Agenda - 12-05-2016 - 7-a - Recommendations of the Firearms Safety Committee

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28 are here is to give law enforcement and the County the ability to stop that sort of thing from happening. If that makes it inconvenient for shooters then we have to accept it. I'm a shooter. I'm an NRA instructor. I don't want anybody hurt, and I don't want anything done to restrict anybody's right to shoot. But I want to be sure there are negative consequences to them if they shoot improperly. Ms. Conti said there is nothing law enforcement can enforce with regard to a noise violation when it comes to firearms. A citizen can call and law enforcement can come to the scene, but once law enforcement arrives it does not have the teeth to enforce anything with respect to noise. We have talked about danger and perceived danger, she said, but that's a meaningless distinction. When I talk about a person hearing unreasonable shooting I am not talking about hearing someone shooting with their kids, skeet, ducks, dove, targets --none of that is unreasonable. That is what living in the country is about. I'm taking about the kind of shooting that really is frightening, where you don't know how far away they are, or how many people there are, or what direction they are shooting in, or what caliber they are shooting. Those are the situations that cause reasonable people to be afraid. They perceive danger, and they don't feel safe. So to the extent that we are here to address safety, their not feeling safe from hearing irresponsible shooting is within this Committee's charge. Things have changed, she said. Living in the country has changed. For all the generations who have been shooting responsibly in the country all these years, still some people are abusing that right. They are shooting assault rifles into exploding targets and they are treating guns like toys. I'm not talking about the people who have bought houses out here and are surprised by the shooting, like those living next to an airport and are surprised by the planes. I have been living in the country a long time. It's different now. We have a noise problem because of the people abusing their right to shoot, and there is nothing in Orange County that gives law enforcement the authority to do anything about that problem. Maybe the solution is for the Board of Commissioners to take up the noise issue, she said. It would be easy enough to lift the firearms exemption from the noise ordinance. But we're here to address firearms safety, and to the extent that people are not feeling safe when they hear firearms noise I think it is hard to separate noise from this ordinance. We're not here to talk about the Second Amendment, she added. Nobody on this Committee is challenging anybody's right to bear arms. At the same time, none of us have the right to shoot anywhere, anytime, anyhow. In reply to a question from Mr. Tesoro, Ms. Conti said that, although it is difficult, we can differentiate between noise from unreasonable shooting and noise from reasonable shooting by giving the investigating officer the authority to make that distinction. She noted that Mr. Tilley had introduced the prima facie clause in section(g). If we require two complainants and then an 9