At 10:14 a.m. on July 4, 2022, a gunman opened fire on the Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. He fired more than 70 rounds from a rooftop. Seven people were killed and more than 40 wounded.
At 11:44 a.m. — ninety minutes later, with the shooter still at large and details still scarce — Darren Bailey went live on Facebook to his 111,000 followers.
Here is what he said:
"The shooter is still at large, so let's pray for justice to prevail, and then let's move on and let's celebrate — celebrate the independence of this nation."
The suspect was not arrested for roughly six more hours.
"Let's move on"
Read the sequence again, because the timing is the story.
Bailey was a state senator running for governor. He was in a Skokie parking lot, about 15 miles from the scene, surrounded by around 20 supporters. The attack had happened an hour and a half earlier. Nobody knew where the shooter was.
His instruction to Illinois was to pray briefly and then move on to the celebration.
The first apology was conditional. Through a spokesperson, Bailey said he was sorry "if in any way we diminished the pain being felt across our state today" — the construction people use when they'd prefer not to concede the thing happened. Three days later he apologized again — "I'm sorry" — while also trying to shift blame to Gov. JB Pritzker.
Then he went to court
Six months after Highland Park, Illinois banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The law is called the Protect Illinois Communities Act. It was passed because of what happened at that parade.
Bailey led a challenge to it filed in White County, arguing the ban violates the Illinois Constitution. The suit, brought by attorney Thomas DeVore, counted Bailey among more than a thousand plaintiffs and 70 firearm dealers.
So the record reads: a mass shooting in his own state, an instruction to move on, and then a lawsuit against the law the state passed in response.
That is a coherent position — Bailey believes the ban is unconstitutional, and plenty of Illinoisans agree with him. What it is not is the position of someone who thinks Highland Park demanded any change to the gun laws. His answer to the deadliest kind of day Illinois has is that the mistake was the gun law.
What he's running on now
Bailey's 2026 campaign is pitched on affordability. His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, told WBEZ in July that they're "talking about core services" and are "not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."
Guns didn't make that list of things they're not talking about — and in May, at a Christian conference in Decatur, Bailey said: "Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."
That's the same two-track campaign we documented when his running mate called abortion a "sin against God" at a Springfield rally weeks after telling public radio that abortion wasn't on their agenda. The affordability message is for the general audience. The rest is for the rooms where the base is.
Illinois voters are entitled to weigh the 2022 version of Bailey, because he has disavowed so little of it. He apologized this year for calling Chicago a "hellhole." He was the first-named plaintiff in a lawsuit to strike down the assault weapons ban.
Why it matters
A governor of Illinois signs or vetoes gun legislation and directs the state police — which, as Pritzker put it when he signed the ban, "is responsible for enforcement".
Bailey is asking for that job after suing to strike down the state's assault weapons ban. If he wins, the state police who enforce the Protect Illinois Communities Act would answer to one of the people who went to court to kill it.
Seven people were murdered at a parade in Highland Park. Their families are still here.
Illinoisans deserve a governor whose first instinct after a massacre isn't "move on." We deserve better.
Source
Mitchell Armentrout, "Illinois GOP gov candidate Darren Bailey tells people to 'move on' after Highland Park shooting" — Chicago Sun-Times, July 2022. Photo: Facebook screen image, via Chicago Sun-Times.
