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 families still searching for each other — 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 Skokie, about eight miles from the shooting, surrounded by around 20 supporters. The attack had happened an hour and a half earlier. Nobody knew where the shooter was. Parents in Highland Park were calling hospitals.

His instruction to Illinois was to pray briefly and then move on to the celebration.

The apology that followed 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. The same statement worked in an attempt 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. He is also a plaintiff in a second suit brought by the same attorney, alongside more than a thousand other 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 at all. 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 three weeks after telling public radio that claims they'd restrict abortion were "a flat-out lie." 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 not disavowed any of it. He apologized for calling Chicago a "hellhole." He has not stepped back from Highland Park, and he is still a plaintiff against the assault weapons ban.

Why it matters

A governor of Illinois signs or vetoes gun legislation, directs the state police, and decides how vigorously the state defends its own laws in court.

Bailey is asking for that job while suing to strike down the state's assault weapons ban. If he wins, the person who chooses whether Illinois keeps defending the Protect Illinois Communities Act is one of the people currently trying 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 via Chicago Sun-Times.