He Tried to Bring a Gun to a Concert

On August 9, 2019, Scott Herndon and a friend bought tickets to the Festival at Sandpoint, the community's beloved summer concert series at War Memorial Field, and walked up to the gate carrying guns. The Festival had banned weapons for years, and they knew it. Herndon later admitted in his own statement that the two men set out to "test whether the firearm ban would be enforced." A camera crew from the far-right outlet Redoubt News was there to film the confrontation, and the video ends with a title card thanking Herndon by name. Security turned them away, the city attorney who happened to be attending explained the law to them, and they left with refunds. Then the lawsuits started. Herndon's stunt first prompted Bonner County and Sheriff Daryl Wheeler to sue the City of Sandpoint, a case a judge threw out in 2020 for lack of standing but not before it cost local taxpayers more than $320,000 in legal fees. In 2020 Herndon filed his own suit, joined by the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance and a Washington state gun group. In June 2021, Judge Lansing Haynes ruled against him on every claim, dismissed the case with prejudice, and ordered the plaintiffs to pay the city's and the Festival's attorney fees. Herndon appealed. In June 2023, the Idaho Supreme Court rejected him unanimously, writing that the Second Amendment "appl[ies] only to government actors, not private parties," and that a nonprofit renting a park has the same right to set rules on its property as any other tenant. As the Idaho Statesman put it, 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."

Most people who lose 7-0 at the state Supreme Court accept the result. Scott Herndon was a state senator by then, so he did something else: he wrote a bill to overturn his own loss. Within hours of the ruling he declared it a "massive legal loophole" and promised a "legislative solution." In the 2024 session he delivered Senate Bill 1374, whose official Statement of Purpo

se says, in black and white, that it was written "following the June 2023 decision of the Idaho Supreme Court in Herndon v. Sandpoint." No other Idaho legislator has ever had a statute drafted to reverse a case with his own name on it. The bill limits when groups renting public property can prohibit weapons, and Governor Little signed it on March 27, 2024. Herndon took a victory lap on Facebook: "This will take some ground for Idaho's gun owners after last summer's Herndon v. Sandpoint." Here's the punchline. When the Sandpoint Reader asked whether his new law would actually apply to the Festival, Herndon conceded it wouldn't, because the Festival charges admission. Five years of litigation, more than $320,000 in public money, a unanimous Supreme Court rebuke, and a law with his personal grievance written into its preamble, and the concert he tried to carry a gun into can still tell him to leave it in the truck. This isn't a man fighting for your rights. It's a man who used your Senate seat to relitigate his own bad day.