"Janet Herman’s 11-year-old son was sitting on the living-room floor in their Albemarle County home when a stray bullet fired from a hunter’s gun burst through the back wall of the house and grazed his arm.

“The bullet had come from the woods behind our house, through the steel screen on the deck, through the siding and the wall,” Herman recalled Wednesday, adding that the bullet only raised a welt on the boy’s forearm.

As a result of that 1999 incident, Herman is firmly in favor of a proposed change to Albemarle County law that could restrict the use of firearms near homes.

However, opponents of the potential gun restrictions say existing state law already bans the reckless use of a firearm, a law the hunter who shot into Herman’s home was convicted of breaking.

They maintain that any new restrictions would be difficult to enforce and serve only as an inconvenience for law-abiding hunters and gun enthusiasts.

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors decided Wednesday to hold a public hearing in March to consider changes to the county’s existing law, which prohibits gun use only in certain subdivisions.

The new ordinance would ban gunfire within 100 yards of any school, park or commercial district, said county attorney Larry Davis.

It would also likely take one of three stances on gun use near rural residential neighborhoods, such as the one where Herman lives.

One option is to make no changes. Gun use would remain legal near rural homes, except for reckless use of them.

Another proposal would allow rural neighborhoods to create “safe zones” around their homes in which firing a gun would be illegal, Davis said. The zones could be any size, though the board has previously discussed making them 100 or 200 yards from homes.

The third option is to ban the use of a firearm within a certain distance of any dwelling in the county.

Albemarle police Chief John Miller has previously endorsed the third option, saying nearby gunfire negatively affects the quality of life for some rural residents.

Several board members said Wednesday that they could be swayed by the March public hearing.

Some worry that the changes would be unnecessary.

“I think we’re setting up a solution in search of a problem, and the problem doesn’t exist,” Supervisor Lindsay G. Dorrier said during Wednesday’s meeting.

Albemarle Sheriff Edgar S. Robb wrote in a letter to the board that changes to the existing law would be redundant and difficult to enforce.

“To change the law or make it more restrictive than State law will simply increase the number of citizens treated as criminals and increase the amount of time that law enforcers will be investigating complaints that are very difficult to prove,” Robb wrote.

Still, for Herman, the answer is clear. She said Wednesday that she endorses a ban on gunfire within 200 yards of a home, and will likely show up at a public hearing to support it.

“The hunters were standing 380 feet from our home,” she said. “Two hundred yards would be an improvement.”" (Rob Seal, The Daily Progress, December 14, 2006)