This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Parade organizers in a small Kansas town have decided they will not stop Kris Kobach, the Republican candidate for governor, mounting a replica machine gun on a jeep.

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The organizing committee for Iola’s Farm City Days had told Kobach’s campaign it would have to remove the replica gun if it wanted the jeep to be part of Saturday’s event.

Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who led Donald Trump’s controversial and discredited voter fraud commission, said that would violate his free-speech rights as a proponent of the right to bear arms.

The jeep is also decorated with US flag designs and has a bobblehead of Trump on its hood.

Daniel Schowengerdt, an attorney for the organizing committee, said it never intended to “forcibly prevent [Kobach] from entering” the parade.

Schowengerdt said the committee now expected Kobach to place an orange cap on the machine gun’s barrel, to show it is a replica, and to mount on his jeep an 11in-by-17in sign saying the parade does not “condone the display of large-scale military weapons”.

The sign was also supposed to say: “The Farm City Days committee does support the second amendment.”

Matters How U Stand (@MattersUStand) #AP ☛➧➧ Kansas town says Kobach can’t use replica gun in parade



TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Organizers of a small-town Kansas parade have told Republican Kris Kobach that he must remove a replica machine gun from the back of a Jeep that’s become a key part… https://t.co/jlByIDFX9M pic.twitter.com/0x4Pwu77fV

Virginia Crossland-Macha, a local Republican, said Kobach’s supporters had nonetheless scheduled a short gun-rights rally before the parade. She said Kobach was expected to speak about the first and second amendments to the constitution, which protect speech and gun ownership.

Iola, with about 5,700 residents, is about 100 miles south-west of Kansas City. It is the seat of Allen county, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than two to one and Trump received 67% of the vote in 2016. Kobach carried it in a crowded primary in August with nearly 43% of the vote.

Crossland-Macha said she was upset enough about the committee’s decision to tell Kobach to remove the gun to resign as its president. She said Farm City Days was non-partisan and staffed by volunteers and had been drawn into “a mess”.

“I just find it kind of crazy,” she said, before the committee’s reversal.

Kobach has been riding in the jeep with the replica gun since at least June. Its appearance then in a suburban Kansas City parade prompted criticism, an apology from the sponsor and what Kobach derided as a “snowflake meltdown” among his political opponents.

Schowengerdt said Farm City Days committee members felt the gun’s “wartime message” clashed with the event’s message of bringing farms and cities together. He said organizers had no problem with the jeep, only with the gun. Under past supreme court decisions, he said, parade organizers have a right to choose content.

“This is not a leftist organization,” Schowengerdt said. “In fact, the vast majority of the people on the committee are gun-owning Republicans.”

He said discussions with Kobach, a former law professor, were “positive” and “productive”, though the two disagree on legal issues.

“We did discuss, if this went to court, what we think would happen,” he said. “No one threatened anyone.”

Kobach said Iola was the first community to express reluctance about his gun.

“In contrast, we’ve had mayors from other cities asking us to bring the gun,” he said. “The second amendment applies as well in the city as it does in the country, and there is no conflict whatsoever between the joining of city and country and the second amendment.”