Hobby shooters peppering neighborhood with bullets; Sedgwick County aims to stop it
Residents of a Derby housing development say they are sick and tired of dodging bullets fired by neighbors in unincorporated Sedgwick County.
They may get some relief Thursday at a special meeting where county commissioners are scheduled to consider a resolution that would make it a violation, with a $500 fine for shooting a bullet that strays outside the shooter’s property.
Residents of the Northbrook Addition say they live in fear, in the line of fire behind where their neighbors on larger county lots adjacent to the development shoot targets with makeshift berms for backstops.
“They’ve been shooting full automatics over there,” said Dennis Pagano, a former county sheriff’s deputy. Ricochets and shots that miss the berms from the recreational shooting fly though the trees and go “just buzzin’ around people that were walking.”
A police report was filed when a bullet from the activity apparently hit a neighbor’s fence.
“When you’re shooting into a housing addition full of people, Where’s the common sense at?” Pagano said. “I know there’s a lot of terrified people over here and my wife’s one of them.”
The situation has caught the attention of Commissioner Jim Howell, who is proposing the resolution that will require shooters to confine their flying lead to their own property.
It’s an unusual position for Howell, a staunch supporter of gun owners’ rights who shepherded several bills as a legislator in Topeka to lift state restrictions on gun-carrying and to prohibit local jurisdictions from regulating firearms.
“Normally when the sheriff goes out to a place like this where there’s a dispute between neighbors on people shooting guns, most of the time the sheriff will talk to them and say, “Look, what you’re doing is not safe and you’ve got to do things differently because people feel threatened and things are a bit dangerous here,’” Howell said. “Most of the time that works. In this particular case, these are people who say ‘We’ve been shooting guns to the west for decades and we’re not going to change. We’ve been doing this forever. We like our guns and we’re going to keep on shooting guns the way we have forever.’”
“One guy even got a video when bird shot landed on his house and he was standing right there,” Howell said.
Neighbors say that incident was a one-off and was resolved fairly easily when law enforcement contacted the neighbor who was shooting clay targets, who agreed not to shoot at aerial targets any more.
But the shooting of rifles and pistols has continued, they say.
“Really, it’s just very pitiful backstops that they have,” said neighbor Max Seaman. “Some of them aren’t even chest high. On more occasions than one it’s just gotten out of hand, you can hear them hitting the trees behind our houses . . . People are very concerned about their pets and their kids and their houses.”
Derby police have taken reports, but they can’t do much about it because it’s out of their jurisdiction, Seaman said.
Howell said he went out to the neighborhood and “the bottom line is there really is no safe direction for them to shoot from these homes, even though it’s in the unincorporated (county).”
He said the resolution the county will consider Thursday is nearly identical to one that Johnson County passed when faced with the same problem.
The only difference is an exception for hunting, because unlike the more fully developed Johnson County, Sedgwick County still has a lot of areas of open land still used by hunters. So bullets can go onto neighboring parcels “as long as safe hunting practices are followed.”
The other exceptions include law enforcement, shots legally fired in defense of life, and permission of the property owner where the bullets fall.
Pagano said he’s not sure the $500 fine will be enough to change the behavior.
“This has been going on since we’ve been here, two years ago,” he said. “If it changes I’ll really be surprised.”
“I think these guys are very numb,” Pagano added. “I don’t think they understand what a bullet can do. All they know is shoot, shoot, shoot and have fun, but it doesn’t work that way when you’re that close to a neighborhood. “
He said one time when the bullets were flying, “I yelled over there and said ‘You guys need to quit shooting before you kill somebody,’” Pagano said. “Pardon my French, somebody told me to kiss my a--.”
This story was originally published October 19, 2021 at 2:26 PM.
