It gets creepier and creepier

I was shocked and appalled following a weekend incident involving a man from suburban Morton Grove whose contempt for the local mosque made him think he could pull out his high-powered air rifle and fire shots at the building.

But the more I learn about this incident, and another one that also occurred this weekend in west suburban Lombard, the more my shock becomes contempt.

CONTEMPT, THAT IS, for those elements of our society who think that their despicable actions are somehow justifiable. As though they think they’re fighting the good fight for our society by letting their mini-minds run amok.

Now before anyone starts sending me their rants telling me that this bigotry is nothing like the past, I will concede one point. It seems that officials are taking these incidents seriously.

In the old days, the authorities likely would have placed blame on the Muslims for even being here, and provoking the anger of others against them.

Take the incident in Morton Grove, where it turns out that the man who fired shots at the Muslim Education Center near his home is actually a village official.

HE’S NOT THE mayor or a village trustee or anything like that. He is someone who serves on one of the village committees and takes an interest in municipal issues – all for no pay.

Which is what caused his attorney to tell the Chicago Tribune, with a straight face, that the man was a, “pillar of the community.”

I shudder in disgust at the thought. Although what bothers me is some of the Internet commentary I have read about this issue that makes it clear some people are more than willing to accept this man as the “pillar” and the mosque as the “problem.”

That attitude is what is wrong with our society. Which is why I was pleased to see that a Cook County judge on Monday, while setting bond at a low-enough level that he was able to post it and remain free while his criminal case is pending, ordered him to undergo an anger management evaluation and to submit to electronic monitoring.

LET’S HOPE THIS same serious attitude remains throughout the legal proceedings in this particular case.

Yet this attitude isn’t even an isolated incident. For it seems that in Lombard (a town I’m familiar with because I had an uncle and aunt who lived there for many years), there was an incident Sunday at the College Preparatory School of America – an Islamic school.

Somebody threw a plastic bottle at the building, a bottle that had been filled with several potentially-volatile chemicals. Somebody envisioned an explosion that would have caused damage to the building – which had students inside at the moment of impact.

Fortunately, there was no explosion. The bottle didn’t even break. A part of me wants to remember the ineptitude of the “Pop Bottle Bomber” incident in the 1970’s Disco-era comedy ‘Car Wash,” and make a joke or two.

YET IT WOULD truly be crude to recall a cinematic moment that ended with a bottle of urine being smashed.

Although I’m sure the terror felt by the people in that facility when they heard a loud bang makes any gag inappropriate. For all I know, the person(s) who concocted the bottle probably are getting a thrill from learning they caused a scare.

It also seems that they’ve moved up a notch, since Lombard police told the Chicago Sun-Times that past incidents at the school have merely involved graffiti.

Which makes me wonder if we’re going to get another incident or two in coming days – we are in the period of Ramadan, after all, that runs through Saturday. I’m sure at least some of the crackpot types are offended that those “Muslims” have a sacred holiday that they know nothing about.

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Air gun attack on mosque may be worse than Wisconsin’s Sikh temple attack

I’m sure that some people are going to read this commentary, then send me a rant claiming that the two incidents that have caught my attention have nothing in common.

One of the incidents is the one that captured national attention – a white supremacist man who walked into a Sikh temple fully armed, then began shooting at people. He managed to inflict casualties, before avoiding arrest by shooting himself to death.

BUT I AM actually more offended by an incident this weekend in the Chicago suburbs – Morton Grove to be precise.

For police there have arrested a 51-yar-old man who lives just a few blocks near an Islamic mosque. Facing charges of aggravated discharge of a firearm and criminal damage to property, the man will make his first court appearance on Monday.

In this particular instance, a security guard at the Muslim Education Center in Morton Grove said he heard something hit the outside wall of the building while services for Ramadan were taking place.

After going outside to check, he heard “bangs” that sounded like gunfire.

POLICE FOUND A high-powered air rifle in the possession of the man. They believe he was shooting at the building to express his opposition to having a mosque so close to his home.

Which makes me wonder if someone will try to claim he was merely expressing his beliefs (freedom of speech?), and that nobody was actually hurt.

But like I stated earlier, this incident actually bothers me more than the recent incident at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek – even though six people were killed in that incident and many others suffered severe injuries from their wounds.

Police have said they believe the 40-year-old who committed that attack was a white supremacist who was expressing his beliefs against Islam.

THE FACT THAT he was in a Sikh temple rather than a mosque can be used by some of us to dismiss him as some sort of idiot who can’t tell the difference.

Yet I’m sure there are many others who don’t want to distinguish between Sikhs and Muslims, or who think that they’re both alike in that they’re not the religious faith that the particular crackpot wants to think of as the lone legitimate one.

What bothers me is that it was just a week after the Wisconsin incident that this incident in the northwest suburbs is committed. Somebody apparently didn’t learn any kind of lesson from what happened at the Sikh temple.

Or perhaps they think they’re going to “finish off” the job that one man tried to start last week.

FOR ALL I know, they’re probably offended at the news reports being disseminated this weekend about the first service at that particular Sikh temple – what with people trying to get on with their lives to the degree that some of those who organized a memorial service for the six dead people wanted to include a seventh empty coffin to remember the fact that Page also died in the temple.

It was a gesture of forgiveness, although more because these people don’t want to have these ideological crackpots dictating the tone of their lives forevermore.

That’s a very mature attitude for them to take.

Yet we probably do have some people who privately rant and rage about how too much attention is being paid to what happened in Wisconsin.

AND A FEW others who feel the need to take some sort of follow-up action.

Because that’s how I view what happened in Morton Grove. It’s evidence that some people are determined not to learn any kind of lesson from what happened in Wisconsin.

