Gerry McCarthy

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ISRA – McCarthy Must Go

March 31, 2013 by 2 Comments

It was a hot night in the city last night. While the weather was just warm, the teen mob violence on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile became rather hot with 28 arrested. According to multiple reports, a mounted policeman was assaulted, passerbys were attacked, and a group of women were attacked on a Chicago Transit Authority train.

In response to this out of control mob, the Illinois State Rifle Association reiterated their calls for the firing of Chicago Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy. They are calling it “one rampage too many.”

CHICAGO, March 31, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The following was released today by the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA):

The ISRA is once again calling upon Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fire Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy . This latest call for McCarthy’s ouster comes after a mob of young thugs – estimated to be in the hundreds – swarmed the Magnificent Mile shopping district Saturday night and began beating dozens of innocent shoppers. This latest mob action appears to be the most serious in a string of events over the past two years involving gangs of youths randomly attacking shoppers on North Michigan Avenue.

“Just like dyeing the Chicago River green on St. Patty’s Day, cracking tourists’ heads on North Michigan Avenue is becoming a Windy City tradition,” commented ISRA Executive Director, Richard Pearson . “The first warm night of the year, and all hell breaks loose in the city’s most tony shopping district. It should be clear to everybody by now that Supt. McCarthy has lost control of the city. What are things going to be like when the weather really heats up? What has to happen before Emanuel wakes up and gives the nod to a more effective top cop?”

“The ISRA has been cautioning folks against making Chicago a leisure time destination for a few years now,” continued Pearson. “Unless you’re the kind of person who wants to be terrorized, beaten, raped or robbed, then you should definitely find another place to vacation. For the law-abiding citizen, Chicago has become just too dangerous to visit.”

“While vicious mobs have been busily destroying Chicago’s tourism industry, Mayor Emanuel and Supt. McCarthy have been busy as well – vilifying law abiding firearm owners,” said Pearson. “If they spent more time thwarting crime and less time trying to take guns away from hunters and sportsmen, then Chicago might be a better place in which to live and work.”

“The sad events of Saturday night will certainly bolster efforts to pass concealed carry legislation down in Springfield,” said Pearson. “Good people have a right to defend themselves against lawless thugs. I’m positive that the prospect of encountering armed citizens would make such flash mobs vaporize in a hurry.”

The ISRA is the state’s leading advocate of safe, lawful and responsible firearms ownership. For more than a century, the ISRA has represented the interests of millions of law-abiding Illinois firearm owners.

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NRA-ILA Gives CPD Superintendent A History Lesson

July 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

Chicago Police Department Superintendent Gerry McCarthy said that Federal gun laws were tantamount to “government sponsored racism” in a speech at St. Sabina’s Catholic Church in Chicago. Recognizing that McCarthy had a poor education in history growing up in New York, the NRA-ILA gives him a history lesson on where the real connections between racism and gun control lie.

Chicago’s Top Cop: The Racist Roots of Gun Rights?

Friday, July 01, 2011

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, newly appointed by anti-gun Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has wasted no time in sharing his views on Chicagoans’ individual right to keep and bear arms. Less than a month after his approval by the City Council, McCarthy attended a service at St. Sabina’s Church (a parish led by anti-gun extremist Father Michael Pfleger) and made a speech claiming that a lack of restrictive gun control laws is “government sponsored racism.”

Those with a better understanding of history will find themselves confused trying to interpret McCarthy’s logic, as decades of scholarship have proven just the opposite; that gun control, rather than its absence, has often been used as a means of government sponsored racism.

In his 1995 Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy article, “The Racist Roots of Gun Control,” Second Amendment scholar Clayton E. Cramer outlines the historical case that “racism underlies gun control laws.” Cramer notes that racist gun control in America stretches as far back as 1751 with a French law in the Louisiana territory that required colonists to “‘[i]f necessary,’ beat ‘any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane.’”

Though Superintendent McCarthy might be excused for not looking that far back, he should certainly be aware of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the case of McDonald v. Chicago. In a concurring opinion in that case, Justice Clarence Thomas explained that in the years preceding the Civil War, “Many legislatures amended their laws prohibiting slaves from carrying firearms to apply the prohibition to free blacks as well.” After the Civil War, little improved. Justice Thomas writes: “Some States formally prohibited blacks from possessing firearms… Others enacted legislation prohibiting blacks from carrying firearms without a license, a restriction not imposed on whites.”

