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6 In reply to questions from Dr. Arvik, Chief Deputy Sykes said that if paragraph (h) were in effect and a complaint were made about sustained shooting, then the Sheriff’s Office would be able – does have the training --to assess the situation to determine if the noise were unreasonably loud and disturbing. Let’s say someone calls to complain that a neighbor has been shooting for 45 minutes, he said. If the caller knows the address from which the shooting noise is coming, then we will go there. If the caller does not know the address then we will go to the area and listen in order to determine where the noise is coming from, and go there. Ninety nine percent of our encounters are positive when we introduce ourselves at the scene: the shooter explains something reasonable to explain the sustained shooting, like he hasa new rifle and is having trouble sighting it in, or he is with his grandson and they’re shooting safely. It is not unusual for a shooter to say that if he is disturbing a neighbor then he’ll finish soon or immediately. Throughout the year we will encounter one or two individuals who tell us to leave their property, who assert their legal right to shoot, who insist that we not interfere with their shooting. They know that since there is no applicable nuisance ordinance that they are not breaking the law. Every officer that responds to these calls uses every tool in their bag to come to a positive outcome. Good common sense on everyone’s part, and good relations with your neighbors, goes far in these situations. It depends on how valuable people consider those relationships with their neighbors to be. Repeated calls to the police can undermine that. So most of what we do now in the absence of an ordinance is to gain cooperation among all the neighbors. We can work it out most of the time. Paragraph (h) would be helpful to us, he said, especially if we adopted Mr. Kirkland’s suggestion to allow for two complainants “and” the law enforcement officer to make the prima facie case. You factor that in to a common sense response by the officer, and you can figure out very quickly if either of the parties are acting maliciously, to antagonize their neighbors, and the feud has been going on for weeks and weeks and weeks; that will be evident. But our observations alone would be difficult to prosecute. Without having the civilian complainants we would not have a victim’s flag to wave in the courtroom. It might be construed that the officer has singled out the defendant to make his life hard. If we had complainants to stand with us then it would make it easier in the courtroom. The Committee took a straw poll to evaluate the options for (h). No one voted to keep (h) as it appeared in the current draft. Six (all but Mr. Hunnell and Mr. Tesoro) were in favor of changing the “or” to “and.” Nobody voted to remove the civilian complainants from the paragraph. One person (Mr. Hunnell) voted to incorporate a rule regarding distance from schools or houses of worship. Mr. Hunnell declined the facilitator’s invitation to make further argument, perhaps to sway his seven colleaguesto support a distance rule. Mr. Tesoro reiterated that his struggle was with the subjective determination of firearms noise being “unreasonably loud, disturbing, and unnecessary.” He asked anyone to explain how a