The end of the 2nd Amendment? No, just a reasonable Idaho Supreme Court decision | Opinion

Idaho Sen. Scott Herndon, R-Sagle, was sent packing by the Idaho Supreme Court on Thursday. He lost his lawsuit against the organizers of the Festival at Sandpoint, a local concert that had in 2019 decided not to allow guns to be carried at its event.

Herndon argued that it was illegal for the concert to do that because it was held at a city park.

But Herndon didn’t just lose, he lost on summary judgment — the court’s way of saying that the case didn’t even belong in a courtroom, that the legal theory behind it had no merit.

Justice John Stegner summed up the issue succinctly: “This appeal concerns whether a private party that leases public property from an Idaho municipality may govern those who come and go from its property during the lease. The short answer is yes.”

It’s a pretty reasonable opinion. If you organize a concert or fair or something, and you lease the space to hold it from the city, you get to decide whether people can carry guns there or not.

Naturally, the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance — one of the plaintiffs in the failed lawsuit and a group founded on the belief that the NRA is a squishy, left-wing outfit — was apoplectic.

The justices had unanimously “gutted the 2nd Amendment in Idaho,” the group wailed on Facebook, as Ruth Brown of Idaho Public Television reported.

People of this ideological bent are fond of calling themselves “constitutionalists” — ironic because their primary objective is to attack the Constitution, to reinterpret it so radically as to bend it beyond recognition.

The right to carry a gun is not absolute — that is pure fiction. No court has ever found that it is. The founders did not contemplate that it would be, as evidenced by the fact that they lived in a world where there were laws regulating carrying firearms when they wrote the Constitution, and they continued to pass more of them after writing it.

“Gun laws are as old as America, literally to the very early colonial beginnings of the nation,” historian Robert Spitzer noted in an interview with Time. “From the beginning of the late 1600s to the end of the 1800s, gun laws were everywhere, thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. You find virtually every state in the union enacting laws that bar people from carrying concealed weapons.”

What harm is supposed to befall gun owners because of this decision?

“With so many summer events kicking off soon at county fairgrounds, we have no idea which places are banning or not banning firearms, and which ones have leases in place or don’t,” the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance wrote.

Is it really that big a deal to ask the organizers whether you’re allowed to carry at their event?

Sometimes, the answer is yes — though that is not always satisfactory.

Herndon’s attempt to carry at a concert happened within a few weeks of a 2019 stunt by then-Rep. Chad Christensen — a ham-handed sting operation attempting to show the Eastern Idaho State Fair was violating gun rights, which was detailed by Jeanette Boner of the Teton Valley News.

Christensen showed up at the fair with a camera in tow and set about badgering staff, hoping to get evidence that the fair was denying people’s right to bear arms, Boner reported. The fair would have been well within its rights to do that, but they in fact allowed people to carry guns, as long as it was done lawfully.

Which he would have known if he’d given them a call.

Both Herndon and Christensen had a simple solution to their shared dilemma: If you want to carry a gun at a public event, ask if it’s allowed. If the answer is no, you can skip the event. Or you can go unarmed.

You just can’t dictate to the people organizing the event how they have to run it.

It’s a free country, after all.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.