Gun Shop Owner Won't Sell Bullets on New Year's Eve

In urban centers across the country, guns are often fired as the ball drops at midnight – sometimes with deadly consequences. (Photo via Flickr)

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To put a peaceful point on Wednesday’s New Year’s Eve celebration, a Southfield gun shop and training center owner says he’s not going to contribute to a dangerous holiday tradition in metro Detroit – the indiscriminate firing of guns into the air at midnight.

Action Impact owner Bill Kucyk told WXYZ-TV that he thinks the tradition is dangerous, reckless and puts people and property at risk.

“What I hope to accomplish, is to raise awareness and discourage the random shooting of firearms,” Kucyk said. “I am trying to take away any excuse you have to shoot your gun.”

Ministers, police and politicians on Monday urged a gunplay-free New Year’s Eve celebration during announcement of the 17th annual “Ring in the New Year with a Bell, Not a Bullet” campaign, the Detroit Free Press reports.

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The bells-not-bullets campaign was started after the New Year’s1997 death of Sandra Latham, who was struck and killed by a bullet as she sat in her dining room.

Similar New Year’s Eve tragedies have played out in urban centers across the country.

The Firearms Talk blog said that in Miami, officers are ordered to officially take cover from falling bullets as part of standard safety protocol. In Jacksonville, FL, police received about 260 calls about random gunfire in 2012. In one instance, a stray bullet hit a private plane at 1,200 feet and injured the pilot.

Los Angeles police field about 500 calls about random gunfire every New Year’s Eve, including one in 2012 causing injury when a bullet grazed a boy’s skull.

Also that year, a Kansas City, MO, man was killed – moments after he fired his own weapon – when a bullet from someone else’s weapon struck him. In New Orleans, five people were wounded by stray bullets fired during the revelry.

Teen: Kids Shouldn’t Have to Hide in Their Homes Afraid of Stray Bullets

In Detroit, the campaign against New Year’s eve gunplay appears to be making a difference.

“Last year, there were many fewer celebratory gunfire incidents,” Detroit Police Chief James Craig said, adding he hopes the trend will continue this year.

For 11 of the 17 years of the Detroit campaign, students have been raising their voices at a “Hugs Not Bullets” rally. Among the speakers at an early December rally urging a gunfire-free New Year’s Eve was an Osborn Evergreen Academy senior who said many people her age “do not feel safe” during the revelry, MLive reports.

Kitara Hamilton, a Detroit Neighborhood Services Youth Initiative spokesperson, said children shouldn’t have to crouch in their own homes in fear that they’ll be hit by a stray bullet.