Other Reconstruction Era (and later) laws were less candid. For example, an 1870 Tennessee law barred the sale of all but the most expensive pistols, effectively disarming newly freed blacks and the poor. New York’s Sullivan Law of 1911, requiring a permit for handgun possession, was largely targeted at Italians and other disfavored immigrant groups. (That law is still on the books.) And the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a concealed carry permit in Alabama under a similar discretionary permitting law—even after his house had been bombed.

We suggest that in the future, Superintendent McCarthy might do a little more research before conflating respect for a fundamental individual right with its antithesis, government-sponsored racism.

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ISRA Responds To Chicago Police Head’s Racist Rant Against The NRA And Gun Owners

June 24, 2011 by 1 Comment

Richard Pearson, Executive Director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, released this alert and statement regarding Chicago Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy’s racist rant against gun owners, Sarah Palin, the NRA, and Federal firearms laws delivered to the primarily African-American congregation of St. Sabina’s Catholic Church in Chicago. If you haven’t seen the video, I posted it here a couple of days ago.

ISRA URGENT ALERT: NEW CHICAGO POLICE SUPERINTENDENT LAUNCHES ATTACK AGAINST LAW-ABIDING FIREARM OWNERS

Fellow Law-Abiding Firearm Owners:

As many of you may already know, Chicago’s new police superintendant, Gerry McCarthy, recently delivered an address on the topic of gun control to the parishioners of Fr. Pfleger’s St. Sabina’s Church. For those of you who have not seen the video of McCarthy’s address, you may find it at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIX4j2sormY&feature=player_embedded

Certainly, none of us would expect McCarthy to discuss how traditional gun control policies seek to disarm law-abiding citizens while ignoring violent criminals. Likewise, we wouldn’t expect to hear McCarthy place the blame for violent crime on a justice system that woefully fails to apprehend, convict and rehabilitate society’s most dangerous elements. No, we’d never expect to hear McCarthy utter the truth about one of the most contentious issues of the day.

As much as we wouldn’t expect to hear McCarthy speak in opposition to gun control, it is equally certain that few of us were prepared to hear what actually came from McCarthy’s mouth when he spoke to the St. Sabina’s congregation. After several minutes of gratuitous self-promotion, McCarthy launched into a racially-charged tirade in which he accused the NRA and law-abiding gun owners of participating in a government-sponsored program to kill Black people.

Like most of you, we believe an assertion such as McCarthy’s is too nutty to dignify with a response. But listening to McCarthy’s rant causes us to pause and ponder the Chicago Police Department’s own record on race relations. Furthermore, given McCarthy’s background, would any of the readers venture a guess as to who McCarthy blames for crime and violence when he’s safe at home among his family and personal friends?

Gerry McCarthy’s verbal attack on law-abiding citizens serves as an affront to law-enforcement officers everywhere. But, then again, any suggestion that McCarthy is a law-enforcement officer is a sham. Rather, McCarthy is merely another in a long line of political hacks who have resided in the office of police superintendant. McCarthy’s job description has nothing to do with law-enforcement and everything to do with enforcing the political agenda of his boss, Rahm Emanuel. Of course, as we know, Emanuel’s agenda seeks the eventual prohibition of private firearm ownership.

Probably the most ironic thing about McCarthy’s speech to St. Sabina’s parishioners is that McCarthy delivered his address while standing only a few feet away from Rev. Mike Pfleger. Let us not forget that, a few years ago, Pfleger urged attendees at a gun control rally to go out and murder gun shop owners and politicians who vote against gun control laws.

McCarthy’s speech at St. Sabina’s is a mere preview of what law-abiding firearm owners can expect out of the Emanuel administration in the months ahead. Watch the video of McCarthy’s performance at St. Sabina’s and you will see what we’re up against. And, as always, we really need your financial support to help contain and defeat the Emanuel Gun Grabbing Machine. So, once you’ve watched the video, please make a generous donation to the ISRA so that Emanuel’s dream of a gun-free Illinois doesn’t wind up becoming your nightmare.

Also, please pass this alert on to your friends and relatives. Be sure to post this alert to any and all Internet blogs and bulletin boards to which you belong.

Remember, gun control is a disease and you are the cure.

Sincerely,

Richard A. Pearson
Executive Director
Illinois State Rifle Association