Monday, December 27, 2010

Don't shoot guns in air on New Year's Eve

What goes up must come down. So, don't shoot guns in air on New Year's Eve. Apparently, people get so excited for New Year's Eve that they want to start off the New Year with a bang (ha). However, they don't understand the consequences of their actions. Because eventually that bullet is going to come back toward that ground, and it might just hit someone. Even starting pistols for races have not been loaded guns for ages. If the public can't understand guns or physics, will this lead to harsher gun control laws or possibly stricter police oversight during the holidays? Prevention is key. However, implementing it is harder than it sounds. What do you think is the best way to get people to stop something? (Just in general, not necessarily for death on New Year's Eve)

2 comments:

EricDing said...

The main reason why people still shoot actual bullets into the air is most likely because there hasn't been any real media-covered cases where a bullet from the sky actually hit and killed a person. Although shooting guns into the air is definitely not something we should do, the injuries from falling bullets don't get publicized enough to cause change.
I read up a bit on this issue with this article:

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/12/how_hazardous_a.html

And so apparently the power of a falling bullet definitely doesn't rival the power of a bullet being shot from an actual gun, but it does cause enough damage for the celebratory shots to be discouraged. Be safe, everyone!

Tiffany Siu said...

In my opinion, the government shouldn't tackle this problem because it'll just be another example of them piling too much on to their plate. It's practically impossible to stop people from doing what they want to do, just like the failure of prohibition back in the early 1900's. But I for one haven't heard any backlash about guns during New Years, so I don't see it as a huge problem. Rather, I feel illegal fireworks are more of an issue that needs to be dealt with, but again, it's hard to stop people from doing that they want to do.