Hundreds packed a gun and knife show in Novi Saturday as a debate over gun regulation has been raging since 17 were killed in a Florida school.
As a national debate over gun regulation and school safety rages across the nation following a deadly school shooting in Florida, hundreds packed the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi Saturday to check out handguns, semi-automatic rifles, antique firearms, knives and ammunition.
The Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. left 17 people dead and sparked a national student-led movement to intensify gun control.
That same debate has been going on for at least 50 years, said Novi Gun & Knife Show organizer Doug Carl, who was skeptical Saturday whether any law could have stopped what he described as a “deranged” shooter in Florida.
“There’s just no way to legislate mental illness, morality, lawlessness,” Carl said. “You can’t legislate that stuff. If you could, it would’ve been…this problem would have been cured a long time ago. And the minute these things happen, everybody starts thinking the wrong direction: what can the government do to help us, what can the government do to fix it. The government can’t fix it. There’s no way.”
There’s only one way to solve the problem, Carl said, and that’s checking students’ books and bags, installing metal detectors and X-ray machines, and having armed guards at schools.
“There’s a TSA at the airports, I think there should be a school TSA,” said Carl, who expected 2,000 to 5,000 people to attend the gun and knife show Saturday. The event continues Sunday.
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At a White House listening session with students, teachers, and parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas on Thursday, President Donald Trump hinted at the possibility of arming teachers or coaches at schools as a way to protect students from attacks.
“And this would only be, obviously, for people that are very adept at handling a gun,” Trump said in the transcript released on whitehouse.gov. “And it would be — it’s called concealed carry, where a teacher would have a concealed gun on them.… A gun-free zone to a maniac — because they’re all cowards — a gun-free zone is, let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us.”
Since the shooting, Trump has taken measures to propose stricter background checks and regulate “bump stock” devices that allow rifles to function as automatic weapons, according to USA Today.
The gun control movement is also impacting the decisions of corporations, including MetLife, United and Delta airlines, which have all dropped their discounts for the National Rifle Association, which has continued to stand for gun rights in the face of recent shootings, the USA Today reports .
At the gun show in Novi Saturday, opinions were varied. If guns are banned, Rick Haynes said, then other freedoms are “out the door.”
Haynes, a vendor at the Total Firearms Inc. booth, was selling everything from handguns to lever-action rifles to semi-automatic rifles.
“It’s all about control,” said Haynes. “They cannot control us if we’re armed.”
Juan Gildemiester, 51, of Howell who shoots antique long rifles and owns an AR-15, said some of the recent arguments he’s heard after the Florida shooting are “perfectly good measures.”
“I have no problems having a waiting period, myself. I have no problems having a much more thorough background check,” Gildemiester said, later adding: “I don’t need to buy anything today and have it today.”
Gildemiester, who describes his perspective as more “middle of the road,” said a lot of the fear is driven by uncertainty which causes people to go “one way or the other, to extremes.”
“It’s a reaction,” Gildemiester said. “People think, right or wrong, ‘Oh they’re gonna ban this or legislate this. And then there’s a reaction. It’s a natural instinct.”
Contact Hasan Dudar at hdudar@freepress.com.
