Mayor Daley backs off plan to limit residents to one gun

The headline makes it sound like good news, but check out some more details in the Sun-Times:

It prohibits possession of those handguns outside the home. The home is specifically defined as the inside portion “traditionally used for living purposes” — not the garage, yard, porch, deck or walkway.

No more than one firearm in the home could be “assembled and operable.” The rest must be secured by a trigger lock or locked box or “broken down in a non-functioning state.”

Additionally, a $100 firearms permit good for three years would be required for each gun owner and an application fee of $15 plus an annual “reporting fee” of $10 for each gun. Mandatory classroom training and range time (cost unspecified) would be required to get the firearms permit.

Here’s an interesting bit: people over 18 but under 21 would require parental permission to obtain a gun. They want to tell 20-year-olds to go get a note from their mommy.

No gun shops allowed. Period. Buy your guns elsewhere. (Though I’ve got to think that ten thousand prospective gun shop owners are licking their chops about the possibility of setting up a store just outside the city.)

Finally, the city would maintain a list of “permissible” guns that residents could own. No word on what would be on the list.

Chicago Corporation Counsel Mara Georges, who a couple of days ago said that previously proposed restrictions, including one handgun per person, were reasonable and would stand up in court says, well, that these new proposed restrictions are reasonable and would stand up in court.

She also makes the driver’s license comparison. I keep seeing that one. I really don’t think those people making that argument have thought things through.

Via Say Uncle and Newsalert:

Chicago Moves Quickly To Draft New Gun Ordinance

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley will push for a strict handgun ordinance to replace its doomed gun ban that will likely include limiting each resident to a single handgun, requiring gun owners to have insurance and prohibiting gun stores from setting up shop in the city, his top lawyer said Tuesday.

This is all part of the way things are done. Rulings are handed down, the losing side tries to make new rules that comply to the letter of the new but the spirit of the old. If it’s not good enough, the new rules get challenged and, if warranted, overturned. And establish precedent along the way.

Chicago Corporation Counsel Mara Georges weighed in:

She said that limiting Chicago residents to one handgun would pass constitutional muster. Nowhere has the court determined that “a person is entitled to more than one handgun,” she said. “And one handgun is sufficient for self defense.”

She said banning gun shops in the city is another reasonable restriction. She said studies have shown a disproportionate number of shootings near gun shops and because there are dozens of gun shops in the Chicago area — 40 in Cook County alone — a ban would not inconvenience gun buyers.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about Georges’ logic, let’s just look at her previous statements about the 2nd Amendment, gun laws, and how they’ll hold up in court:

City Corporation Counsel Mara Georges has told two City Council committees she’s confident Chicago’s law will stand.

Georges tells Aldermen the Supreme Court’s decision on Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban shouldn’t apply to Chicago, because previous Supreme Court rulings have said Second Amendment “right to bear arms” doesn’t apply to local governments, like Cities. She says D.C. is a federal jurisdiction.

Hmmm. She didn’t quite get that one right.

Anyway, it’s probably easier for everyone if she convinces Daley to just keep trying to restrict things unreasonably. That way the challengers don’t have to travel all over the country to get stuff struck down.

On the road right now, but here are a few thoughts about the decision.

Like Heller, this is a game-changing landmark. But we didn’t get where we are in a couple of years, and it’s going to take more than a couple of years to get back closer to where we should be.

However, sooner or later people are going to have to give up on the whole “the 2nd Amendment means guns for an organized government militia” thing. We’ve been telling them for years and years that it doesn’t mean that. The Supreme Court keeps judging that it doesn’t mean that. At some point critics are going to have to accept that it doesn’t mean that.

UPDATE: Here’s something else by Reynolds. It includes:

the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions have made a major difference. In particular, they have offset the gun-control community’s longstanding effort to “denormalize” firearms ownership — to portray it as something threatening, deviant, and vaguely perverse, and hence demanding strict regulation, if not outright prohibition. That effort went on for decades, and received much media support. Two decades ago, it seemed to be working.

But with the Supreme Court saying that it’s clear the Framers regarded individual gun ownership as “necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” that effort must be seen as a failure now. Gun ownership by law-abiding citizens is the new normal, and the Second Amendment is now normal constitutional law.

I was asked last night what I thought this decision would mean by the person who told me that it had been handed down. I responded that since I hadn’t read any details about it, I could only say that I thought it was good and though I doubted gun laws in many places would change overnight, this decision would change the playing field and form a new foundation that future cases (and laws) would be built upon. The key is to maintain the momentum and not lose focus just because it looks like things are going well.

Honestly, I didn’t know there was such a thing as Bill of Rights Day. Cato@Liberty looks them over and comments a bit on today’s take on the inalienable rights guaranteed by the document.

Obviously, folks reading a site like GunPundit.com are probably as interested in the Second Amendment as much or more than any of the others. And some of the items, such as the Third, don’t have a lot of impact in today’s society.

