ALTHOUGH it is barely a week since fireworks went on legal sale, already an East Lancashire teenager lies dead -- killed by one that blew up in his face.

And this comes after fire chiefs had compiled a catalogue of incidents in which they have been dangerously misused -- including one that we report tonight of a car left looking like it had been blown apart by a bomb and, yet, was wrecked by just one ordinary firework.

And on top of these terrifying events come cases of fireworks being shoved through letter boxes, shop shutters and into phone kiosks and pillar boxes -- each, we are told, capable of causing serious injury or death. And all of these are cases logged by just one East Lancashire fire station.

And this is the state of affairs when there are still more than two weeks to go before Bonfire Night -- for which these fireworks are supposed to be intended.

Yet every year at this time, people are subjected to premature firework mayhem -- despite the Firework Code, legal bans on them being sold to under-age youngsters, entrapment tactics by council officials to catch rogue shopkeepers and certain types of fireworks now being outlawed. Come mid-October, we have this annual explosion of pyrotechnical danger and hooliganism. Lives are put at risk -- innocent ones as well as those who mis-use fireworks. Others are injured and sometimes maimed for life; nerves are shattered and old folk and pets are subjected to night after night of terror.

Why do we endure all this?

It is evident that whatever the courts, voluntary codes and official warnings can muster is not good enough. The law can only be policed thinly and the deterrents are plainly not good enough.

In view of this -- and above all the terrible toll over the years of lives lost, kiddies permanently scarred and the sheer anti-social menace of it all -- has the time not come to ban fireworks from general sale altogether?

Surely, the Guy Fawkes Night tradition is no excuse for the continuation of this seasonal senselessness and terror. And would there be any great loss of Bonfire Night fun and excitement , if the sale and use of fireworks was restricted to licensed and properly-organised public displays?

It is time the government lit the touch paper for safety and sanity.