By John Sharp
As Valerie Abbott tells it, the timing of her car battery dying before midnight on New Year’s Day was horrible.
The sounds of rapid gunfire through the streets of Birmingham were compared with Fallujah, Iraq. In other words, she was walking through a warzone.
“It occurred to me I could die on my way home from a bullet from one of those idiots who are shooting their gun in the air,” Abbott said during the Jan. 2, Birmingham City Council meeting occurring less than 48 hours after police reportedly sheltered underneath viaducts to protect from falling bullets.
“People don’t realize that once a bullet goes up, it has to come back down,” she said. “When it comes back down, it is going just as fast as it came out of their gun.”
Celebratory gunfire did prove deadly in at least a few cases nationwide this new year – including the death of a 3-year-old boy in Memphis. And around Alabama, at least two people in Birmingham and one in Tuscaloosa were injured by celebratory gunfire in Birmingham as 2024 began, police reported.
For a countless number of years, police in Alabama cities and metro areas throughout the South issue warnings about the dangers of shooting a gun in the air as New Year’s arrives.
Get caught, they say, go to jail or pay a fine.
But the gunfire continues, and policing it remains difficult even with improvements in shot detector technology. The result are scenes in large cities like Birmingham that play out like a Hollywood dystopian film where overnight lawlessness rules as gunfire and fireworks overwhelm neighborhoods.
“It’s illegal, it’s dangerous,” said Birmingham City Councilman Hunter Williams. “It’s crazy that we get a call that a neighbor is shooting a gun in the air. I can’t go over (to) the neighbor’s house and take the gun away. Stop shooting in the air.”
Legislation coming?
Some Alabama officials outside Birmingham are taking notice and are willing to consider penalties that might deter the activity. While celebratory gunfire legislation has not been addressed in recent memory – if at all — some lawmakers believe there could be a way to do something that might deter the persistent and dangerous tradition of shooting a gun in the air to honor the New Year or the Fourth of July.
Cities do have penalties on the books, and it is illegal to fire a gun in Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, and other cities. But in those cases, the penalties are often small even if someone is caught – which is rare. In Montgomery, it’s a $100 fine and seven days in jail.
“It caught my attention how low the fines are,” said state Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, who has pushed for gun control legislation before and would be willing to consider backing state proposals adding more teeth to curb celebratory gunfire.
“Maybe if (a shooter) gets hit with a whopping amount, maybe that might sway some people,” Ensler said. “But of course, what I hear from law enforcement is they cannot predict where or when people shoot those celebratory gunshots. And the reality of it is that if it’s a young person who is firing off a gun, and they are hit with a few thousand dollars fine, chances are they won’t have it.”
Ensler said community service could carry more of an impact.
“Right now, it’s a misdemeanor,” said state Rep. Allen Treadaway, R-Birmingham, who retired three years ago from the Birmingham Police Department following a 31-year law enforcement career. He said that examining increased penalties “is an option.”
“I’ve been out of law enforcement for three years and I haven’t seen anything that indicates it’s going away,” Treadaway, chair of the Alabama House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee, said. “It’s a serious crime people that people think has no consequences. It does. What goes up, must come down.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who has been supportive of measures to protect police, said he would be open to having discussions about curbing the activity.
“The one thing I know is that law enforcement is incredibly proactive in discouraging this behavior,” Marshall said, noting public awareness efforts warning against celebratory gunfire before the holiday.
He added, “I welcome law enforcement to have a discussion on what that may look like and to the extend we may look at other states in helping us in that front.”
Missouri, Texas answers
A few conservative states are taking action, but it’s been an uphill battle in getting new laws adopted.
Bipartisan legislation called “Blair’s Law” has been pitched for years and was finally passed out of the Missouri Legislature last spring before Republican Gov. Mike Parson vetoed it.
Parsons, according to media outlets, was not opposed to the legislation. He said he only vetoed it because it was within an omnibus package of other pieces of legislation he did not support.
Blair’s Law is named after an 11-year-old girl who was shot and killed by a stray bullet by celebratory gunfire during a Fourth of July celebration in Kansas City in 2012. The bill named in her honor elevates charges for reckless discharge of a firearm within a city limit.
In Texas, which has some of the weakest gun laws in the country, Democratic State Rep. Armando Martinez is attempting to push for increased penalties for people who shoot in the air anywhere in the state. Right now, he said there are only penalties for people who fire their gun off illegally if they are within one of largest cities.
Martinez has personal experience with the issue. He was struck in the head by a bullet while watching a New Year’s Eve fireworks show in 2017.
“At the stroke of midnight, I kissed my wife and wished her a happy new year,” Martinez said. “I was then struck by a stray bullet and needed surgery to remove the bullet.”
He added, “What is upsetting to me is the fact that holidays are a time to celebrate for friends and family and not worry about stray bullets because there is an irresponsible gun owner firing weapons into the air.”
