Chicago Gun Sales Ban Ruled Unconstitutional

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
 Police Super' Garry McCarthy

 IBD Editorial - Gun Control: A federal judge rules that the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to buy them — and that while government is obligated to protect its citizens, it must protect their constitutional rights as well.

Chicago's long-standing attempt to deny its citizens their full Second Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution was met with yet another court defeat. This time, it came via a ruling by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang that the city ban on retail gun shops owned by licensed dealers went too far to count as a "sensible restriction" on gun ownership to prevent gun violence, in what has arguably become the nation's murder capital.

"The ban on gun sales and transfers," wrote Judge Chang in a 35-page opinion, "prevents Chicagoans from fulfilling, within the limits of Chicago, the most fundamental prerequisite of legal gun ownership — that of simple acquisition." Chang found the city's "blanket ban" on sales and transfers of firearms violated the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

In a 5-4 decision in 2008, Heller v. District of Columbia, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court overturned D.C.'s draconian gun law. Similar to Chicago's law, D.C.'s law barred private ownership of handguns, but the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the right to bear arms was indeed an individual constitutional right.

On the heels of Heller, however, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, led by Judge Frank Easterbrook, rejected subsequent suits brought by the National Rifle Association against the city of Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill., on the grounds that Heller applied only to the District of Columbia and not to the states and their municipalities.

That nonsense was straightened out when Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old Army veteran who lived in a high-crime area of Chicago, asserted that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution he fought to protect gives him the right to bear arms to protect himself and his wife, just as he once protected his country.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him, saying the right to keep and bear arms was not only an individual right, but also a national one.

The plaintiffs in the Chicago lawsuit, the Illinois Association of Firearms Retailers and three Chicago residents, argued that if they have the right to have a handgun within city limits, as courts have ruled, then they also have a right to buy one within the city.

Judge Chang agreed, noting that the Chicago ordnance was so restrictive it banned gifts among family members — even preventing a father from passing a firearm down to his son — in the name of reducing gun violence. Yet last year Chicago led the nation in homicides.

The latest ruling in the long legal fight for gun rights in Chicago came a day after Illinois, the last state to approve a concealed carry law, began taking applications from residents seeking to carry concealed firearms in public, after being ordered to do so by a federal court.

On Feb. 22 of last year, a 5-4 majority of the 10-member U.S. 7th Court of Appeals upheld an earlier decision by a three-member panel that addressed the absurdity and inconsistency of Illinois gun laws that allowed ownership of a firearm, but not the right to carry it outside the home — in other words, the "right to keep but not to bear arms."

In an earlier decision overturning Chicago's ban on firing ranges with city limits under its Responsible Gun Owners Ordinance, Judge Ilana Rovner of the 7th Circuit said, "The ordinance admittedly was designed to make gun ownership as difficult as possible."

But she noted pointedly that the Supreme Court has upheld "the Second Amendment right to possess a gun in the home for self-defense and the City must come to terms with that reality."

So too will the gang-bangers and other criminals within the city limits. Soon their victims will have both the right and the ability to shoot back.

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