Dear Editor,

As I sit here tonight, I ask why the rights of one individual should take precedent over the rights of a whole community?

We have a man who has recently moved into our neighborhood of about ten homes. He has decided to target practice for hours and sometimes several days at a time with his friends from other parts of the county, who also bring beer and drugs with them, I’ve been told.

He cites the second amendment as his right, which is the right to bare arms. Nowhere does it say you have the right to shoot up the neighborhood and be a nuisance, causing pain and suffering to our well being. It only states that you have the right to own and carry a gun.

This has been ongoing for almost a year. Different ones have called the Sheriff’s Department, I don’t know how many times. This man laughs and says they only tell him to have a good day. The place where he is shooting is directly between my house and my next door neighbor, down hill, through the woods at us. My neighbor was almost shot in the head, back in the Spring, which was reported to the Sheriff’s Department. Nothing was done about that, except talk to him again, which he denied doing.

What I am trying to say is we don’t have any protection in the county. I have talked to the Sheriff, two commissioners, the D. A., and several other county officials to no avail. The D. A. told me, when I asked him how he would like to have that going on near him, said, “I don’t have to worry about that, I live in the city.”

We need to have some kind of law in the county that protects us from this kind of person or persons. I don’t have anything against him for target practicing for a half hour, but not for hours on end. I and my neighbors all have guns, but you don’t hear us blasting away at all hours of the day. We all moved to the country for peace and quite, not to live in a war zone. Even the animals have all left, the only things left are the crows.

Shirley Collins

Rockingham