Dallas Police Received 711 Phone Calls About Celebratory Gunshots Being Fired Off In Four Hours On New Year’s Eve.

Hey, who here remembers the ’00s Dallas band The Happy Bullets? Anyone? It’s OK, you only really need to know two things about them at the moment: 1) They were pretty solid, and 2) the way I always heard it, they were named for the phenomenon of people firing off gunshots in celebration — like on birthdays, on the Fourth of July or on New Year’s Eve.

Lest personal experience hasn’t indeed long proven to you that this is indeed a real thing here in Dallas, allow us to point you in the direction of this video that the Dallas Police Department released on December 30, warning people not to celebrate this way on New Year’s Eve.

Seems that video was only so effective, though. For one thing, it’s been viewed fewer than 225 times on YouTube at the time of this posting. Also, there’s this: Per a statement released by DPD yesterday morning, cops still gunshot complaints aplenty on New Year’s Eve.

In total, DPD says it received 275 random gunfire complaints between 10 p.m. and midnight on December 31, and 436 complaints between midnight and 2 a.m. on January 1 for a total of 711 complaints at peak celebration hours. This comes on top of another 282 reports made about fireworks during those hours, which, far as anyone knows, might as well have been gunshots, too. And, of course, those are just the ones people called in about, too. Who’s to even say how many happy bullets were really fired off?

This is obviously a stupid way to celebrate — those fired-off bullets gotta come down somewhere — but, on the other hand, tradition is tradition? Sure, that’s a dumb defense — but, then again, what argument against gun control isn’t?

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