After a closed session with the mayor on Tuesday to discuss response the city’s response to a shootout amid New Year’s Eve festivities, the Mobile City Council has expressed its outrage and its intent to support laws against certain modified firearms.

At about 11:14 p.m. Saturday, during the run-up to the city’s signature New Year’s Eve MoonPie Drop at midnight, gunfire broke out in the 200 block of Dauphin Street. One person was killed and at least nine were injured.

City leaders took a circumspect approach to the issue at the year’s first meeting of the Mobile City Council, where one might have expected it to be a hot topic. There was no discussion of the incident during the preliminary agenda review session, and none during the meeting proper.

Mayor Sandy Stimpson was absent from the council meeting and did not make his usual remarks. His chief of staff, James Barber, said Stimpson would be glad to talk with the council after its meeting.

At the end of the meeting, Barber presented the council with a more specific plan.

Barber said that while council members seemed to have a lot of questions about the shooting, “that is an active criminal investigation and we feel like if we disclose publicly anything more than we already have, it could harm that investigation.”

“We would ask that if you would want to proceed with executive session, we would be glad to tell you what we know, what we’re doing,” Barber said. With that, City Attorney Ricardo Woods stated that the subject was one that the council could legally discuss in an executive session, and the council voted unanimously to do so.

The group left the council chamber and did not reconvene after the closed session. The council’s statement was issued several hours later.

It read, in whole: “We are outraged and disappointed by the violence that took place downtown on New Year’s Eve. This event does not represent the family friendly atmosphere that we have worked so hard to create for all of our citizens to enjoy in downtown Mobile. We have every confidence in the Mobile Police Department and fully support efforts by the administration to go after known offenders and illegal weapons on our streets. In the coming weeks we look forward to passing a council resolution to send our legislative delegation supporting laws that would get trigger activators off our streets.”

The term “trigger activators” refers broadly to devices that enable fully automatic fire on semiautomatic firearms. Police say at least one was used in the Dauphin Street incident, and that their use has generally been on the rise, making public shootings more dangerous.

In the New Year’s Eve event, the dead man has been identified as 24-year-old Jatorious Reives. Mobile Police Chief Paul Prine has said that police don’t think Reives was one of two shooters believed to be involved. But he said that police do think they know who shot him: A unnamed man who is being treated for a chest wound at a local hospital. Reives was known to his alleged killer, Prine said.

Prine has said police think the incident involved loosely organized neighborhood gangs, and that they haven’t ruled out a connection to another shootout, similar in its disregard for bystanders, that took place Dec. 27 in the self-checkout area of the Walmart on Mobile’s I-65 beltline.

“Loosely speaking, it could be a retaliatory type of shooting on New Year’s Eve in regard to the Walmart (shooting),” Prine said in a Monday interview with AL.com. “But it’s speculative at this point. We can’t prove it. But the individuals (involved in both cases) are loosely tied to these neighborhood gang (organizations).”

Mayor Sandy Stimpson said on Sunday that he was “outraged” and “beyond disgusted” by the New Year’s Eve shootout and was standing up a task force to identify and arrest those responsible.

Prine said the suspected shooter currently in the hospital will be transferred to Metro Jail when his injuries permit, and to be charged with murder. The chief said he also hopes to see federal firearms charges, because one of the shooters used a handgun modified to permit fully automatic fire. That in itself has been a growing headache for police, he said.

“We’ve had 15 switches or weapons that are modified from semi-automatic weapons to an automatic weapon (in recent incidences),” Prine said. “This is where you have a lot of casualties. It’s causing havoc.”

William Carroll, the councilman whose district included downtown, deferred to the common council statement rather than making a separate statement on Tuesday.