There was ''an air of absolute unreality'' about the actions of Luke Anthony Bonney, the judge said when sentencing the 21-year-old to 15 months' jail on firearms and intentional damage charges.
Bonney was before the Dunedin District Court yesterday after earlier admitting three Arms Act offences of discharging a .177-calibre BB gun with reckless disregard and three of intentionally damaging windows in two buses and a house.
The defendant was driving past a Hunt St house about 7.20am on August 29 when he fired at a sunroom window while the occupants were having breakfast.
He continued driving and, soon afterwards, shot out windows about half a metre behind the drivers of two buses picking up passengers in Highcliff Rd and Musselburgh Rise.
The windows shattered.
A passenger was seated beside the window of the second bus at the Musselburgh Rise bus stop.
Defence counsel Campbell Savage said the bus drivers were ''robust people'', one describing what happened as ''the actions of a silly boy''.
But Judge Phillips said the drivers might be ''robust'' in their response, but when ''some young criminal'' was firing shots at their buses, the drivers and other people inside were vulnerable.
Mr Savage said Bonney could not explain his actions and probably did not know why he had done what he did. He had no previous convictions involving firearms and pleaded guilty relatively early.
Judge Phillips told the defendant the incident had been frightening, particularly for the bus drivers and their passengers.
And while he was relatively young, Bonney had built up ''an alarming record'' of violence in recent times.
He had several convictions for assault and for driving with high alcohol levels.
He clearly had issues of alcohol abuse. All his offending appeared to be alcohol-related but, when undergoing a pre-sentence alcohol assessment, he had minimised his alcohol consumption, so the report was of little use.
''You say you acted foolishly,'' the judge said, but he called Bonney's behaviour ''dangerous and menacing''.
He had been driving a car after drinking heavily and, while driving, had randomly fired at a house and two buses, ignoring ''the utterly foreseeable consequences'' of what could have happened.
''People wouldn't expect such things to happen at that time of the morning in Dunedin,'' Judge Phillips said.
The judge said the denunciation and deterrence required for what Bonney had done ''far exceeded'' what would be provided by any electronically monitored sentence, but he gave the defendant credit for his youth, his guilty plea and the fact it would be his first prison sentence.
For discharging the airgun with reckless disregard, Bonney was given concurrent jail terms of 15 months (one charge) and nine months (two charges), with concurrent one-month sentences on each of the three convictions for causing intentional damage to the bus and house windows.
From the end of his sentence he will be subject to release conditions for six months with counselling and programmes as directed.
His unpaid fines of $6870 were remitted and replaced with a concurrent one-month prison term and he was ordered to pay reparation totalling just over $2000 by instalments.
At the request of police prosecutor Stewart Sluis, Judge Phillips ordered forfeiture of the firearm and confiscation of Bonney's car, although the defendant said he had sold it.
