Going through Sitemeter, I found this very interesting visitor to my post on Spoofing the Anti’s – the Calgunners psy ops operation against the Legal Community Against Violence.
I always thought the National Educational Association was anti-gun rights. So was it a rogue employee checking out a gun blog before everyone came into work to see stuff on gun rights and even gun porn or was it an opposition research operative? Hmmm.
The new Chicago gun ordinance went into effect yesterday and dozens flocked to Police Headquarters to pick up the registration forms according to the Sun-Times.
At a new conference, Jody Weis, Chicago Police Superintendent, said:
We want to know who has weapons so that first responders can be aware of that information before they enter a home.
I guess Supt. Weis is ignorant of the fact that under Illinois law all gun owners are required to have a Firearms Owner ID card – the FOID Card. One would think that since this info is held by the State Police that all other police agencies would have access to the info as well.
The new ordinance mandates processing in 120 days but other reports suggest it will take 5 1/2 months before the first handgun registration is finally processed. The Chicago PD has the forms and the law on their web site where they refer to it as the “Responsible Gun Ownership Ordinance”. They suggest you just download the forms instead of coming to the Police Headquarters. Under no circumstances, they say, should you show up with your firearm.
Supt. Weis also said about the new law at the news conference:
The ordinance bars people from buying more than one handgun a month. Weis said there’s no restriction on spouses or relatives of felons buying guns and keeping them in the house where a felon resides.
But the city’s ordinance doesn’t allow residents to carry handguns outside their homes. That includes garages and porches, Weis noted.
I won’t even comment on the garages and porches not being part of a home but you would think that the Police Superintendent, a former FBI Special Agent, should know a little bit about Federal law. If a felon’s spouse or relative has a gun in the same house where the felon resides, the felon would be considered in constructive possession of a firearm and liable to charged under Federal firearms law. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse for you but is OK for the cops.
Today’s New York Times ran an editorial entitled “The Hard Work of Gun Control”. While it was originally published on July 9th, they saw fit to re-run it in their Sunday paper just in case the elites didn’t read it the first time.
Like the dissenters in the McDonald decision, they are still fighting the Heller decision. It must have killed them to acknowledge that, “the law of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their home for self-defense.”
They did concede that they thought Chicago’s new gun law was flawed and would likely be overturned.
Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns, but they need to do it with more forethought than went into the Chicago ordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun per home, with a strict registration and permitting process. But residents are not allowed to buy a gun in the city. They must receive firearms training, but ranges are illegal in the city. Chicago lawmakers sloughed off on the suburbs the responsibility to regulate sales and training. As a result, more people will travel more miles to transport guns.
The law is likely to draw heightened equal-protection scrutiny from skeptical judges at all levels. Chicago would have been better off allowing gun sales under the strict oversight of the police department, which could then better check the backgrounds and movements of every buyer and seller. The District of Columbia passed a largely similar ordinance last year after its law was struck down by the court. But it permits sales at the few gun shops in the district, and a federal judge upheld that ordinance after it was challenged. It could stand as a model for other cities.
They thought the lawsuit against the new Chicago gun law was over-the-top.
It disputes virtually every aspect of the law as a violation of the Second Amendment and poses ludicrous hypothetical situations to show that everyone needs a gun. “If an elderly widow lives in an unsafe neighborhood and asks her son to spend the night because she has recently received harassing phone calls,” the lawsuit complains, “the son may not bring his registered firearm with him to his mother’s home as an aid to the defense of himself and his mother.” Putting granny in the middle of a neighborhood firefight is preferable to having her simply call the police?
I guess they never heard of the wait times for police response to 911 calls and that the police have no legal obligation to protect you.
They conclude with a call for “tough but sensible” laws and with a shot at Alan Gura and “the gun lobby”.
The gun lobby is going to attack virtually every gun ordinance it can find, if only to see what it can get away with now. (Last week, the same lawyers who brought the Chicago and Washington cases sued North Carolina, challenging a law that prohibits carrying weapons during a state of emergency.)
All I can say as a North Carolinian is “Go Alan!”
Sayre Weaver is one of the leading legal lights of the gun control movement in California. She is one of the lead attorneys for the County of Alameda in the Nordyke case and she helped the City of West Hollywood develop their law prohibiting the sale of “junk guns”(sic). She has won awards from Women Against Gun Violence and the California Wellness Foundation for her work on gun control. The LA Times writes glowing articles about her that characterize her “as the California gun lobby’s Public Enemy No. 1.” So, when she says the McDonald decision is likely to spawn lawsuits challenging local gun control laws, I listen.
Weaver released her analysis on the impact of McDonald v. Chicago on Monday. Her analysis centers on the likely immediate impact that McDonald will have for local governments in California.