Martinez first pitched increased penalties against celebratory gunfire while he was in his hospital bed recovering from the bullet wound. He said he will continue pushing for legislation this year that would assess a misdemeanor penalty of a year in jail, and up to $4,000 in fines to people who shot their guns in the air.
Martinez said previous bills have died in the Texas State Senate. He blames the influence of the nation’s largest gun rights group, the National Rifle Association, for the setbacks.
“They feel like this is an attack on guns,” Martinez said. “This has nothing to do with removing guns. I’m an outdoorsman and a hunter. My dad brought us up to hunt and fish and understand the importance of safety and not being irresponsible. When the NRA doesn’t get behind safety, it’s really upsetting.”
An NRA spokesperson did not respond to AL.com for a request for comment.
Kale Hollon, a board member of Alabama-based gun rights group Bama Carry, said there are already city ordinances in Alabama that outlaw discharging a firearm.
He said if additional penalties were considered to curb the shooting, his group would not “have any issues with it other than looking at what it is in the bill or what the penalties are and what they are calling for.”
“I don’t think it would be something that would necessarily affect our members or law-abiding citizens as long as there is no way it could be used against someone who is engaged in self-defense or some type of situation like that,” Hollon said. “You never know how these things will get twisted and turned.”
Addressing danger
For now, police continue to push out the public service notices, but the amount of gunfire continues to swell. In years past, Birmingham police have responded to more than 1,200 Shot Spotter calls. Mobile police responded to 223 reports of shots fired or fireworks mistaken as gunfire over New Year’s Eve.
In Birmingham, police hunker down on New Year’s Eve as midnight approaches. But Birmingham Police Chief Scott Thurmond and Mobile Police Chief Paul Prine both told AL.com their agencies do not instruct officers to shelter in place during New Year’s Eve, or on the Fourth of July.
“Combatting celebratory gunfire is a very challenging issue because officers must witness the individual firing the firearm to arrest them for discharging a firearm within the city limits which is a misdemeanor,” Thurmond said in a statement. “The police department’s primary goal is the safety of our citizens. Unfortunately, celebratory gunfire has taken place in Birmingham and other cities for many years. We encourage the citizens of Birmingham to be mindful of this dangerous behavior.”
Ed Delmore, police chief in Gulf Shores and a former law enforcement officer for agencies near St. Louis, said he can recall routine occurrences in St. Louis where police officers would seek shelter at a gas station or somewhere with a roof to avoid falling bullets on New Year’s Eve. He said in small cities like Gulf Shores, there are no concerns about shooting guns on New Year’s. The only problem is with fireworks, which are illegal within the city limits.
Delmore said that in St. Louis, while the gunfire could be heard “you could tell it’s not semiautomatic fire, but fully automatic which is concerning.”
“It’s never a responsible gun owner, in my experience,” Delmore said. “When it happens, it’s always (from someone who has gotten) that gun illegally.”
Treadaway said he believes technology will improve, and that gunfire detection technology will be able to better pinpoint where the gunfire occurs.
“The technology is getting closer where it puts me within (a few) feet where the shot went off,” said Treadaway. “It gives officers a better indication and tools to go to those areas. It also lets us know how bad it’s been. But it’s costly. And the coverage (of shot detector technology) is not city wide. When I left law enforcement three years ago, it was in areas where we felt were most problematic. The number of shots (fired off on New Year’s Eve) is incredible in what was taking place.”
Lack of officers
Treadaway said the next concern would be with a lack of police officers who could follow up on the shot detections. He said there are over 450 fewer law enforcements officers patrolling the streets in Jefferson County than there were a few years ago, calling the situation a “crisis.”
Birmingham community activist Harry “Traveling Shoes” Turner said the shortage of police is just one of the problems. He said the prevalence of guns in cities like Birmingham is the result of a culture in which youths experience gun violence tragedy at a very young age and respond with vows to someday purchase a gun to retaliate, often by the ages of 14 and 15.
“We need to find those children who are connected to the homicides because I think it’s affecting them and there needs to be counseling in schools once we find out about one of these homicides,” Turner said.
He said New Year’s Eve is more dangerous than it was years ago when someone would fire a gun in the air at midnight, and then walk back inside their house. He said the guns that youths are obtaining are “weapons you only use in a war.”
Turner said the lack of police officers is also notable. The lack of fines and arrests will also mean there was a lack of a deterring effect on New Year’s Eve, and that the celebratory gunfire will only be worse by the Fourth of July.
“If no one went to jail, and no one was fined, guess what,” Turner said. “It will be show-out mode and it will escalate more. You will have shootings all day. It’s not cute and it’s not fun but these 14- and 15-year-olds have guns. They are going to outdo New Year’s Eve, which was bad enough.”
