Huntley concealed carry meeting

The Huntley Tea Party sponsored a meeting tonight on the topic of concealed carry.

There was little new from the proponents. Joe Walsh and Mike Tryon were there. Richard Pearson, of the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) was there, and so were Valinda and Mike Rowe. Valinda founded IllinoisCarry.com (www.illinoiscarry.com) and very recently was awarded the national Activist of the Year Award by the Second Amendment Foundation.

Huntley Police Chief John Perkins was on the agenda but didn't make it. Maybe the Huntley town fathers decided that Perkins ought to be somewhere else???

Also present was Bill Jenkins. Although he had been billed as being from the Brady Campaign, I understood the moderator to say at the beginning of the meeting that Bill was not from the Brady group.

Bill was the best prepared of the speakers and showed a PowerPoint presentation that ought to cause any reasonable person to stop and listen hard to what he was saying. Bill is a gun owner and a believer in the Second Amendment, but he opposes concealed carry.

I suspect that much of his presentation fell on deaf ears in the audience. There were the usual few rude and obnoxious proponents of concealed carry, including one man I had run into at another meeting. I remembered him for his "carrying a concealed weapon is a Gawwwwwwdddddddd-given right" proclamation at the previous meeting.

Bill's presentation and arguments made sense. Some of the loud-mouths got tired of listening and began to heckle him and interrupt him. The moderator could have done a better job of shutting down the disruptive members of the audience. They were the ones who scare me about the whole right-to-carry subject, because they are likely to brandish their weapons or even fire them outside of legal limits.

Even Richard Pearson, the Executive Director of the Illinois State Rifle Assn., gave a couple of personal examples of "self-defense". In my opinion, one was borderline, but the other was clearly a violation of law. And he was proud of them.

Todd Vandermyde, the lobbyist for ISRA and also a union lobbyist, went into the attack mode against Jenkins and accused Jenkins of positions that Jenkins calmly explained were not his positions. That didn't slow down Todd.