Festival gun struggle gets national exposure

SANDPOINT — Efforts in Idaho to solidify Second Amendment rights and the struggle over firearms at the Festival at Sandpoint are getting exposure at the national level.

BuzzFeed News published a 7,726-word article on its website Thursday entitled “The Fight to Bear Arms.”

“The national war over gun control remains at a standstill. But in the small Idaho town of Sandpoint, Second Amendment activists are fortifying the rights they say are constitutionally theirs — no matter the cost,” the subhead reads.

Written by Anne Helen Peterson, a senior culture writer based in Missoula, the article covers a lot of ground — state-level efforts to bolster the Second Amendment, the American Redoubt movement, Idaho ballot initiatives, the perceived political divide among conservative rural residents and city dwellers and the legal fight over the Festival at Sandpoint’s prohibition against firearms during its annual waterfront concert series.

The piece features interviews with Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler, Commissioner Dan McDonald, Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad, abortion abolitionist Scott Herndon, members of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force and Greg Pruitt, head of the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance. Conspicuously absent from the reporting is comment from Festival at Sandpoint officials.

“In the state of Idaho, it’s clear these rights can’t be breached,” Wheeler said in the article. “To me, there’s not two sides. It’s not the Festival and the county. There’s just the rule of law, and it says you can do this as a citizen.”

For his part, Rognstand said there’s been a whole “shift around gun culture” in North Idaho.

“It used to be you just kinda grew up around it, your family went hunting, you learned gun safety at a young age. No one needed to brandish their guns when they went to work or to the supermarket,” said Rognstad, an Idaho native.

The Festival was dragged into the gun debate in September, when Bonner County filed suit against the city for allowing the nonprofit Festival to promulgate its own security policies when renting War Memorial Field for the annual concert series. Idaho law forbids the prohibition of firearms on public property. Festival officials have said they do not oppose the Second Amendment, but had to implement the weapons ban in order to meet contract obligations with artists who perform at the Festival.

The article posits that the Festival could come to an end if the county prevails because there are no other available in-town concert venues.

A status conference in the litigation is set for Tuesday in 1st District Court.

Keith Kinnaird can be reached by email at kkinnaird@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow him on Twitter @KeithDailyBee.