A day ago it looked like the Wild West had broken out in Minneapolis, with police reporting that gun incidents were up 40 percent from 2012 to 2013. This afternoon, it looks like it might have been a case of bad numbers, not bad people.

A department spokesman said this afternoon that crime analysts discovered a flaw in the data and that new calculations found an 8 percent increase, not 40 percent, in gun incidents from 2012 to 2013.

Gun incidents, just to be clear, include everything from people being shot or shot at, to reports of gunshot wounds, the discharge of a weapon or a gun used, according to the city report that published the numbers.

The erroneous numbers had shown a jump from 1,025 gun incidents in 2012 to 1,442 last year. Department spokesman Scott Seroka said new calculations put those numbers at 1,330 and 1,442. That would mean gun incidents jumped from 972 in 2011 to 1,330 in 2012, a 37 percent increase.

Seroka, contacted by email about five minutes ago, said he was working on historical numbers and methodology for the MPD numbers and hoped to have something ready by 4 p.m.