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More on Kansas State Rep. Virgil Peck and His Hog-Wild Comments about Immigrants

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UPDATE: We are delivering Virgil Peck petitions to the FBI next week, but we want to double our count before then.  Take a stand against hate speech and sign here!

As it turns out, it wasn’t over.

Last week, America’s Voice collected almost 4,800 signatures to investigate Kansas Rep. Virgil Peck’s comments about shooting undocumented immigrants from helicopters.  To jog your memory, Peck is the state legislator who jumped in during a committee debate on how to control the feral hog population, and suggested that the method used for killing hogs could also be used to solve “our illegal immigration problem.”  When asked for an apology, he slandered all southeast Kansans as fellow racists and rather obliviously claimed that no one else would have a problem with his statement. 

Well.

Since then, Peck has been denounced by fellow politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike.  LA Late talked to representatives furious about Peck’s comment: 

[Kansas] Gov. Sam Brownback called the remarks “completely inappropriate…I’m from southeast Kansas.. I disagree with that statement.” Rep. Bob Grant told news that “I have no intention of letting Representative Peck brand me with his own extremist views just because I live in the same region.” 

The blogosphere has been up in arms, denunciating “Klansas”.  Chicago Now reminds us that hogs and helicopters are only the latest in a long trend of public racism: 

Let’s microchip illegal immigrants so we can track them like lost dogs.  How about we put down land mines to get them at the border?…The microchip comment was from Pat Bertroche, a physician running for Congress in Iowa.  Tom Mullins, a Republican candidate for Congress in New Mexico, had the land mine idea.

Balloon Juice defended non-racist Kansans:

I highly doubt this is the way southeast Kansans speak; tossing out jokes about genocide willy nilly. I’ve never been to Kansas, but I sawThe Wizard of Oz, and I don’t remember Dorothy taking a detour to shoot some Mexicans.