MCHENRY, Ill. (AP) — A suburban Chicago gun shop is raffling a semi-automatic weapon to benefit victims of the nightclub shooting in Orlando.
Second Amendment Sports in McHenry, Illinois, is selling tickets for $5 to win an AR-15 rifle similar to the one gunman Omar Mateen used when he opened fire in a gay nightclub June 12, leaving 49 people dead and 53 injured. It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“We wanted to do something for the loss of lives and injuries that happened to people in Orlando,” store owner Bert Irslinger Jr. told the Chicago Tribune (http://trib.in/293ArqQ ).
The store isn’t making a political statement, owners said.
“I understand that there are different opinions out there,” said Vic Santi, store marketing director. “We don’t look at this as a gun issue. We look at this as a terrorism issue.”
Store owners plan to announce the winner on July 31, when they open a new gun range and larger showroom.
Kathleen Larimer’s son, 27-year-old John Larimer, a U.S. Navy sailor from Crystal Lake, Illinois, was one of 12 people killed in the 2012 shootings in a Colorado movie theater. Larimer called the raffle an inappropriate publicity ploy.
“Guns are not toys,” Larmier said. “They should be taken seriously. I’m not saying they should be illegal, but raffling off a gun is not taking its killing power seriously.”
Colleen Daley, executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence in Chicago, said the raffle is offensive.
“I’m glad people are trying to raise money,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the most appropriate way to do that. These guns are weapons of war, meant to kill large numbers of people in a short time, which is what happened in Orlando. I find it very distasteful and offensive.”
The gun shop said proceeds plus its own donation of $2,000 will go to the OneOrlando Fund run by the non-profit group Strengthen Orlando Inc.
McHenry is about 50 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Are they seriously that fucking stupid or are they just so sleazy that they think it’ll drum up more business for their shop? Brain dead, tone deaf, gun humpers never stop amazing me with their perverse fetish.
In Yiddish we call this shootzpah.
More prize douches.
Is today “Doucheday”???
I think sleazy. I hope that the Orlando victim fund announces that it will refuse their donation, whatever the amount. This would be like raffling George Zimmerman memorabilia or swag to benefit the Martin Family or Black Lives Matter. It is the new, who can be more insulting to our political adversaries gimmick of the GOP voter base…
“It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.” Too bad these authors, and now many have said / written this delusional statement, do not define “modern U.S. history” (what, the last 2 months is defined as “modern” in this context to be true) because this was not the worst massacre / mass shooting in the USA by a longshot, pardon the pun. Recently an article was published describing many more, worse massacres and mass shootings in our checkered history as a nation. This article is just another PC b.s. artist who has a public platform for his distracting and incorrect writing, about yet, yes, another horrible massacre. When an author states such an uninformed “fact” and handles his terms / word so loosely, the remainder of the article is also suspect, and not to be read as fact or truth. Too bad AP doesn’t have the integrity to attribute, or identify, the author in their AP - attributed article.