New Year's Eve gunfire? It's not just in Detroit

Imagine it’s New Year’s Eve, with clocks ticking down, corks of bubbly popping, the ball dropping over Times Square — and then what happens?

In Detroit, it’s something loud and dangerous. Bang! bang! bang!

Gunfire in the air.

But the same thing happens in countless other cities across the nation and around the world, as well as in some small towns and rural areas. People point guns into the air, and they fire. The trigger-happy tradition goes back decades, even centuries in some places.

Gunfire here and elsewhere

This week in Detroit, leaders of the nonprofit Neighborhood Service Organization (NSO), together with student leaders from Detroit Public Schools, revved up their campaign called Hugs, Not Bullets. Endorsed by Detroit Police Chief James Craig, the campaign echoes similar campaigns from around the country, and from Detroit’s own decades of holiday safety talk and holiday gunfire:

In 1982, on Dec. 31, midnight unleashed "the traditional hour-long volley of gunfire” that marked the holiday, according to a Free Press report.

In 1984, a 6-year-old girl was shot in the hand amid New Year’s gunfire that a police officer told a reporter “sounded like World War III.”

In 1987, Detroit’s People Mover was shut down early on New Year’s Eve, stranding hundreds of Red Wings fans, when guns began going off downtown before the usual midnight trigger time.

In 1995, a grandfather’s New Year’s Eve gunfire went awry in Sterling Heights, striking his grandson in the foot. More deadly that holiday was the stray bullet that — just after midnight — crashed through a window and killed a 47-year-old Detroit woman as she sat in her kitchen, making Sandra Latham the city’s first homicide of 1996. Her death sparked the following December's launch of the multi-year Bells, Not Bullets campaign.

In 1996, New Year's Eve gunfire was blamed for slicing cable-TV lines and shutting down reception to hundreds of Comcast customers in Detroit. Workers couldn't make repairs until gunfire ended about 5 a.m. Jan. 1, a company spokesman said at the time. Elsewhere in Detroit, an 18-year-old college student was hurt when a bullet struck her back as walked into her east-side house at 1 a.m.

To help change the tradition of holiday gunfire, in 2005, some 200 Detroit high school students organized by the NSO started the Hugs, Not Bullets campaign. Now in its 12th year, Hugs, Not Bullets has expanded to preach against year-round gun violence in Detroit and to warn about “the dramatic increase of children in metro Detroit obtaining and using firearms found unlocked and loaded in their homes,” according to a news release.

In Michigan, shooting skyward is a misdemeanor regulated by city ordinances, carrying up to a 90-day jail sentence — although if someone dies from a stray bullet, the charge is likely felony manslaughter. In much of the world, however, what sociologists call “celebratory gunfire” is legal, even if celebrants blast away with weapons far more powerful than a rifle or handgun.

According to the English-language magazine National in the United Arab Emirates, mourners at a funeral in Beirut honoring Hizballah fighters killed in Syria fired rocket-propelled grenades into the air. It's common in parts of the Middle East to fire into the air for weddings, elections, even if a child did well on exams.

Although Detroit is locally known for its annual gunfire, other cities that logged recent injuries or fatalities include Atlanta; Columbus, Ohio; Houston; Los Angeles; New Orleans, and Indianapolis, where the deputy mayor told the Indianapolis Star newspaper that he'd walk home from a midnight church service holding a Bible atop his head because last year, he narrowly missed being hit by a falling slug.

A dangerous way to celebrate

Firing into the air is especially dangerous in urban areas, where the laws of physics apply with extra urgency: Whatever goes up must come down, and bullets do so at a rate of 300 to 700 feet per second — not nearly as fast as a gun’s lethal muzzle velocity but still likely to cause serious injury or death, and sure to cause property damage as well, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Who’s pulling the trigger? Criminal justice researchers at Michigan State University found that most gun violence nationwide is committed by young men, ages 14 to 24, according to studies published from 2009 through this year.

But the practitioners of celebratory gunfire span a wider age group and can be law-abiding gun owners, said Rick Ector, 48, the owner of Rick’s Firearm Academy of Detroit. Many sky shooters probably saw the behavior modeled by older relatives, Ector said. And while some of their intent is about marking the new year, more of it seems akin to marking territory, he said.

“I think that celebratory gunfire, at least in Detroit, is more of a liberty that some people take to make a dramatic announcement that their home is not safe to invade or burgle,” Ector said. He lives on Detroit’s west side, near 7 Mile and Evergreen, and on each New Year’s Eve, the gunfire is “pretty pronounced, and of considerable duration, until they run out of ammo,” he said.

In a post on AmmoLand.com, Ector wrote: “Anyone who engages in the practice of celebratory gunfire is an idiot (because) the discharged bullets have to come down somewhere.”

Metro Detroiters start campaigns

Firearms historians say that celebratory gunfire undoubtedly began centuries ago, when a musket could be loaded with gunpowder but no lead ball, making it easy for the celebrant to fire “blanks.” And many did so at the behest of American leaders. Immediately after signing the Declaration of Independence, future President John Adams wrote to his wife that his wannabe nation’s Independence Day “ought to be celebrated by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells (and) bonfires." Little could Adams know that future firearms technology would make it easy to fire bullets with a range of up to 2 miles, and to do so in a nation of large cities with millions of gun owners.

Publicity campaigns that discourage celebratory gunfire probably have a positive effect but that’s hard to measure, said Alex Cooper, 60, a marketing communications consultant in Huntington Woods, who helped start the Bells, Not Bullets campaign in 1996.

“When the grandmother was killed at her kitchen table, that campaign began with the Laundry Workers Local 129 because she was a member,” as a hospital laundry worker for the Detroit Medical Center, Cooper said.

“The DMC helped us fund cards with little bells, and they said ‘Ring in the new year with a bell, not a bang.’ We distributed more than 180,000 of those cards, mainly in the schools, and (to) some churches and community centers,” he said.

Whether the effort saved a life, “we’ll never know, (but) if you talk to people who’ve paid attention to the problem, the feeling is that there seems to be less” holiday gunfire. Yet, the problem got harder to gauge when Michigan passed the 2011 law allowing more powerful fireworks, Cooper added.

“For a lot of people, it’s hard to tell the difference between guns and the bigger fireworks,” he said.

Both are popular New Year's Eve noisemakers — in Detroit and around the world.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com or 313-223-4485.