Tea party opposes Sutter County gun law on levees
WHAT: Sutter County Board of Supervisors second reading and adoption of ordinance.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday.
WHERE: Sutter County Hall of Records, 466 Second St., Yuba City.
Even after some debate, revisions and a fair amount of pressure, Sutter County supervisors still may not have an ordinance on using guns on levees that will please everyone.
After word began circulating this week of the supervisors preliminary adoption, and possible final adoption next week of such an ordinance, members of the Sutter Buttes Tea Party signaled their intention to rally the troops again.
"They'll just keep pecking away until we have no freedoms left," stated an email sent by the group to media and some supervisors, though it did not have a signature. "This is not only a gun rights issue, this is a personal freedoms issue."
Members of the group could not be reached for further comment.
However, board Chairman Larry Munger said the revised ordinance has gotten the OK from several quarters, including gun rights groups, hunters and officials with the state Department of Fish and Game.
Under the revised ordinance, firing a gun off the top of the levee is strictly prohibited. But people can still fire a gun from the side of the levee, and people using air guns or arrows can also do so from the top.
"We just cleaned it up," Munger said, relative to an existing ordinance from 1976 on the issue. "It's much cleaner and simpler now."
Existing state law already bars firing guns from the tops of levees, he said, but the county ordinance will be more specific. And such an ordinance, which came at the request of Levee District 1, is necessary with Sutter County planning millions of dollars in levee upgrades in upcoming years, he said.
"We're going to have people working on the top of those levees," Munger said, adding he knows from experience at a hunting club he belongs to how a shot from the top of the levee can go far enough to hurt someone, in this case a person's eye.
"You can go across a field and go a long ways," he said.
When he took a group of hunters to a Sutter Bypass levee to explain the ordinance, he said, the reaction was positive.
"They could care less about shooting from the top," he said.
Munger added, "With the tea party, I'd bet most of 'em don't even have a gun."
LD1 General Manager Bill Hampton said he hasn't read the revised ordinance, but shooting from the levee top is the paramount issue.
"We can close the top of the levees altogether. We don't want to do that," he said, adding like Munger, many of the people involved with the levee district are hunters themselves. "It's completely a safety issue."
The ordinance requires two approvals to be enacted, and the agenda item from this week's meeting indicated a vote for final adoption would come next Tuesday.
At the meeting earlier this week, supervisors voted 4-1 to waive first reading of the ordinance.
Supervisor James Gallagher dissented, saying he thought the ordinance was unnecessarily duplicative.
