What is it with guns and the New Year’s celebration?
Once again, Denver residents awoke on the second day of the year to find that someone was shot dead on the first day of the year.
This time the victims were Angelica Martinez, 11, and her aunt, Rebecca Yanez, 47, killed by a single slug fired through the wall of a house. Pedro Cortez, 25, has been arrested. He told police he was aiming at a streetlight with a .44-caliber revolver.
Last New Year’s saw the death of Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams, shot after leaving a Denver nightclub. There had been an altercation. Someone decided the dispute needed settling with a gun. Naturally, this person happened to have one handy.
Happy New Year, you’re dead.
Whether the result of malice or mere stupidity, gunfire in the wee hours of New Year’s has become a staple in American cities. This year, people in Dallas, Tucson and St. Petersburg, Fla., were wounded by stray bullets.
“Between midnight and 12:30 a.m., we got more than two-dozen reports of gunfire,” Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said. “I know dozens of other cases don’t get reported.”
Bullets fired skyward can tumble to earth with enough speed to penetrate skulls.
“It’s extremely dangerous,” Jackson said. “You fire a bullet, it has to land somewhere.”
That means headlines like the one in Wednesday’s Post — “Revelry gone wrong” — arrive with the inevitability of broken resolutions.
And with those headlines comes the train of friends and relatives lamenting how good and loving people came to a bad and unlovely end.
All because of knuckleheads who decide that traditional New Year’s noisemakers aren’t enough.
My friend Rene Ramirez stepped into the yard of his Aurora home at midnight New Year’s Eve. He thought he’d light his fire pit. The notion lasted all of two minutes.
“When I heard someone emptying out their clip on their pistol, I just shrugged and went inside,” he said.
This is no ban-all-guns screed. Guns, handguns included, have their uses. Ask anyone who ever had their home burgled or worked the night shift at a gas station.
Historians will tell you that discharging firearms into the night sky on New Year’s Eve was a frontier tradition. Of course, so was smallpox.
But we have reached a point where part of the population seems desensitized to the potency of guns. This demographic is almost exclusively young and male.
Maybe the resulting carnage comes from a New Year’s cocktail of alcohol and idiocy.
Maybe if you watch enough movies with balletic deaths and cameras fetishizing ammo being chambered, a gun becomes just another prop.
It is not, and anyone who has seen what happens when a bullet meets flesh and bone knows that.
Armed young men are great if you need to defend your country. But when they are on the streets of your city, immersed in a culture of ignorance or violence, people wind up dead on a day that should be filled with promise.
Somehow we need to wrap our heads around this.
Until then, we will keep waking up to post-New Year’s headlines like Wednesday’s.
It will happen with utter predictability, just like a clock ticking toward midnight.
William Porter’s column appears twice a week. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
