When demonstrators converge on your shop

Shooting Industry, Nov, 2007 by Massad Ayoob

When Jesse Jackson brings a crowd to picket your gun shop, you know your day is going downhill. However, when Jackson targeted Chuck's Gun Shop, owner John Riggio turned lemons into lemonade.

This past summer, Jackson decided to make a major anti-gun statement by conducting a demonstration at a Chicago area gun shop, supposedly to protest the deaths of young inner-city people by gunfire.

He chose as his prime target Chuck's Gun Shop, located just south of the city limits of Chicago, which long ago banned the possession and sale of handguns.

Sharing the limelight with Reverend Jackson was Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest from Saint Sabina church. Jackson and Pfleger brought three busloads of protesters to carry anti-gun signs and picket Chuck's Gun Shop. Cameras were everywhere and Riggio said, "We counted the protesters on film. There were approximately 198. The media estimated the turnout as a thousand."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The organizers of the protest made sure to liberally sprinkle the group with people who had lost loved ones to criminal gunfire. One Jackson/Pfleger follower told TV news reporters that she had been led to believe the gun that killed her child had been purchased at Chuck's Gun Shop. When asked what evidence there was to support the statement, she said. "It had to come from somewhere."

Father Pfleger raised the profile of the publicity game during that first demonstration when he called for the crowd to drag the owner out of the gun shop "like a rat" and "snuff" him. It was this inflammatory statement that catapulted the local protest into the national news.

Though there was backpedaling later about the meaning of his words, they were crystal clear to all who heard them, both at the scene and later on national television. Father Pfleger also called for a "snuffing out" of lawmakers who voted against anti-gun legislation.

In that statement, more than anything else, were sown the seeds that would grow to turn around the attack on a legitimate businessman.