Dungadin shooting ban passed after lengthy debate on rights versus safety

Two successive public hearings in the midst of a loaded 10-public hearing County Board of Supervisors agenda Tuesday night, August 18, led to a perhaps unexpectedly broad debate over law enforcement’s right to patrol neighborhoods, personal liberty, and exactly what the 2^nd Amendment guarantees citizens regarding the right to own, bear and recreationally fire arms versus the right of neighboring citizens to public safety, as in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The latter aspect was vividly illustrated in the story of a Dungadin subdivision family’s 4-year-old child’s outdoor birthday party during which a neighbor was recreationally shooting to the extent it frightened the birthday girl so much that she fled into her home. Asked if he could stop the shooting for the duration of the party, the neighbor refused and continued shooting so that the girl was afraid to return to the planned outdoor celebration of her birthday.

With that dramatic meeting of children, the 2^nd Amendment and the “bad neighbor blues” we’ll begin our coverage of the August 18 supervisors meeting with the Dungadin shooting ban request.

Joe Andrews opened the public hearing on the shooting ban requested by a majority of Dungadin property owners and residents – 31 people including two renters representing 44 lots for the ban: 9 people including 6 renters representing 15 lots against; and 2 undecides representing 4 lots.

Joe Andrews urged against ‘governmental overreach’ in enacting neighborhood shooting bans for safety reasons he believes are already covered by existing laws. Royal Examiner Photos/Roger Bianchini – Royal Examiner Video/Mark Williams

As he did with the Linden Heights road designation request previously, Andrews called the proposal “government overreach” asserting that existing laws sufficed to control safe shooting practices. – “We don’t need another one. Here’s the problem, you’ve got 40-some signatures, what about those other 20 people? What if they want to shoot a raccoon in their trash can and they can do it safely with a small caliber gun with rat shot in it or something,” he said of majority opinion versus individual rights.

“What we’re going to do here is open up a can of worms where neighbor One can call the police on neighbor Two just because he discharged a firearm, even if he did it safely; and he can go to jail and possibly lose his right to have a firearm. This is a slippery slope,” Andrews warned.

While two other speakers, whose names we got as Ryan Messinger and Sarah Saber, agreed with Andrews points, Saber calling the public safety shooting ban request “a witch-hunt” for the offending neighbor or neighbors, a seven-person public hearing majority saw the issue from a different perspective.

After citing general public safety concerns from an average 300-foot proximity of residential lots, often with children playing on lots close to the shooting, as well as an obtrusive noise factor, Scott Simmons brought the above-referenced children’s birthday party story to the conversation uniting all those concerns.

“A neighbor was having a birthday party for his 4-year-old daughter. Once the shooting started she became scared, went back in the house and would not return to her party. When the offender was asked to stop, his reply was, ‘I live in the county, I will shoot when I want.’

“I urge you to pass this thing,” Simmons implored the three-supervisor quorum present, Mabe, Culler and Fox, of the requested Dungadin neighborhood recreational shooting prohibition.

And eventually on a motion by Vice-Chair Cheryl Cullers, seconded by Archie Fox, that addition of Dungadin to the list of county subdivisions where recreational shooting is prohibited as a public safety hazard was approved by a 3-0 vote.

A matter of perspective

But it seemed that additional argument may have been necessary to sway the board to the action due to the limiting of personal freedoms arguments, specifically 2^nd Amendment freedoms, and board Chairman Mabe’s desire that neighbors work things out without government interference, to assure that majority vote. Prominent among those arguments favoring the ban were Dana Fogle, Paul Gabbert, Noel Williams and Dale Orlowske.

Chairman Mabe asks Dungadin neighborhood association President Dana Fogle if neighbors couldn’t just work out their differences. The answer was ‘No’.

Responding to a question from Chairman Mabe about whether a meaningful effort had been made by neighbors to alter the offending behavior without County interference, Dungadin neighborhood organization President Dana Fogle replied.

“The people that are shooting, it’s almost impossible to have conversations with them. It’s a younger generation. One has been in trouble with the law for a very long time. So, they have the law called on them multiple times up there because of different things that have been going on. So, really you cannot talk to them,” Fogle told Mabe, adding that the landlord was the mother of one of the occupants who lives in Norfolk.

Gabbert expressed distress at a seeming anti-social self-centeredness among some guns rights advocates.

“I don’t get when in a subdivision where there’s not a lot of land, the lots are small – I don’t get it when people can’t give up their shooting when there’s children playing around … I’d think safety would be their number one thing … I just don’t understand the values of things these days that, ‘It’s MY right – it’s MY right to fire a gun; it’s MY right to carry a gun’,” Gabbert began. “Not to be judgmental with gun owners but it’s like the whole thing is about their guns, about being able to hold their gun in their hands and shoot it.

“Forget the people who are around you standing in the street, playing in the yard – forget those people. Just give me my gun and let me shoot it,” Gabbert said, concluding to the supervisors, “I hope you all vote the right way.”

As she had during the Linden Heights road designation public hearing, Noel Williams addressed the issue most succinctly, illustrating for those paying attention, that you don’t have to speak at length to make a point.

“You all need to go on and help these people out. That person needs to be arrested,” Williams said of the described behavior of one Dungadin resident. Williams noted she had worked in sporting goods at K-Mart and encountered seemingly responsible gun owners, adding, “This person isn’t – get them off the street,” to some appreciative laughter from the shooting ban support side.

Following Gabbert to the podium, Orlowske brought military, law enforcement and a firearms instruction background to the discussion. That background included county deputy sheriff experience in Colorado and U.S. Air Force small arms instruction, he told the supervisors. He pointed to safety as a bottom line in all military firearms training, pointing to 80-foot berms around sites to prevent ricochets from leaving the training area – ricochets he noted could travel a mile-an-a-half in any direction.

“This is not anything about 2^nd Amendment rights,” or their overstepping their authorized duties, Orlowske told the board, but rather about directional and personal safety – a right also guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution he stated.

Dale Orlowske brought a wealth of professional firearms work and instruction to the discussion to say ‘public safety’ not the 2nd Amendment is at issue in such requests.

And left unchecked in a populated area, firearms accidents “will happen” Orlowske assured the Warren County Supervisors, pointing to one he has been told already happened here, of a woman being struck in the neck by a stray round, as well as other close calls where rounds missed people but struck home interiors or were discovered in a pool.

“They say, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope,’ – It’s also a slippery slope … if someone gets hurt … I do believe in the safety of the people of Warren County,” Orlowske told the county’s elected officials in urging them not to follow false Constitutional flags being waved over a right not being taken away by enacting public safety codes.

Dungadin’s and the county’s other gun owners could still possess and fire their guns in safe situations provided legally in supervised situations, Orlowske pointed out.

See that Dungadin shooting ban request public hearing and vote in this Royal Examiner video, and see the Linden Heights road designation public hearing and law enforcement patrolling discussion in a related story/video.

Prior to meeting, Board Chairman Mabe explains to FR Unites reps Samuel Porter and Steve Hubbard, among other Confederate statue issue speakers, that they will have to wait till second public comments at meeting’s end to address the issue because that is the time prescribed for non-agenda items. The statue was not on the Aug. 18 agenda.

Watch the entire Warren County Board of Supervisors meeting of August 18, 2020, in the following videos. The meeting is in two parts.