Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) Executive Director Richard Pearson placed a comment by longtime gun rights advocate David Codrea in the complimentary “I wish I had said that” category.
Writing in AmmoLand about the end-of-year spike in Chicago murders, Codrea, who has won multiple awards for his reporting on the sanctity of the Second Amendment, blamed the murders on “feral thugs.”
“That term is exactly correct,” Pearson wrote in ISRA’s January 2 Bulletin. “These people freely roam the streets of Chicago causing havoc like feral hogs do in the timbers and forests Downstate. In my view, both the City of Chicago and Cook County blame everything and everybody but themselves. When the police arrest these feral thugs, they are out of jail before the arresting officer can get their paperwork done. One of the ways the City of Chicago and Cook County deals with their criminals is that they export them to the cities, villages and towns Downstate and into Indiana. Every citizen and public official should be aware of this problem.”
ISRA Executive Director Richard A. Pearson
Pearson's article in the ISRA newsletter mentioned the shooting last Sunday at the West Freeway Church of Christ in the Fort Worth, Texas suburb of White Settlement. A gunman shot and killed two parishioners before being shot dead by a volunteer security officer at the church with a past career in law enforcement. Pearson wrote that such training is critical to saving lives in deadly situations.
“In a bad situation you don’t have time to think about how to do different skills, you must simply do them,” Pearson wrote. “Remember, you have three to five seconds. As Wyatt Earp said, ‘Take your time but hurry.’”
In his “feral thugs” reference in AmmoLand, Codrea was reacting to a quote attributed to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on the five people murdered and 33 wounded in the city the weekend before Christmas. Codrea quoted Lightfoot as saying, “We can’t normalize this kind of behavior. Solving disputes with a gun is never the right answer.”
“You’re a little late, Lori,” Codrea wrote. “If there’s one thing that’s ‘normalized’ in the Windy City, it’s feral thugs upping the death toll on a regular basis. And as for the right answer, as with the parallel about war, that depends on the question. Chicago Police use guns to ‘solve disputes’ all the time. So do peaceable citizens, no thanks to the Chicago Democratic political establishment and its enforcers.”
In his piece, Codrea also called out South Side priest and activist Michael Pfleger for inciting a mob to “snuff out a gun-store owner who, based on being in continuous business, was constantly proving to state and federal regulators his compliance with the rules and laws.”
Chicago City Wire published a story last year that one of Pfleger’s armed bodyguards was arrested outside his church.
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