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“Are we at last brought to such an humiliating debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense?”—Patrick Henry
Attendees at an Oct. 26 event headlined by Turning Point U.S.A. (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk were disarmed prior to being allowed into the event.
The event, Faith and Freedom Conference at Capital Church in Meridian, Idaho, was hosted by FreedomStand USA. According to it’s website, tickets were $45 a person. It is unclear if attendees who were turned away were refunded.
Ammon Bundy, a liberty activist and a Republican primary candidate for Idaho governor, posted a video from the event which showed security looking through bags of attendees. The disarming went as far as an off-duty police officer, who had his police badge with him, being turned away, according to Bundy.
“I was just shocked at that, that at a Charlie Kirk event, at a chapel here in Meridian, Idaho, they’re disarming people before they go in,” Bundy said. “Did we not just learn our lesson? What just happened yesterday at Boise Towne Square Mall?”
Bundy added: “While I was there at the door, I had an undercover guy there who was an undercover officer and he says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got the security. We’ve got you covered. We’ll protect you.’ And again, have we not learned our lesson?… I’m just really, really surprised at a Charlie Kirk event that they’re turning people away and stopping them from coming in armed. It’s beyond me. So, we’re not going to go in.”
The previous day, Monday, Oct. 25, a shooting at Boise Towne Square Mall resulted in two deaths and five injuries according to local media. That mall was designated as a “gun free zone,” and Bundy wrote in the description of his YouTube video that “disarmed people were hiding in closets afraid for their lives.”
“During the Boise Mall shooting people hid in closets hoping that a perpetrator with a gun would not find them. They feared for their lives praying that the door would not open. Why? Because they had no practical way of defend themselves against a shooter. Under no circumstances should we rely on any security personnel, including the police, to practically defend our family and our life,” Bundy added.
Idaho is a constitutional carry state where citizens, 18 and older, are allowed to open carry without a license. Concealed carry is also allowed, but that does require a license. There are no background checks, no registration and no waiting periods required to buy a gun from private dealers in the state.
FreedomStand USA apologized for the event in a statement, according to Media Right News. According to the statement, the security was contracted by Kirk’s TPUSA, which was hosting other events in the state, and not FreedomStand USA.
The statement: “On another matter, during the course of the evening, we learned that the contracted security team followed the security protocols that were requested the night before at the Nampa Civic Center for the Critical Race Theory Tour. The same security firm was contracted to support the efforts of both Turning Point USA’s events. To be clear, FreedomStand USA did not request our security team to prohibit those from Constitutionally carrying into the event, nor did we do so last year for our FreedomStand 2020 event. We will be debriefing with the various groups who supported the security efforts to understand how this transpired. The event was supported by private security, church security, and security from Turning Point USA with armed security during the event. We are grateful that we had an uneventful evening and experienced no security threats, but it is disappointing that additional protocols were taken that were not specifically requested by FreedomStand USA. We apologize for those who were prohibited from carrying into the venue as that was not our requested protocols for the evening.”
John Lott has compiled statistics for years with the Crime Prevention Research Center showing that the more guns there are in society, the less crime there is.
“The great object is that every man be armed.”—Patrick Henry
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