My mother is selling the house she’s lived in for 52 years. One thing she had to replace was a sheet of paneling in the garage that had a fist-sized hole in it. That’s because, along about 1975, I fired a 45-caliber pistol through a target, through a reclining chair, through the paneling, and right out the side of the garage. On another occasion, I directed a shot straight up, so close to the side of my own head that I nicked my ear and scorched my hair. Yeah, it’s a wonder I’m alive.
Naturally, neither of these shots produced a call to the police. Or anyone other than my parents, who had to fix the garage. Turns out, I'm not the only one firing a gun where I shouldn’t.
The study, from economists Jillian Carr and Jennifer Doleac, looked at new ShotSpotter data, which uses high-tech audio sensors to report gunshots, in Oakland, California, and Washington, DC. It found that only 12 percent of gunfire incidents resulted in a 911 call to report gunshots...
There’s some question about the ShotSpotter data. Some shots get reported more than once, and those sensors can be fooled. It’s also likely that the shootings that the data is detecting rarely end with someone injured or killed. Shot and a miss? Might go unreported. Shot and someone dead? Likely to be on the radar. But these are definitely areas where gunshots shouldn’t be a part of the normal soundscape. So it’s interesting that they’re showing up much more than crime statistics would indicate.
... Carr and Doleac suggest that a drop in reports of crime may just mean that people are reporting fewer crimes even as it continues happening. So researchers using the traditional sources may have been picking up how policies affect reports of crime, not necessarily crime itself.
Maybe. I suspect there are a lot of idiots who like to shoot guns. I have firsthand experience.