It doesn’t take much to lure the crazies out into the open.
I’m talking about the gun fanatics who racially attacked Illinois state Sen. Elgie Sims after he called for tighter gun control laws in the aftermath of a deadly shooting at a south suburban mall.
“I hope you get AIDS and cancer and die,” one young man posted on Facebook. Another posted a picture of Frederick Douglass with the caption, “Ooga Booga. Where the white women at?”
The social media attacks were so vile that the Illinois State Rifle Association had to issue a public statement condemning what it called a “racist” backlash.
It’s not that we haven’t seen how nasty some people get whenever someone brings up the subject of responsible gun laws. This time, though, it was particularly vile because Sims was actually at the Orland Square Mall last Monday when the shooting took place.
Sims then dialed 911 and alerted authorities to an active shooter at the mall, just a few feet from the front door of the store he was in. Then he made his way to the front of the shop and locked the doors.
Likely no one would have noticed if Sims had stopped there. But he took it further and put the shooting into national context, joining the divisive and often crude debate over the federal banning of semi-automatic weapons.
“The shooting is yet another tragic reminder that the gun violence epidemic has only worsened in our country,” he said. “It’s another reminder that we must act now in a meaningful way to address this problem and end the blood that flows onto the floors of churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, city streets and malls.”
The solutions are not secret, he continued. Sims is a longtime state representative who was appointed to the state Senate last year.
“We know that simple and broadly supported measures like universal background checks, cracking down on straw purchases and illegal weapon sales and limiting access to high-capacity magazines and military-style assault weapons would save countless lives.”
What he said was perfectly reasonable. And it would seem that no reasonable person, regardless of their stance on legalized firearms, would have issue with any of it.
But as these debates often do, some gun owners took it too far. It became, once again, a heated discussion over why law-abiding citizens who want to carry a firearm should be penalized for the acts of people who carry them illegally.
Within that message always has been a thinly veiled racial undertone that serves to pit young African-American men against mostly white, suburban gun owners. People don’t often say it out loud, but everyone understands the code.
It comes out in just about every debate over gun laws.
In an interview with NPR, Sims explained it this way: “We’ve got to get away from this fallacy that gun violence is perpetrated by this ‘boogeyman,’ the ‘gangbanger.’ It’s not,” he said. “Gun violence can happen anywhere, and I think the fact that this happened in Orland Park only serves to reinforce that these issues of gun violence — they don’t just happen in poor communities. They can happen anywhere.”
The morons who made those racist statements don’t represent the majority. ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson put it this way: “People are really angry, really afraid of losing gun rights in Illinois,” he told me. “So these people are afraid and they are acting like they are afraid. But they do not represent us or who we are.”
He’s probably right about that.
Certainly, it would be unfair to label all or even the majority of law-abiding gun holders as racists and bigots.
But it is clear, as the ISRA appeared to point out its statement, some of these people are within their midst.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
