Miami leaders make an annual warning not to fire guns into the air on New Year’s Eve

Gilberto Santa Rosa’s salsa classic “La Agarro Bajando” is both a love song and a physics lesson. The crooner and Puerto Rican knight of the sauce it will catch you as you fall into the depths of love and also remind you that everything that goes up must go down. Everything that goes up must fall.

Remember that moment when you’re thinking about shooting bullets in the air after the midnight kiss this New Year’s Eve.

We know it, we know it. We have explained it before. But we’re back, because apparently in 2020, law enforcement and elected officials are still begging people to stop celebrating the new year by firing their guns into the air. For the 22nd year in a row, local leaders lined up at the “One Bullet Kills the Party” press conference yesterday morning to urge Miami-Dade residents to celebrate 2021 in a safer legal way. If you look at the whole press conference, everyone seems tired of having to remind people that gravity is a thing and firing guns into the sky is a bad idea. Our officials do this every year, twice a year (before July 4th as well). Please close the guns.

“Every bullet that goes up has to go down and it can go down in a very violent way,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said during the press conference.

If you want to know how violent it is, a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine estimates that bullet drop can reach speeds of 600 feet per second. It only takes about a third of this speed for a traveling bullet to penetrate the skull and less than a bullet to pierce the skin. No doubt someone will be harmed if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A reminder to keep guns out of festive celebrations is necessary. In December 2018, a 40-year-old man died during a Christmas party in Kendall’s back garden. People saw him grabbing his chest but didn’t know what had happened to him at first. The man, Yemil Arguelles, had a wife and young children, according to police.

In 2016, someone went stupid and fired a gun out of Bayside Marketplace, sending people running and screaming shortly after the fireworks show ended. (Who did it: My mom goes home at eight in the evening and stays away from the windows every year-end because of people like you.)

An 11-year-old boy playing hide-and-seek in Opa-locka on New Year’s Eve 2008 died from celebratory shootings. The man who shot was charged with murder. A jury found him guilty and the man was sentenced to ten years in prison.

New Year’s Eve shootings also killed a father of five in West Little River in 2007.

“It hurts me to know that most of us will enjoy the holidays with family and friends when other families mourn the loss of loved ones,” says Miami-Dade County Commission Chair Audrey Edmonson.

So, we have already said it and we will say it again. New Year’s Eve in Miami is already full of traditions. We cleaned the house from top to bottom to welcome a fresh new year. We throw a bucket of water on the front lawn to ward off evil. We eat 12 grapes after midnight and take apple cider. And for the handles between us, there’s the kiss. It’s ridiculous that reminding people to have common sense about guns is part of our vacation. At risk of sounding super horny: shoot your shot, not your weapons, in 2021.