Gun-control group demonstrates at Northbrook Mariano’s the headline at chicagotribune.com proclaims. It’s a story of an anti-gun flash mob – all 17 of them – protesting outside a grocery store that somehow decided not to ban legal concealed carriers from its premises. You got to hand it to Northbrook anti-gun rights “activist,” founder of Peaceful Communities, Lee Goodman. The man’s got this media-friendly agitprop thing down . . .
Northbrook activist Lee Goodman, created a pile of stuffed animals in a mock shrine to a gunshot victim outside the store’s main entrance and carried signs emblazoned with slogans including “lox not Glocks” and “bagels not bullets.”
They also brought a petition for the signs that Goodman said was signed by 600 people.
It was the second trip some of them had made to Mariano’s, 284 Skokie Blvd., as a part of the effort. The group also had appeared on opening day, Aug. 25, with the same message.
“We’re creating our own teddy bear shrine,” Goodman, who had opposed Illinois’ concealed-carry law, said at the protest. “We want to impress upon Mariano’s that this is what happens when you have guns around.”
Clever man that he is, Goodman’s catering directly to the media’s insatiable appetite for “if it bleeds it leads” bloody shirt waving. No doubt we’ll be seeing more of his anti-civil rights campaigning. But this article offers something extra: his rationale for so-called “gun-free zones.”
Goodman maintains that signs do save lives, saying gunfire is less likely to occur due to criminal intent than error, and it would be better if people with new Illinois concealed-carry permits kept their firearms in their car trunks while they shopped.
“It’s the accidents,” he said. “People drop guns, children pull them out of the purses left in shopping carts and there’s also the potential that people who carry guns, anywhere, if they get into an argument, with guns there, now it’s turned lethal.”
Goodman’s lying – and he knows it. You have to be wildly willfully ignorant to even suggest that negligent discharges and escalated “arguments” with legal concealed carriers account for more in-store bloodshed – or the possibility of bloodshed – than armed robbery. You can spend .55 seconds Googling “armed robbery Chicago.”
By the same token, Goodman knows exactly what game he’s playing. The more stores who ban concealed carry, the more he can make it a PITA to carry a concealed weapon, the more he degrades Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.
Oh, and here’s something interesting: a Trib story about an armed robbery foiled by a FOID-card holding Chicago resident, one that left the perp at room temperature. How about them apples?