There’s a little legal rigmarole, probably useless, endured by all the people pushing shopping carts full of shells, cones, sparklers, fountains, firecrackers, and honking big mortar tubes to the checkout at Phantom Fireworks in the Wisconsin countryside.

Before buying, they must apply for a permit to possess fireworks. For $4, the town of Addison in Washington County says they’re legit.

This doesn’t matter. In Milwaukee, my city, the fireworks laws are so tight, you violate them by entertaining amorous intent. The same is true of many other cities, so even if you’re legal when buying, you’re not when lighting. The Wisconsin Department of Justice warned last year that most of those permits that fireworks dealers issue are no good anyway and that any firework that takes flight is illegal to light or possess.

So the well-groomed man in his fifties whom I saw buying at least $1,000 in fireworks was probably going to possess and light them in violation of some law.

Fireworks bans, especially statewide ones, aren’t premised only on the notion that loud, fiery stuff is unneighborly in dense places but that, wherever you shoot it off, someone will be hurt. Indeed, fireworks injuries sent some 9,200 people of all ages to emergency rooms in 2006, reports the Consumer Products Safety Commission. Eleven people died from fireworks that year.

In the same year, about 65,000 children wound up in ERs because of skateboard injuries. The commission guessed that about 240,000 children needed emergency care because of bicycles, and 77 children died because of them, never mind how many adults were hurt. I don’t recall any states banning bikes, or canoes, which killed 72 people last year.

In fact, the number of fireworks injuries is about 25% lower now than it was in the early 1990s. If you look at the rate of injuries — more than twice as many fireworks are shot off now as then — the improvement is dramatic.

The fireworks industry says this is because its products are safer. This rings true: Walk through Phantom’s supermarket-like aisles, and for all the endorphic names — “thermobaric warheads” or the Marines-themed “Hoo-ah!” — the individual shots inside have no more that 50 milligrams of explosive. Stay under that and a firework is OK under federal law because it packs comparatively little explosive power — about a fiftieth of an M80, now illegal.

It doesn’t matter, though, that there were vastly fewer people hurt by fireworks than by skateboards if you can’t see why anyone would shoot off fireworks anyhow. “Why do people want to do that?” asked a friend of mine, and I’m sure she’s not alone.

They do it because it’s fun. Somehow, this doesn’t have to be explained about deadlier thrills of canoes. Fireworks set some 1,800 buildings afire a year, while candles ignite about 21,000 structure fires, yet one doesn’t hear people saying they can’t understand why people light candles. I’m coming to think this is because regulators have some sort of mommy mindset, predisposed to see value in candles and canoeing and to see fireworks as incomprehensible noise to be grown out of.

Mind you, my family won’t light any. One of my children only has one functioning eye. My threshold of nervousness is commensurately cranked. That’s a rational judgment, which adults can make. Blowing things up is, indeed, fun, but our circumstances make the risk not worth it for us.

Our situation isn’t the same as Josh Paul’s, though, nor as that of the graying gent buying all the firepower. Leave aside the question of fireworks’ noise: If noise mattered, my local police would enforce laws against unmuffled motorcycles, of which there are many here in Harley-Davidson’s hometown. No, it’s our safety that’s the excuse for the state making the same calculation for Mr. Paul, the genteel pyro, and me and superseding our own judgments.

Last year, I talked to a state senator, Fred Risser of Madison, Wis., a longtime foe of any fireworks, and he lamented weak enforcement. “A lot of people don’t particularly like the law,” he said, and so many disobey. I found this heartening, that people could see when the state was being pointlessly bossy and were willing to resist.

Last July, New York police tried arresting a Staten Island man for shooting off fireworks. Neighbors, who apparently liked the display, “became combative,” as one account put it; 28 were arrested. In the main, people ought to obey police.

There is something fitting, however, about citizens feeling a touch rebellious when authorities tell them they cannot, under any circumstances, celebrate the nation’s overthrow of tyranny in the way that Americans have celebrated it for more than two centuries — by making bangs and flashes.

Mr. McIlheran is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.