Miami mayor has a grim New Year’s request: Don’t shoot in the air at midnight

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez joined community leaders Monday for an annual exercise in trying to discourage dangerous behavior, reminding gun holders that bullets fired skyward for fun will land and might kill people.

“We want to urge people in our community not to fire guns up in the air,” Suarez said at a morning press conference at Olinda Park, joined by the county commissioner representing that area, religious and community leaders and police administrators. “Every bullet that goes up, must come down. And it can come down in a very violent way.”

One participant held a poster from a prior year’s event, a photo collage of a bullet, fireworks, and Miami singer Pitbull and the message: “One Bullet Kills the Party.” While Miami has experience with stray-bullet shootings on Dec. 31, the tradition is not an exclusively local one. Police across the country have held similar events in the hours leading up to midnight on New Year’s Eve, part of a national effort to spread the word about the dangers of celebratory gunfire.

In Pittsburgh, police last week touted their ability to detect gunfire using the ShotSpotter system, technology also in use in Miami and Miami-Dade County. “There’s a good possibility that if you fire a shot, you’re going to see a police officer relatively soon,” Wendell Hissrich, Pittsburgh’s public safety director, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, noting the system “lights up like a Christmas tree” on New Year’s Eve from gunfire and fireworks. In Raleigh, N.C., a woman was shot in the stomach last year by a celebratory bullet at a downtown New Year’s celebration, The Associated Press reported.

In 2010, a 6-year-old boy visiting from Italy with his family was struck by a stray bullet after midnight on Jan. 1 while eating outside at a restaurant in Miami’s Design District. The boy survived, and the incident remains the most high-profile example of Miami’s concerns about falling bullets as a new year arrives. It’s a subset of a wider fear of stray bullets. On Dec. 24, Dennis McGhee, 57, was fatally shot while mowing his lawn in the morning at his Country Walk home in South Dade.

“It pains me to know most of us will be enjoying the holiday time with family and friends, but other families are mourning the loss of loved ones,” said Audrey Edmonson, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade County Commission, whose district includes Olinda, a county park. “As we have done every year at this time, we ask the community to lock your guns up and put them in a safe place.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2019 at 2:46 PM.