The Howard County Council will be proposing its first bill of the new year tomorrow, and, wheeew, it's a stinker.
On the surface, CB1-2009 seems like a rational response to an incident last month, when a hunter who should have known better opened fire on a deer and instead shot out the window of a day-care center 277 yards away. The state safety buffer zone is 150 yards, and this proposal would double that distance.
But before everyone starts congratulating each other, let me rain on the parade by saying, "This is a knee-jerk, badly worded, sorry excuse for a solution that won't make a single person any safer."
Others will no doubt say the same thing in far more eloquent terms, but I wanted to be the first.
Here's the bottom line: As written, it's unenforceable.
You see, in addition to arbitrarily doubling the safety zone (more about that later), the proposal also would prohibit anyone from firing a gun "in the direction of any dwelling, house, residence or other building or camp designed for occupation by human beings which is within the maximum range of the gun being discharged."
Verbosity and grammatical error aside, there's the little matter of the last seven words. I'll repeat them: "maximum range of the gun being discharged."
Maximum range is as unknowable as the number of bubbles in a Coke.
What size Coke? Cold or warm? Diet or regular?
It's the same thing with shotguns, a fact that apparently escaped the Howard County lawyer who drafted the bill.
For the sake of argument, let's use state hunting law as a foundation. Deer may be legally killed in Howard County with 10-, 12-, 16- and 20-gauge shotguns. Those guns come with lots of standard and custom barrel configurations that take at least four types of ammunition. They can be equipped with a scope or open sights.
A Howard County friend of mine who does math a whole lot better than I do came up with 192 combinations of legal deer gun.
But wait, there's more. What's the temperature? The wind? The humidity? Is the hunter on elevated ground or in a gully? How old is the gun?
You want to know the maximum range of a shotgun? First, tell me exactly how many bubbles are in my Coke.
(For perspective: Two honest-to-goodness scientists trying to determine the number of bubbles in a full bottle of champagne came up with two answers, 49 million bubbles per bottle and 250 million bubbles in a bottle.)
