"When Mayor Pranas Rimeikis walked into the council chamber and saw it filled with armed men -- guns tucked inside jackets, guns on hips, some people packing their heat so openly they "looked like Pancho Villa" -- he knew his town had inadvertently touched the third rail of far-exurban politics.

Varmints. And the shooting thereof.

During the past two months, a proposal that sounded obvious to the new police chief -- prohibiting Culpeper residents from opening fire on their own gardens -- has brought an unexpected uproar to this town at the far edge of Washington's commuter diaspora.

Somehow, it also became an argument about the Second Amendment and a little bit about Culpeper itself. Even though, the mayor says, the fight was really about the proper time, manner and place in which to kill groundhogs.

"This is about shooting rights, not gun rights," Rimeikis said yesterday, the same afternoon that the police chief tried to finally put the matter to rest. And shooting, he said, does not have the same place here that it once did: "In the old days, when there were more varmints and less [developed] land . . . you could get away with it."

It all began over the summer, when Culpeper Police Chief Scott Barlow -- hired here a year and a half ago, after 27 years on the force in urban Newport News -- noticed an odd law on the books. It said that anyone in town could discharge firearms at pests in their garden, as long as they obtained a permit from the chief first.

The town of Culpeper has grown by about 50 percent in the past decade as transplants from the Washington area traded an hour-and-a-half commute for a $300,000 house. Now, it has about 15,000 people living in a tight-packed street grid, many in stately old houses on quarter-acre lots.

Definitely within rifle range of one another.

"I didn't want someone sitting on their back porch, looking out at their neighbor shooting at a groundhog," Barlow said. He received two applications for varmint-hunting permits but didn't feel he could approve either.

So Barlow proposed changing the law to effectively ban all shooting within town limits, with exceptions for police officers and residents firing in self-defense.

Rimeikis, a former Green Beret who took up politics after leaving the Army, also thought the measure was a no-brainer. Not that he is a groundhog-lover -- quite the opposite. He said he has killed a number of the tunneling, garden-munching creatures on his own property.

But word of the proposal made it to the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a pro-gun group whose members have previously attracted attention by eating lunch, en masse and openly armed, in Northern Virginia restaurants. At least 15 of the group's members showed up at Culpeper town council meeting, carrying guns both open and concealed and wearing stickers reading "Guns Save Lives."

Not from groundhog attacks, usually. But "they also have copperheads" in Culpeper, said league president Philip Van Cleave, who wore a .40 caliber Kahr K40 pistol in a concealed holster at his waistband.

The council rejected the change in the law, with some members saying that some residents deserved the right to shoot at their groundhogs.

So Barlow changed tactics. Yesterday, he showed a council committee his new solution: a revised permit, which only allows varmint-shooting on properties larger than one acre. There were no armed protesters and no objections from the council.

"Next item," said council member Christopher H. Snider." (David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post, October 1, 2008)