Chris Estes was just another innocent bystander in the middle of an American battlefield.

On a warm January day, three shots were fired from a red sedan, with the heads of several towheaded boys sticking out. As the laughter rang from the car, Chris, a middle-schooler who'd been on a bike ride with his two brothers and a cousin, pedaled back to his house to call 911: A gelatin-encased paintball had just hit his eye, permanently damaging his sight.

The teens sped away and hit a number of others throughout Garner - including a Hispanic man picking through a dumpster. They also popped a few rounds at a fast-food drive-through window, before police arrested them and charged them with assault with a deadly weapon - a crime that could carry serious jail time.

Now the town of Garner is joining a growing number of small towns and cities across the US considering a ban on paintball guns altogether, despite their popularity as a safe "extreme" sport with some 8.5 million recreational players, second only to in-line skating and snowboarding.

To be sure, boys who once would have thought nothing about pelting each other with BB guns are today picking up the kid version of a .50 caliber Howitzer: the 320-feet-per-second paintball gun, or "marker." But as injuries rise, a debate over the limits on the games boys play - and how badly they should be punished for capers gone awry - is also heating up.

"It raises this issue to a debate: When does juvenile behavior rise to the level of criminal action?" says Mayor Donald Rudney of Gurnee, Ill., who chose not to follow suit when neighboring towns began banning paintball guns last year.

"It's a question for our society," he says, "because we were all kids once, and we all did things that we look back on and say, thank God nobody got hurt."

The sport was invented in 1981 by bored forest rangers in Connecticut, carrying "marker" guns to identify trees. Now kids are turning abandoned mills, soggy woods, and crumbling state hospitals into faux-battle scenes . Many users are youth, but adults wage their own wars as well.

Paintball injuries have doubled in the past four years, but many courts, like one in New Jersey, have had little luck portraying the guns as firearms. Bans and restrictions have been in place in many cities across the country - but now the fight is coming to the suburbs, in places like Garner, Alpharetta, Ga., and Lake Forest, Ill., near Chicago.

For officials in Garner, the key is to discourage turning cul-de-sacs into OK Corrals.

"We don't want to infringe on people's rights to have paintball guns, but we also can't have people using them on the streets," says John Blum, an officer at the Garner Police Department.

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