spent over fifty years around emergency scenes of every kind, and I’ve made a kind of peace with the fact that people do careless things. Careless, I understand. Careless is human. What happened on some of those calls last night wasn’t careless. It was deliberate. Somebody made a decision to point a firework at a neighbor’s house, or to keep launching after being asked to stop, knowing full well what it would do.
Strip away the fireworks and just look at the shape of it: a person decided the fastest way to settle a disagreement with the person next door was to escalate until someone else got hurt. That’s not a holiday problem. That’s a decency problem, and fireworks just happened to be sitting there as the accelerant.
I keep coming back to the same question. Whatever happened to being a good neighbor? Not perfect. Not best friends. Just decent — the kind of neighbor who knocks on the door instead of retaliating, who says something before it becomes a 911 call, who remembers that the person on the other side of the property line has a name and a family and probably didn’t wake up that morning looking for a fight.
What the Law Actually Says
Setting the human piece aside for a moment, because I think people genuinely don’t know this: Michigan law already answers most of what happened on those calls, and it’s not close. State law expressly prohibits igniting, discharging, or using consumer fireworks on public property, school property, church property, or someone else’s property without that person’s express permission — and that’s not a suggestion; it’s a civil infraction carrying a fine of up to $500.
That covers both halves of what I heard last night: fireworks launched onto public land, and fireworks launched — or left to drift — onto a neighbor’s yard or house without their say-so. A lot of townships go further than the state minimum, too. Some hold the person who set them off responsible for cleaning up any debris that lands on someone else’s property, on top of the fine. And if the discharge causes actual harm or property damage, several local ordinances bump the violation up from a civil infraction to a misdemeanor.
None of that requires you to know a statute number. It requires knowing where your property line is, and asking before you point anything explosive across it.
What I’d Ask Instead
I’m not writing this to lecture anyone who lit or plans on lighting a few fountains in their own driveway over the Fourth Holiday and call it a good Fourth. That’s what the holiday’s for, and I hope you have a safe and good one.
This is for the smaller number of people who already know better and did it anyway — who used fireworks as a way to send a message to somebody they were mad at. I’d ask you to think about what you’re actually risking: a fine, a misdemeanor charge, a house fire, an ambulance call, or — like last night — someone reaching for a gun over something that started as a disagreement about noise and debris.
And it doesn’t stop at a misdemeanor. Under Michigan law, careless fireworks use that causes a serious injury is a felony carrying up to five years in prison — and if it costs someone their life, that number climbs to fifteen. None of that is worth whatever the original argument was about.
Be the neighbor who knocks first. Be the one who asks before you launch anything that leaves the ground, and stops the moment someone asks you to. It costs nothing, and it’s the difference between a holiday everyone remembers fondly and one that ends with a fire truck, an ambulance, a squad car, or worse in your driveway.
Stay safe out there. Watch out for each other.
— Fire Chief Paramedic Fred R. LaPoint
Legal references: Michigan Fireworks Safety Act, MCL 28.462(1) (discharge on public or another person’s property without permission) and MCL 28.457 (local ordinance authority and state-protected holiday windows). Local debris and damage provisions vary by township —Current as of July 2, 2026.
This article first appeared in Behind The Alarm, the newsletter of Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department, on July 2, 2026. Read the original.