Overzealous gun owners kept us from buying home

With interest I read about whether people can carry firearms at the Festival at Sandpoint. I thought Bonner County folks should know why we are not residents there.

My family vacationed and fished at Priest Lake when I was young. When my wife and I retired, we looked at the Sandpoint area for a home. We took a few trips to Bonner County to look at homes on the market. We saw a couple homes that we would have been happy to buy. However ...

It’s the gun nuts around there that sent us scurrying away. That’s a simple fact. We didn’t buy a home in Bonner County, didn’t put our money in a Sandpoint bank and are not shopping at local businesses or eating breakfast at the Hoot Owl. For that one and only reason.

I know guns. I grew up in a serious hunting and fishing family. I’ve been a gun owner all my life and always will be. It’s the myopic view that gun rights trump all else that I can’t stand. A friend, an ex-Marine and NRA weapons instructor, put it best when he said that while everyone has the right to own a gun, far too many gun owners do not have the level of personal responsibility to actually have a loaded weapon in their hands. I couldn’t agree more. It is the ever-increasing number of irresponsible gun owners, including members of my family, who have driven me from being anti-gun control to supporting most gun control legislation.

It is only common sense to leave your guns and knives home when you go to a public event like the Festival at Sandpoint.

RICK MEIS

Halfway, Ore.