Meeting Notes 062216 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

13 are a hundred yards away from a pistol, then the bullet will go into the ground before it gets to you; the same thing with a shotgun. Arifle is a very different concern. When I was about ten years old I was on a pistol team that met downstairs in a police barracks. One of the demonstrations we saw involved shooting a .22 into a 1-inch pine board. The bullet went right through. They successively put a second and third and fourth board behind the first one, to show that the pistol’s power was sufficient to propel the bullet through. Then they took a one-inch piece of meat to show you what happens if you shoot a human or a cow. It doesn’t go through, he said, because the flexibility of the tissue contains the bullet. Mr. Kirkland said that “assault” is an act. From that perspective, he said, a shotgun could be an assault weapon. It’s irrelevant whether a gun is an assault weapon or a sports weapon. What we need to concentrate on is safety, and on keeping the rounds on the shooters’ properties, on making sure rounds are contained and that shooters are responsible about making sure where their rounds are going. He said that he understands Ms. Conti’s aggravation at hearing her neighbor’s shooting for eight hours a day. Please don’t be sorry to say anything, he said to Ms. Conti, because if it’s a learning experience then everybody in here can learn something from it. That’s why this Committee is here: so we can get input from everyone and make good, sensible solutions for what we’re facing. Ms. Barksdale said that it’s important to understand the dangers posed even by semi-automatic weapons. There were two semi-automatic handguns used by the mass murdererat Virginia Tech. He shot 50 people, each of them no less than three times, in about ten minutes. My daughter was a student there at the time, she said, and it was very, very distressing. She had friends killedand wounded, and I wentup and spent a week there. It lowered my immune system and I developed transverse myelitis. We have outcomes from these things that spin out, other than being shot. Even a semi-automatic weapon can be bad. Mr. Webster said that the people in his community have told him that what’s problematic is that gunfire is loud and sounds dangerous. I explained to them that that’s a noise ordinance violation, he said. Maybe the County needs to look at the noise ordinance and adjust it. It’s also tough to train all the deputies on what it is that would make a shooting range safe. Yes, it’s common sense and they learn a little in basic law enforcement training and through their field training officer program and through the years of their service. I agree that it’s notsafe to shoot into a block of wood leaning up against a tree with a bunch of rocks behind it; it