Don’t Blow Your Face Off This July 4th, Kids

Around this time of year, there’s nothing better than an afternoon spent drinking, grilling meats, and watching fireworks. We tend to let the professionals handle lighting the explosives—we think we remember hearing something once about not drinking and blowing stuff up.

But it seems that kids are harnessing the power of the internet to not only buy fireworks, but create their own.

Every year around the Fourth of July, we get the mandatory PSA of what fireworks can do to a watermelon or Styrofoam dummy. But this year, authorities are also warning kids not to blow their faces off, even after Independence Day has come and gone.

State Trooper Robert Bachelder told the Globe that kids have taken to using the leftover materials from their fireworks to build “IEDs”—that’s improvised explosive devices, you know like those things they have in Iraq—and then post videos of their work on YouTube.

Needham police found one such device made of a milk carton and several metal containers of Axe deodorant Sunday in a field near High Rock School, Lieutenant Christopher Baker, department spokesman, said in a phone interview.

So not only is Axe body spray an offense to our sense of smell, but the stuff is also turning our children into little terrorists? Does this mean we can finally ban it now? Or does it just mean we need checkpoints in Needham? Complex questions for a complex time.