Police: Celebrate without guns on New Year’s

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Phil Stake
Staff writer

GALLUP — When the clock turns midnight Wednesday, some people will celebrate with a kiss, others will make a toast, and still others will ring in the new year with bright displays of fireworks.

But in lieu of fireworks — or maybe in addition to — other people will start 2009 by firing bullets into the night sky.

A bullet will travel more than a mile into the atmosphere before gravity and friction stop it; a rifle can send its larger-caliber slugs more than two miles high, while most handguns will stop sooner, according to N.M. State Police Armorer Sgt. Kevin McPherson and N.M. State Police TAC-Team member Sgt. Alex Horcasitas. Once the bullet stops its upward flight, it will fall until the ground — or some other body — breaks the fall.

Unlike a penny dropped from the Empire State Building, that falling bullet can be deadly. The penny is broad, flat and has less mass. It will flutter in the air, slowing substantially on the way down. A lead bullet not only has more mass and density, but its conical shape cuts through the air like a hot knife through butter. And it can reach upwards of 300 mph before it lands.

Firing a gun inside the city of Gallup is against municipal ordinance; it’s illegal. Firing a gun outside the city, at a target, is perfectly legal. But firing into the air is considered negligent use of a firearm, according to McKinley County Sheriff’s Lt. John Kendall. If the bullet falls on someone, as it did to 14-year-old Shannon Smith in Phoenix nine years ago, the charge changes to manslaughter.

Smith was talking on the telephone in her back yard around midnight New Year’s Eve 1999/2000 when an errant bullet came down on her head and she died, according to Phoenix Police Sgt. Tommy Thompson. Her death sparked a lively debate among Phoenix policy makers, a debate that ended with the enactment of Shannon’s Law in June of 2000. The law made it a felony to fire a gun into the air. But, Thompson said, a big part of Shannon’s Law is education.

“There are good people in our community who simply don’t understand that it is dangerous to fire a gun in the air,” Thompson said.