I’ve always thought that the Bill of Rights, and the battle surrounding it and the ratification of the US Constitution, are significant not only for the actual rights guaranteed, but as a signal that even back then people were terrified that government would overstep its intended bounds.

Alexander Hamilton, I think, once wrote that an amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms was not necessary. Someone found that and tried to use it in an argument against me one day. But they either didn’t know or didn’t care WHY Hamilton thought that. In essence, he believed that the right to keep and bear arms was self-evident and that a limit on government’s power to regulate it was totally unnecessary. Fortunately, enough people had the foresight to know that, despite the Tenth Amendment, the government would eventually try to control everything that wasn’t specifically forbidden.

Incidentally, my reply to the argument was that I didn’t think we needed an amendment guaranteeing the right of US citizens to breathe even though I was opposed to regulation on such activity.

For your enjoyment here are some of the more amusing comments left on the Kalamazoo Gazette article about this past weekend’s Open Carry Picnic in Kalamazoo’s Bronson Park. Offered without comment.

These nut jobs that like to walk around wearing guns to compensate for their lack of abilities elsewhere are to pathetic to even mock. I’m sure you could find a nutty Ron Paul supporter or racist rapture waiting survivalist in the group if you looked a little deeper. Most “2nd amendment advocates” shouldn’t be aloud scissors much less the right to carry their gun around in public.

The 2nd Amendment refers to a “militia,” i.e. military.

There is no need for private citizens to own firearms of anykind. It simply should not be allowed.

Approved hunters can rent rifles from appropriate DNR offices.

I also forgot to mention. If you get a CCW license YOU HAVE TO CARRY IT CONCEALED. With a CCW license you can never carry a gun exposed other than for hunting.

This is just boys wanting to play modern day cowboys.

(more…)

Murdoc didn’t even know about this until he read the blogs:

Gun owners show support for open-carry law at picnic in Kalamazoo

It resembled most any Sunday afternoon picnic in Bronson Park. Except most of the people assembled around tables filled with watermelon and grilled goodies had firearms in holsters strapped to their waists.

The Glocks and the Smith & Wessons remained holstered but visible during a three-hour Open Carry Picnic designed to raise public awareness of what organizers called Second Amendment rights in Michigan to openly carry a firearm in most places.

They were high school teachers, college students, computer geeks and housewives with one thing in common. Rather than a cell phone, the leather pouch they wore at their waist contained a gun. The picnic drew about 40 people on a wet afternoon.

Murdoc was actually staying not too far from Kalamazoo this weekend.

Here’s a good news report on the event:

Hat tips to Huffman and Soyer.

A Literacy Test for Gun Owners?

A commenter immediately brings up the big switch, pointing out that written tests are needed for “all sorts of licenses, driver’s, Pilot’s, marriage, etc…”

And when the US Constitution guarantees that the God-given right to keep and bear automobiles shall not be infringed, the commenter will have a point.

Stephen Herrington:

The era in which firearms were a practical necessity is substantially and thankfully over as of the end of the 19th century. They are possessed now for what most honestly amounts to a hybrid of sport, nostalgia and primordial anxiety.

I guess “honestly” is in the eye of the beholder.

After pointing out that guns won’t stop crime, drugs, homelessness, or pornography, he adds

Use of guns, weapons of any kind, are the definition of chaos. The road to chaos is swift. The road back is nigh impossible.

Just last night I linked to a news story about a pizza guy who used a pepperoni pizza as a weapon against armed robbers. What chaos. The pizza guy swiftly went down that road and his return is apparently “nigh impossible.”

Herrington says that “general prosperity prevents crime.”

The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms by Stephen P. Halbrook:

December 15 marks America’s Bill of Rights Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. To commemorate this event, we have created the Second Amendment Book Bomb, a unique and powerful way to communicate the importance of the Bill of Rights’ Second Amendment for the protection of liberty. With your help, we can launch constitutional rights to the top of national book bestseller lists, making a loud and clear statement that Second Amendment rights are inalienable!

As you know, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2008 landmark District of Columbia v. Heller ruling finally affirmed that the Founders fully intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to own and bear arms. The renowned Second Amendment scholar and lawyer Dr. Stephen P. Halbrook, Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, was key to the Heller victory—as well as to three previous gun-rights victories in cases before the Supreme Court. And his definitive defense of the Second Amendment is now available in The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms the first in-depth, book-length account of the origins of the Second Amendment and the most readable, comprehensive, and compelling work ever assembled arguing that the right to own a gun is as fundamental under the U.S. Constitution as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

The book bomb is an effort to get the book to the top of the rankings on the big book-buying sites. I haven’t checked out the book yet, but I am often amused by “the Founding Fathers never meant for people to have assault weapons” claims. If people took two seconds to think about what the 2nd Amendment means and why it might have been added to the Constitution when it was, they’d realize it wasn’t about hunting or home defense against criminals.

Ashby Jones on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog points out a take by David Kopel.

Meanwhile, Burress has been suspended for the rest of the NFL season.