San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Turnout low for pro-gun rally in Santa Fe
A pro-gun rally in Santa Fe failed to draw a large audience on Saturday.
Organized by the San Antonio-based This Is Texas Freedom Force, the Carry For Our Kids Rally featured several speakers who presented arguments for arming teachers across Texas schools.
“It’s a really good message,” said Denise Jaimes, 53. “They’re hitting it right on point. It’s just that there’s nobody listening.”
Jaimes and her fiance drove nearly two hours from their home in Cleveland to attend the rally after hearing about it on Facebook. But when they strolled into the pavilion at Runge Park to find more speakers and media members than audience members, she felt let down.
“I’m disappointed that there aren’t more people here, and
I’m going to let people know that I’m disappointed,” said Jaimes, who for a long time was a member of the Texas Defense Force, a sovereign army for the state of Texas. “We could have had a strong stance here, and there’s just nobody here.”
Brandon Burkhart, president of This Is Texas Freedom Force, didn’t let the low turnout affect his mood. Instead, he projected confidence that the push for arming teachers in the name of student safety will continue to grow, despite a lack of media attention.
“First and foremost, we’re trying to educate the public on the other side,” he said Saturday, just a few minutes before he introduced the first speaker
to take the microphone atop a wagon repurposed as a stage.
“Most of the media has been running with the narrative of March For Our Lives and pushing more gun control and stuff like that,” he said. “Basically, we want to do away with gunfree zones. We want any teacher that wants to carry to carry.”
He set out to plan the rally in the wake of last month’s school shooting at Santa Fe High School, which killed eight students and two adults.
The biggest hoots and hollers of the day came about when radio host Doc Greene of “The Amazing Doc Greene Show” spoke. In his speech, he tapped the holster on his right hip and invoked the Bible regularly.
“Someone asked, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Well, we know that. We have the answer to that,” he said before paraphrasing from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus told his disciples to sell their cloaks and buy a sword.
“The whole point is that the Lord Jesus Christ understood that the ability to defend yourself and others is more important than comfort itself,”
Greene said. “That’s why he said sell your coat and buy a gun. Jesus might have been the first Navy Seal. He said it would be better for you to be cold and wet than to not be able to defend yourself and others.”
This was met with resounding applause. But while many of the other attendees cheered, Steve Johnson remained largely silent. He sat at a picnic table, listening to speakers for much of the morning, his arms crossed in front of the green Santa Fe Strong T-shirt he wore, which bears the names of the students who were killed.
“I wanted to just come and hear all the viewpoints,” Johnson said. While Johnson technically lives on the other side of the city line in Algoa, his children attend Santa Fe schools, and his daughter was at Santa Fe on the day of the shooting.
“It was a pretty bad day for us,” he said of May 18. “But it was a worse day for my daughter.”
He hoped Saturday would help him find answers to the big questions his community has. But he knows finding true solutions will take time and more voices than can be offered up in one rally fueled by out-oftown organizations.
“Nothing alone is going to stop it. It’s going to have to be a group of things put together,” he said. “And I think education is really important first step in that. Getting the voice out there of whatever it is you’re pushing so people can understand.”