It should have been a legal “slam-dunk” that the appeals courts would uphold Chicago city government’s ban on firearms within the city limits.
After all, the limited government conservatives who always want to rant about the right of a government to set its own standards theoretically ought to support the idea of letting a city impose limits on firearms.
FROM A PURELY practical standpoint, firearms in places where people are packed (just under 3 million in the city proper) don’t make sense. It’s not like anyone is hunting for their food if they live in Beverly or Sauganash.
Yet the rigidity with which the far right wants to impose some rural definition of when a firearm makes sense upon the entire nation (even those of us who deliberately reject a rural mentality by not living there) and the willingness of some segments of the courts to cater to those people have always made any case involving firearms to be up in the air.
It’s almost as bad as abortion the degree to which people will hop into their partisan rhetoric mode whenever the issue comes up.
So I must admit to being pleasantly surprised when I learned that the federal appeals court for the Seventh Circuit (based in Chicago) issued a ruling this week that upholds the laws the City Council and then-Mayor Jane Byrne imposed back in the early 1980s that pretty much made possession of a firearm a crime.
WHAT IT USUALLY amounts to is an additional charge that can be tacked on to someone when they are arrested for some other crime.
Under the law, people who had properly registered firearms prior to the imposition of the law could remain legal, but I remember from my police-reporter days with the old City News Bureau being told by Chicago police of just how few legal weapons there were in Chicago.
Of course, we now have the firearms advocates claiming they’re going to take this issue to the Supreme Court, which ultimately will have to decide how the nation as a whole perceives this issue.
I’m just wondering how long until the firearms advocates start trying to taint Sonia Sotomayor with this issue – claiming she will keep the balance of the Supreme Court from being a majority in their favor (there already have been some people claiming the appeals court judge from New York is not properly appreciative of firearms).
OF COURSE, WE’RE talking about a woman who grew up in the inner city of the Bronx. She might have a differing perspective of urban violence and the need to try to reign it in than would someone who wants to view the nation as a giant rural open field with no neighbors around for miles.
What ultimately is at stake in this issue isn’t so much the act of physically owning a firearm. It is going to be an issue of just what does it mean when the federal government passes a law.
Because the logic used by the appeals court in Chicago to rule in favor of the municipal ban on firearms was that the previous ruling by an appeals court in the District of Columbia is restricted solely to areas controlled by the federal government.
It goes back to the fact that Washington, D.C. is not a normal city. It is a federal district and is operated by people in Congress who at times could care less about the people who live there year around.
BY THAT LOGIC, the Chicago municipal firearms ban would not apply on property in the city maintained for the federal government.
In theory, you could take your pistol into the Dirksen or Kluczynski federal buildings or the post office, but not into City Hall, the Thompson Center or any other building.
Except that I would guess the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office would have their own qualms about anyone trying to bring a pistol into their office buildings or one of the federal courtrooms maintained in town.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide this issue, because we now have an instance where the federal courts based in Chicago are in disagreement with those of the District of Columbia. The high court will have to pick a side.
I’M NOT GOING to claim to know how they will ultimately rule. The legal appeal the high court will be asked to decide hasn’t even been filed yet.
I’m sure the firearms advocates will try to make an issue out of the fact that it is a federal appeals court in Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago that is somehow behind the problem. They will claim that if only the whole country would adopt their interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution (which I read to mean that people have a right to have a firearm only for the possibility that they might have to cooperate as a militia for the national defense), then all would be right with the world.
Except that it wouldn’t.
Because the fact is that this is one issue where we are not of a single mindset, and conditions are not universal.
PERHAPS THE IDEA of an outright ban on owning a pistol would be nonsensical in Butte, Mont., or even East Peoria, Ill.
But in Chicago or other urban areas where there are the flare-ups of violence that make people uneasy, perhaps it makes some sense.
After all, it’s not like anyone is arguing that the residents of Kennesaw, Ga., should be banned from owning a firearm just because Chicago residents are, no more than Kennesaw’s long-standing requirement that residents own firearms ought to have any bearing on what Chicago does.
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