It's generally true that the more local an election, the more beholden the elected official is to his or her constituents. City council members, for instance, don't stay elected long if they don't carry out the will of the people who voted for them.

But what if the voters are ill-informed on an issue? And what if their safety is at stake? What should a councilperson do then?

Ten days ago, the Charles City County Board of Supervisors voted to prohibit the use of high-powered rifles for deer hunting. The decision reversed one the board made almost three years ago. Between then and April 22, Sherri Bowman defeated incumbent board member Michael Holmes.

Holmes had voted in favor of allowing rifles. Bowman ran promising, among other things, that she would vote to ban their use, even from a tree stand at least 10 feet above the ground. It was part of her campaign, and the people of her district elected her. She did their bidding. The vote was 2-1. Bowman voted with Timothy Cotman against rifle use. Gilbert Smith cast the dissenting vote.

"While I was out campaigning, that was one of the issues that the citizens in my district wanted to see get changed," Bowman said in a phone interview this week. "One of their main concerns was safety."

The safety concern stems from the generally held belief that because a rifle fires bullets at a greater velocity than a shotgun fires slugs, rifles put other hunters and innocent bystanders at greater risk of being accidentally shot.

As The Times-Dispatch's Reed Williams reported, county resident Elbert Parker stood up with a piece of inch-thick wood to demonstrate how easy it is for a bullet to go through someone's wall.

"Your children can be shot dead looking at TV in your house," Parker said.

His emotionally charged argument seems to ring true, but there is significant evidence to suggest that it isn't. In fact, new data indicates that shotguns may, in fact, be more of a danger than rifles.

"It's a misconception," said Captain Bobby Mawyer, head of hunter education for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, that rifles are more dangerous. "To make a statement that we're going to outlaw [rifles] simply on safety, the data doesn't support it."

Mawyer combed through the state's hunting-incident reports from 1997-2007, going county by county, comparing those that allow rifles during deer season and those that don't. If the premise of Bowman's vote was correct, Mawyer should have found a greater number of accidental shootings in rifle counties. That wasn't the case.

Consider Henrico and James City counties, the only ones in Central Virginia that allow rifles during deer season. Despite being more densely populated than Charles City, neither had a single incident of a hunter accidentally shooting another hunter or bystander with a rifle in the past decade.

The same was true in Augusta and Botetourt counties, rifle-friendly counties that were No. 8 and No. 10, respectively, last year in total number of deer harvested. In Charles City's past two rifle-legal deer seasons, no incidents were reported.

By contrast, in that same time period, Chesterfield had four accidental shootings involving shotguns in deer season. Hanover had three. James City had four. New Kent had four. Goochland had four. Charles City had two.

The popular conception that shotguns are safer than rifles had more holes blown in it last year by a study commissioned by the state of Pennsylvania. The ballistics study, conducted by Mountaintop Technologies, concluded that while the maximum range of bullets fired from commonly used deer rifles is greater than that of 12-gauge shotgun slugs, "when shots are fired holding the guns level 3 feet off the ground, the shotgun slug will travel 0.99 of a mile, 16 percent farther than the rifle bullet will travel under the same circumstances."

The reason, the group said, is that slugs tend to hold together better and lose less energy than rifle bullets. This becomes even more significant when considering ricochets. The bottom line, the study found, is that slugs often can travel farther than rifle bullets in common hunting scenarios.

Mawyer brought up another point.

"People think that because a rifle goes farther, it's more dangerous. For one, the data simply does not support that. For two, a rifle is a well-placed shot. A shotgun is going to cover a broader area farther down range."

None of this information was news to Bowman at the meeting.

"I've read the article and books, and I've met with people and all that," she said. "The citizens did hear that [Henrico has had no rifle incidents] as well, and they were like, 'Well, go to Henrico [to hunt].' They didn't want it in Charles City."

This is not a tempest in a teapot. Not only is there now evidence that shotguns could be more dangerous than rifles in common hunting situations, NRA spokesman J.R. Robbins pointed out other consequences of the vote in an e-mail this week.

"As more and more unnecessary restrictions are imposed on hunters, they actually begin to discourage people from hunting. When that happens, game departments lose critical funding from license fees. Deer harvests go down, too, which leads to . . . increased crop damage, increased potential for Lyme disease, increased deer-auto collisions, etc."

Bowman said her vote represented the will of the people -- always a safe bet, politically. The question is whether those people now are any safer.