SACRAMENTO — So far, John Lockwood has had only two customers for his new Internet-based business, yet lawmakers in California, 14 other states and Congress are moving to shut it down.
Lockwood operates a website -- live-shot.com -- that for a few hundred dollars lets anyone with access to a computer shoot and kill a variety of animals roaming a fenced ranch in Texas.
A rifle, video camera and computer are mounted on a stand at the ranch at a spot frequented by deer, antelope and sheep. From thousands of miles away, via computer, a person can control the camera and gun, firing with a click of the mouse.
Even if Lockwood doesn't yet have customers lining up around the block, the mere notion that a venue exists for remote-controlled killing has triggered a backlash of disgust, compelling lawmakers and forging an unlikely coalition of big-game hunters and animal rights activists.
Lockwood's venture has offended sensibilities even in Texas, where many private hunting ranches promise clients they can bag exotic trophy animals such as impala and wildebeest.
"It's not hunting," said Kirby L. Brown, executive vice president of the Texas Wildlife Assn., which represents landowners, hunters and conservationists. "It falls off of the end of the ethical chart."
Scholars such as Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University, also see Lockwood's business as an understandable, if disturbing, extension of a computer society where popular video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" let players pretend to kill police officers.
Jamieson said people feel threatened by Lockwood's business, much as they do violent video games, because both involve an unseemly delight in killing. Lockwood's business, he said, undermines the central argument in defense of hunting: that the joy of the sport comes in the chase and in being attuned to the natural world, but not in the kill itself.
"If you look at this as being kind of a continuum or slippery slope," said Jamieson, "you have people who enjoy the act of killing and destruction in video games, you have people who enjoy killing animals over the Internet.... But of course the next step in this is that people start killing people over the Internet. That's the worry."
In February, state Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) introduced SB 1028 to forbid Californians to use Lockwood's website or starting a similar business. The bill faces a vote in the full Senate today.
