It just boggles my mind that the general sentiment is we need people to be protected from themselves not expect more from those people. Then again I guess its a barometer for the "everyone gets a trophy" society we live in.
Perhaps we've learned that simply expecting more of anything from anyone too often results in nothing getting done.
But it's such a shame we've warped that into the belief that over-reacting is a healthy reaction to "Bad Things Happening".
However, there are advantages to "Everyone gets a trophy". Perhaps impossible to fully comprehend until you've experienced a life where there are no trophies.
I've lived outside of that society you speak of for more than four years. I could go on and on and on about how I also used to resent "being protected from myself" until I didn't have it any more, and was slapped in the face by sudden awareness that it's a necessary element of being protected from other people. You'll just have to trust me when I say that your life would be much more stressful (and dangerous) without the safeguards you take for granted now. You probably aren't even fully aware of just how far those safeguards extend, since the handrails have always just been there to protect you from falling. Yeah, the regs and bureaucracies and costs of installing them are a hassle, but live for awhile in a place where those regs don't exist (or exist but aren't enforced, *sigh*), and you will see what an ugly, unpleasant, chaotic, and dangerous environment develops around said lack of regs. Unless required by some higher power (the ugly 'gov' word in this case), very few people are willing, or in financial positions, to invest anything into making your life just the little bit better.
But on the flip side of all that, the majority of "our" society is so unconsciously dependent upon those 'regs', that their common sense has sort of slipped into hibernation. You can warn a guy about the dangers, instruct him how to use it safely, then hand him a mech and watch him blow his face off, because once it's in his hand, he's only thinking "just push the button...if it wasn't safe, it wouldn't be on the market." Hard to blame the individual, considering the bigger picture. See what "our" society has created? Not stupidity, but rather castrated awareness. Everything needs to be highly regulated, painted safety yellow, made too big to be swallowed, handrailed and completely sterilized of "user error", because people can no longer recognize what the risks are, let alone develop a tangible awareness of the consequences.
It's clear we need some regs (how ironic that there are already such great ones on the market), and self-regulation would be the ideal, but it appears that human evolution has yet to reach such an advanced state. Hence, as is The Way of "our" society, vaping will end up over-regulated in the end. That's not the fault of this one guy, even if his accident is attributable to user error. It is just how we've decided it's best to install handrails to protect him from falling again.
That same vape shop is also known for building some seriously janky, questionable coils for people. It's only a matter of time before something stupid happens, and it ends up on the news. 
