Following Florida shooting, Las Cruces residents protest gun show

Nearly two dozen Las Cruces residents protested the Sunrise Lions Club’s gun show as the last of the Parkland shooting victims were buried in Florida.

“I can’t attend the last funeral today in Parkland, Florida, said Jean Berlowitz, who organized the protest. “But I can come out on this street corner and say that our children are more important than your guns.”

The Sunrise Lions Club’s gun show is a semi-annual event that had been planned months in advance.

“This would have been a good time to say, ‘You know what? We had to cancel,'” said Father Wally LaLonde, a protester who admitted to owning a gun, himself. “That would have been the right thing to do.”

While Las Cruces residents outside the Convention Center exercised their First Amendment right to protest, hundreds of gun activists and firearms dealers exercised their Second Amendment right to purchase firearms.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun with the courage and the wherewithal to use it,” explained Jason Axtell, a local dealer and owner of Axtell Rifle Works. Axtell told ABC-7 he lived only six blocks from the Columbine High School massacre of 1999.

“Unfortunately, good intentions don’t stop bad people,” Axtell said.

“It should be a basic right of students to know that they’re not going to be killed at school or hurt at school,” said Eva Barber, a Las Cruces High School senior who described the frightening shooting scares this past week. “They came out and said that it was a precautionary measure, but at the time, they did not tell us that.”

Barber told ABC-7 she purposefully stayed home on Friday because she was afraid a student would bring a semi-automatic weapon to school.

“We don’t need them for protection,” Barber said. “They’re pretty much made for war. They’re meant to kill a lot of people.”

Local gun owner Joe Perez acknowledged the protesters’ First Amendment rights, but said guns are necessary to stop criminals in their tracks.

“The right to self-defense should never be denied, regardless of who you are,” Perez said. “You should always be able to defend yourself.”

“We’re both trying to accomplish the same thing,” Axtell said. “We just have different ideas on how to do it. What we want is safety. No one wants our kids hurt.”