The rifle shots from the roof of a store came more than 10 at a time and much faster than the tempo of the band playing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” at the Fourth of July parade on the street below.
A doctor at the scene on Monday morning in Highland Park later described the gruesome injuries of the six killed and more than a dozen wounded as something right out of a war.
This was the kind of carnage that this small suburban city north of Chicago was seeking to avoid when it banned assault rifles back in 2013.
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“The City Council has determined that assault weapons are traditionally not used for self-defense in the city of Highland Park, and that such weapons pose an undue risk to public safety,” read the ordinance signed by Mayor Nancy Rotering on June 24 of that year almost a decade ago.
Rotering did all she could to defend the ban when a IIlinois pro-gun group joined a local gun collector in mounting a legal challenge. The matter went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was so different in 2015 from the present one that the justices declined even to consider overturning it.
As was reported by The New York Times back then, Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissent.
“The ordinance criminalizes modern sporting rifles (e.g., AR-style semi automatic rifles), which many Americans own for lawful purposes like self-defense, hunting, and target shooting,” Thomas wrote. “Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.”
Note that in calling assault weapons “modern sporting rifles,” Thomas used the terminology of the gun industry. Among other things, it makes the AR-15 sound a lot less like something that should be banned.
Thomas remained exactly Thomas as the court tilted far to the right. He wrote last month’s majority opinion expanding the right to carry a firearm in public. He argued that having to demonstrate a particular need to go about strapping kept “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.”
The Highland Park ban still stands, at least for the moment. But it offered little protection as long as so many other jurisdictions make assault weapons easy to acquire. Salvador Ramos of Uvalde, Texas, legally acquired two assault rifles—both advertised as “modern sporting rifles”—the day after his 18th birthday, and another two days later. He proceeded to murder 19 students and two teachers at a local elementary school.
In the aftermath, there were calls for an assault weapons ban, but the U.S. Senate could come up with nothing more than an enhanced background check for gun buyers between 18 and 21. A kid too young to drink can still buy all the “modern sporting weapons” he wants.
It was apparently no problem for the gunman who police say climbed onto a roof in Highland Park on Monday morning.
Police have named 21-year-old Robert Crimo as a person of interest in the massacre, and his YouTube channel includes a video that contains a drawing of a figure aiming a “modern sporting rifle” with a high capacity magazine at two figures, one sprawled on its back, the other on its knees, arms raised.
An actual gunman with an actual rifle waited as the parade kicked off, led by a police contingent with lights flashing and the fire department in an antique engine. They were followed by a marching band, which struck up “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
In Chicago, a half-hour drive to the south, 57 people had been shot, nine fatally, so far on the holiday weekend. But that must have seemed a world away from this wealthy, low-crime suburb. Both sides of Highland Park’s parade route were lined with people cheering and waving flags. The most American of holidays was being observed in classic all-American style.
Then came the shots, as fast as a finger can pull a trigger, transforming a celebration of the nation’s birthday into another mass murder scene. Strollers stood empty where parents had snatched up their kids and fled. An abandoned picnic blanket was used to cover one of the dead. A small American flag such as a child would wave lay on a patch of pavement, the red, white and blue joined by the deeper red of a victim’s blood.
In one of the early briefings, the police announced that they had recovered a “high-powered” rifle. The mayor who had done all she could to protect her city from such weapons then spoke.
“This morning at 10:14 our community was terrorized by an act of violence that has shaken us to our core," Rotering said. “On a day that we came together to celebrate community and freedom, we’re instead mourning the loss, the tragic loss, of life, and struggling with the terror that was brought upon us.”
She had the look of the instantly haunted, the look of somebody who had done her very best only to see the very worst happen anyway.
This story has been updated to change Crimo’s age to 21
