Chicago defies forgotten 2nd Amendment
Since the Supreme Court upheld the individual right to own guns last summer, one municipality with handgun bans after another has faced reality. Washington, which lost the case, changed its law. Morton Grove repealed its ban. So did Wilmette. Likewise for Evanston. Last week, Winnetka followed suit.
Then there is Chicago, which is being sued for violating the 2nd Amendment but refuses to confront the possibility that what the Supreme Court said may apply to this side of the Appalachians.
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So it’s no surprise that Daley refuses to make the slightest change to the handgun ordinance, preferring to fight the lawsuits filed by the National Rifle Association. He is not impressed that 1) the law almost certainly violates the Constitution, which elected officials are supposed to uphold, and 2) it would cost taxpayers a lot of money to fight lawsuits the city is bound to lose.
He and all the other officials who preside over gun ban cities were dragging their heels in order to wait out the election. With the victory of Mayor Daley’s own Barack H. Obama, they’re hoping that he can pack SCOTUS with liberals, who will then rehear Heller and decide the other way.
If that logic applies to the Washington statute, it very likely applies to Chicago’s law. The city, however, notes that the nation’s capital is a federal enclave, and that the court did not say states must respect the 2nd Amendment. That’s true. The court’s ruling also did not say that China is in Asia, which doesn’t make it part of South America.
That was my fear, too, that as the Roberts Court had been loath to create major precedents and wide-sweeping decisions, would weasel out and use the “federal enclave” Constitutional provision to apply a decision for Heller only to D.C. But they did not: Scalia’s majority opinion for Heller made a passing remark about Mayor Daley’s “federal enclave” reasoning, but only in a historical, pre-14th Amendment context. Therefore, that was tantamount to stating that the Heller decision, combined with the “incorporation doctrine” of the 14th, applied to all levels of American government.
Also, what would Mayor Daley’s opinion be if the state of Mississippi wanted to bring back segregation, and they would use the argument that Federal civil rights laws only applied to “federal enclaves?’
