HORTONVILLE — A small crowd of people showed up to the Delaware town board meeting Wednesday night to ask the board to allow citizens to bring guns into the town hall.

Their request came after last month's town board meeting when they mistakenly thought the board had voted to take away the right to bring guns into the building. When in fact, that was already in the town's policy and no change had been made.

“The no firearms rule existed before last month, this is a modification of the no firearms that could basically create a carve-out for the two town justices,” said Town Attorney Ken Klein. “It was a blanket prohibition. Now the prohibition excludes the justices.”

A few meetings ago, Town Justice Charles Nystrom asked the board if he could bring a firearm with him because he felt unsafe. At last month's meeting, the board voted to change the policy to allow town justices to carry a firearm.

Harold Roeder, the town's Upper Delaware Council representative and former councilman, said during public comment that he wants the board to re-look at the policy, and allow for anyone to enter the town hall with a gun.

“My concern is that we have a situation that appears to be an oxymoron,” Roeder said. “Because on one hand you want to let one person protect their life, but you don't care about anyone else protecting their lives.”

He mentioned a current culture of violence as the reason why citizens should be allowed to carry a firearm in the building. He said he was issued a license to carry in 1961 and since then has carried a firearm, even when he served on the town board.

Supervisor Ed Sykes said he also has a license to carry but does not bring a gun into the town hall.

“This has been a no firearms zone certainly as long as I've been supervisor,” Sykes said. “What we did was just modify the law. You're preaching to the choir, I'm looking around the table and all of us [carry].”

Paul Hemmer of Jeffersonville came to the meeting to tell his story. During public comment, he said in 2010 a person came into the Jeff Pharmacy with a baseball bat and a spear and demanded drugs. Hemmer said he was the only person in the pharmacy with a license to carry and held the suspect at gunpoint, which quelled the situation.

“The reason I wanted to tell my story is because I carried a handgun up until that point for 25 years; no one has ever known until that moment that I had to draw it to protect the customer at the register standing next to me, the techs in the pharmacy and the pharmacist in attendance. I hate to think what would have happened if I wasn't able to do that,” Hemmer said.

According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.

Roeder referenced the murder of Lorraine Gempler in Kenoza Lake in September of 2018 in which she was killed with a heavy vase. Roeder said that, according to FBI statistics, in 2017 there were 403 murders with rifles, 1,600 with knives, 467 blunt objects and 669 personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.).

But Roeder excluded that in 2017 the total number of murders by firearms was 10,982. Firearms accounted for 72.6 percent of all murders, knives were 10.5 percent, and personal weapons were 4.6 percent. (Visit www.fbi.gov for data).

Sykes said the board wouldn't take any action that night but would look into it for the next meeting.