It appears likely that McDonald will generate challenges to a wide range of local firearms regulations, as well as ammunition regulations…..Because the Court has given little guidance on what standard a firearms regulation must meet to survive challenge under the Second Amendment, we anticipate that the decision will embolden individual litigants to challenge a wide range of firearms laws, including long standing laws that have previously survived challenge in the courts.
Because any restriction on firearms possession or sale might be argued to create some burden on the right to possess a firearm for self-defense in the home, local governments should anticipate numerous lawsuits challenging a wide range of firearms laws. There are already a number of such challenges in the California courts, which were stayed while those courts waited for McDonald.
Because the Second Amendment right articulated by the Court pertains to possession of handguns, which the Court characterizes as the most popular weapon among Americans for self-defense, it is likely that local regulations of handguns will be challenged under the Second Amendment.
While she doesn’t come out and say it, if a city loses a challenge to a firearm restriction in court, they will end up paying the costs for both the defense and the plaintiffs. In case-strapped California, this should make some municipalities think twice.
…ordinances will now be subject to a stricter test in the courts, and the legislative findings that may be needed for a given law to pass muster under the Second Amendment will be of particular importance.
The bottom line for Weaver is that the world as she knew it has changed with McDonald.
This Sunday’s Parade Magazine ran a puff piece of Senator Frank Lautenberg’s attempt to use terrorism as excuse to suppress gun rights.
Convicted felons and the mentally ill aren’t generally allowed to buy weapons, but suspected terrorists are. Now city mayors and politicians on Capitol Hill are working together to change that policy.
They fail to note that the “city mayors” are Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They refer to them as a non-partisan coalition of big city mayors.
They also are running a poll asking if “suspected terrorists should be allowed to buy guns?” Fortunately, at this time the majority of people are seeing through this biased poll.
Perhaps Derrick Bird’s deadly rampages aren’t so ‘inexplicable’ after all
Yet another gun massacre is followed by yet another typhoon of psychobabble, sentiment and bogus declarations that ‘this must never happen again’, when everyone knows that it will.
It’s difficult to argue for tighter gun laws, since they’re already so tight, though I’m sure the authorities will think of something suitably irrelevant and futile, as they did after Hungerford and Dunblane.
They are determined to make sure nobody in this country is armed, apart from criminals and terrorists, the invariable effect of ‘tough’ gun laws that trouble only the law-abiding and have no impact on illegally held weapons at all.
I’m amazed that anyone left in the UK still had enough good sense to recognize this.
The truth is that until 1920, Britain’s gun laws were so relaxed they made Texas look effeminate, but we had virtually no gun crime. That only really began to increase here after we abolished hanging.
But that truth doesn’t fit the Leftist dogma which has everyone, including the Tories, the media and the police, in its grip, so the facts will be ignored.
What can we learn from the Cumberland murders? Well, first of all that the police are no use to anyone once a crime has been committed. They never were and they never will be, except if they can do first aid.
The British Empire may have faded but their writers can still figuratively wield a very sharp pen.
H/T to Dave Hardy for the link.
Yet Another Chicago Resident Defies Gun Ban, Shooting a Home Invader!
Fortunately for the home owner, there is this (though the home owner will have to deal with Mayor Daley’s moaning and groaning):
The Illinois Legislature addressed city gun bans after Hale DeMar shot a home invader in the Gun Free Zone of Wilmette, IL. This makes it nearly impossible for police to charge people violating the gun ban if the gun/s are discovered after a self-defense incident.
ILLINOIS LAW:
(720 ILCS 5/24-10)
Sec. 24-10. Municipal ordinance regulating firearms; affirmative defense to a violation. It is an affirmative defense to a violation of a municipal ordinance that prohibits, regulates, or restricts the private ownership of firearms if the individual who is charged with the violation used the firearm in an act of self-defense or defense of another as defined in Sections 7-1 and 7-2 of this Code when on his or her land or in his or her abode or fixed place of business.
Kurt Hofmann in the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner asks the right question concerning Great Britain: how much more restrictive can its gun laws get?
In a land with the most draconian gun control laws, where the populace is virtually disarmed and at the mercy of thugs and loonies, where the people are actively discouraged by force of law from defending themselves, to propose any new “gun control measures” is absolutely ludicrous. I think the UK’s new PM David Cameron might actually understand that.
A few years ago Massad Ayoob said “So-called gun-free zones are nothing but hunting preserves for psychopaths that hunt humans.” The tragedy in Cumbria, England proves him right yet again.
John Kass in his column about Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Jr.’s news conference accuses Hizzoner of embarrassing the City of Chicago. He’s right. Watch the video.
Kurt Hoffman, in the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner, goes a bit further and wonders if Daley is making “terroristic threats” when hoping some of the more conservative Justices on the Supreme Court end up getting shot before they can rule on the Chicago gun case, McDonald v. Chicago.
If it had been me or you saying that, you can be sure we’d be getting a visit from the authorities. Bullies like Daley need to be taken down a peg or two.
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