ERRI wishes all our friends and subscribers a very Happy New Year!! Everyone please stay safe and don't forget to take cover at midnight.
For our friends in other countries who may not understand the above sentence -- Many people in the United States, and especially in urban areas, have a tendency to celebrate the New Year at midnight by firing guns indiscriminately into the air. They usually don't realize that the bullets must come down somewhere or, that in many cases, bullets can crash through windows at a location many blocks from where they were fired.
After your editor had written the above, he came across the following news report:
In New Orleans, a massive publicity campaign has been launched in effort to stem the tide of using guns as New Year's noisemakers. Posters, flyers, billboards and television and radio commericials are telling people, "Falling bullets kill."
On New Year's Eve in 1994, an 11-year-old boy in Phoenix and a 50-year-old woman in Atlanta were killed by New Year's gunfire. A police helicopter in Riverside, California was hit by bullets apparently fired by New Years Eve celebrants. The pilot was wounded and the fuel tank of the helicopter was punctured, forcing an emergency landing
The problem of gunfire used to be much in worse in Los Angeles, But, since 1990, all ammunition sales in the weeks leading up to New Year's Eve has been banned. When the law was first instituted, gun shop owners said that it wouldn't work. Statistics would seem to indicate, however, that the regulation has had some positive effect; calls to police about New Year's gunfire fell in L.A. from 706 in 1989 to 265 in 1992.
Experts say that most people who shoot into the air on New Year's Eve are good people who just are not thinking about what they are doing. Most people don't realize, or don't remember, that bullets fall at lethal speeds after they have reached their apogee and come back to earth.
To relate to it on a personal level, your editor, who lives in a quiet
suburban neighborhood, can attest to hearing several "Pop ... pop ... pop ... pop's" every year at the midnight hour. And... he always tries to stay away from the windows.