New Year’s Day, 2003. Another chapter printed in the history books. I went to bed early last night, as I often do. The celebrations are always the same, so I’ll let someone else breathe my allotment of crowd air, and spend the night in jail on a DUI charge in my bunk. Ever since Guy Lombardo died, it hasn’t been the same… But I was awakened at midnight, sure enough, by the same crackle of gunfire that brings the passing of the New Year to my attention every time.

I live in a pretty nice area, three-quarters of a mile from the most opulent shopping district in the Southwest. The houses in this neighborhood go for around $200,000, which is what you’d pay for a tool shed in LA – maybe – but passes for some pretty clean living in these parts. And a lot of neighborhoods didn’t hear a single shot fired. But I heard all kinds of things going off, some familiar, some not at all. It sounded like Baghdad out there.

Random gunfire is a fact of life in many large cities in the United States. Those who haven’t experienced it don’t understand that warm feeling you get when live in a brick house during the annual assault. But if you’re in Las Vegas, you’ll notice that most of the cops do the same thing when the ball drops; they park under a bridge. In Los Angeles last year, there were roughly 500 reports of gunfire, which is down considerably from past years. In New Orleans, Mayor Marc Morial honestly said he “would take cover at midnight,” even though he acknowledges that the French Quarter is always packed for New Years Eve (and all other) celebrations. “There are risks to being outside,” he said. “I cannot guarantee anyone’s safety.”

New Orleans, ironically enough, doles out some of the most severe punishments for those who commit random gunfire: Two years in prison for a first offense. Those with a criminal record convicted for the crime get five to ten. In Phoenix, we had a case in 1999 (not at New Years) in which fourteen-year old Shannon Smith was killed on her back steps while talking on the phone; a “stray bullet” pierced the top of her head. That tragedy begat Shannon’s Law, which hands out a felony conviction and a year in prison for doing something so stupid that it does deserve such a stern penalty. The only problem with this is that it amounts to window dressing.

They do that a lot in the greater Phoenix metro area. For instance, the much-ballyhooed DUI task force, which nabs 15 drunks for every 100 people stopped. Not exactly an exercise in civil rights, this operation costs millions of dollars to run, every major holiday, and looks a lot more like a revenue scam than it does anything else. For all the expense and inconvenience to the 85 percent of sober drivers who were picked on in the name of feel-good legislation, drunk driving hasn’t declined much in recent years. But the overall feeling of goodwill from the citizen toward the police has.

It is admittedly early, and I don’t have the stats yet this morning, but the news bureaus haven’t received anything yet from the police departments, and that means that things went as they usually do. There was a hail of bullets last night, and luckily nobody got hurt or killed (or it would be playing every ten minutes already), and nobody got arrested, either. At the beginning of 2002 there were over 700 reports of random gunfire to mark the New Year, down a paltry five percent from the year before. But for all of the calls made, there were no arrests last year… or the year before… in fact, since the passing of Shannon’s Law, there has not been a single arrest for the violation thereof. They do this because they want to get re-elected. They want to say they were part of the solution, when there really is none where this problem is concerned. Obviously, a lot of people in Phoenix are armed to the teeth (myself included). Generally, people drink too much at the end of the year; the culture encourages it. So, every time around, some people are going to pop off with their noisemakers in a drunken stupor. They should be rounded up and put in jail. Lip service won’t do that.

But this year, the city of Glendale, Arizona broke out the “Shot spotter”, a military-type listening device that is supposed to be able to immediately report gunfire, down to an address. While this amounts to illegally wiretapping an entire city, the government loves it; Phoenix City Councilperson Phil Gordon wants it here. Two years ago, in Redwood, California, the system (which only cost the taxpayers of Glendale half a million dollars) resulted in one arrest, out of more than 400 calls. The following year, Redwood recorded just two calls to report random gunfire. Even though the Los Angeles police department disavows the system’s ability to make a distinction between gunshots and fireworks, the feel-good legislation’s commitment to appearances paid off. That one arrest in Redwood curtailed the bad behavior, despite the clear statistical failure of the cost/benefit analysis. But that’s because they arrested somebody.

Anything that can be done to reduce the problem is good, I guess. But with a shameful tally of zero arrests in three years, despite the cooperative diligence of hundreds of citizens, they can stop with all the accolades and praise about Shannon’s Law. Until some real results are delivered, the sanctimonious back-patting that goes on between the policymakers, the police departments and the press should be discounted as nothing more than unreported acts of random government, not so much unlike the antics of a bunch of drunken cowboys.