And that, ultimately, is the flaw in our society – not the existence of differing religious faiths in our ranks.

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Chicago officials are going to have to fight for the right to keep their firearms ban

Social conservatives from rural communities like to say they are trying to protect their approach to life from outsiders, particularly urban types who they think show disdain for their beliefs.

Yet it often turns out to be just the opposite, as evidenced by the reaction of the activists who get worked up over firearms ownership issues. When the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the handgun ban that exists in the District of Columbia, the activists' first reaction was to say they were now going to go after the gun ordinances that exist in Chicago.

THE NATIONAL RIFLE Association says it considers the gun ordinances in Chicago and San Francisco to be just as onerous as what existed in the national capital. They are hoping that federal judges appointed by decades of Republican presidents will strike down the gun bans that exist in our city and others of likeminded views.

Insofar as Chicago is concerned, the City Council’s knee-jerk reaction to the assassination attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan was to ban the sale or ownership of handguns within city limits.

Basically, anybody who lives in the city of Chicago who has acquired a firearm since 1982 is in violation of the law. City residents who go to gun dealers in the inner suburbs to purchase firearms commit a crime when they bring the weapons home – similar to how Illinois residents can legally purchase fireworks in neighboring Indiana but cannot legally have or use them in their homes.

I can remember my days as a police reporter for the now-defunct City News Bureau when a police sergeant explained that an outright ban made it easier for police to control gun-related crime by eliminating various categories by which some firearms would be legal under some circumstances, but not others.

IT ELIMINATED LOOPHOLES by which people might try to claim their weapon is legal, while their neighbors’ is not.

As police explained it to me back then (and which they have a legitimate point), no one in an urban environment seriously is going hunting for sport. People who seriously see something “athletic” about firearms and competitive shooting are going to want more space than can be found in an urban environment.

The argument that legitimate sportsmen are having their rights impinged upon was absurd. Police in general, and the cops of Chicago in particular, are never going to be mistaken for some liberal-minded organization.

To me, the fact that legitimate law enforcement personnel are in support of these extreme firearms bans is the evidence that it is the people who oppose bans who are the radical fringe of our society – and not the norm, as the NRA would have us think.

I’M SORT OF willing to concede that in a rural community near open areas, the hunting aspect of firearms creates a different situation. While a part of me subscribes to the old joke that hunting will be a sport the day that deer are armed with an AK-47 and can shoot back at the hunters, I’m willing to admit that those rural communities might have some reason for having differing laws than the urban areas.

That is the case.

These are city-only ordinances that ban firearms sales, although select suburban towns in the Chicago area (most notably, Morton Grove, Ill.) have gone so far as to impose their own bans on firearm ownership within their boundaries.

That’s why the fact that the NRA and its allies are eager to shoot down Chicago’s gun ordinances strikes me as perverse. It’s almost like they want to impose a small-town, rural mentality that is completely inappropriate to the third-largest populated city in this country.

THEY DEFINITELY WANT to play politics with the issue of firearm ownership, hoping to score a few more rural votes by bashing around what they want to perceive as the “big bad wolf” of Chicago.

Why else would Republican presidential hopeful John McCain have bothered to bring up the issue on Thursday, praising the Supreme Court’s ruling and reminding people that his likely opponent, Barack Obama, hails from Chicago.

It’s probably just a matter of time before GOP aides remind us of ties between Obama and the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who has devoted years of his life as a priest to trying to fight the spread of firearms in his Gresham neighborhood parish and surrounding inner-city neighborhoods.

For his part, Mayor Richard M. Daley is bracing himself for a fight with the NRA, as he wants the courts to ultimately maintain the city’s gun sale ban. He is skeptical, as are many law enforcement personnel, that it is realistic to expect people to be able to protect themselves by allowing them to carry handguns on their person.

“DOES THIS LEAD to everyone having a gun in our society? If they think that’s the answer, then they’re greatly mistaken,” Daley told reporters. “Why don’t we do away with the court system and go back to the Old West? You have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle in the streets.”

Specifically of the Supreme Court’s action, Daley said, “They’re changing the rules. Why should we as a city not be able to protect ourselves from those who want guns in our society?”
Basically, Chicago is going to become a new legal battlefield for people who want to have the courts impose rules that somehow maintain a rural sensibility to this country – even though this country has long ceased to be urban-oriented (the typical American these days lives in a suburb of a major city).

THAT IS WHY towns like Kennesaw, Ga. – the town that reacted to Morton Grove’s gun ownership ban by imposing its own law requiring all households to own at least one firearm – are just ridiculous.

Kennesaw officials like to spew statistics claiming their crime rate has declined. When one considers how small the population is in that Southern town, it doesn’t take much of a drop to create a large percentage decline in crime.

It also would mean that differing circumstances exist there than in Chicago. Trying to move Chicago more in the direction of Kennesaw is just misguided.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The right-leaning Supreme Court’s elimination of the District of Columbia’s gun ordinances (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/23/ST2008062300649.html?hpid=topnews) are giving activists motivation to go after Chicago’s bans on handguns within city limits.

Chicago and San Francisco are getting ready to fight in court to keep their gun sales (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27React.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) restrictions in place.

Supporters of the handgun sales bans in Chicago want to believe that the now-invalid Washington, D.C. law (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/26/usa3) was so much stricter than what exists anywhere else that there will not be a large-scale legal effect by Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling.

The far right has been demonizing Rev. Michael Pfleger since before his comments about Hillary R. Clinton’s presidential campaign (http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2008/06/26/abcs-robin-roberts-ignores-radicalism-maverick-priest-pfleger), as he has long taken an active role in trying to fight the spread of firearms in the city from suburban gun dealers.