Meet the Man Behind McDonald v Chicago

The City of Chicago has some of the country’s most draconian gun laws. Law abiding citizens can’t keep a hand gun in their own home. When 76 year old Otis McDonald heard from other gun rights activists that the Supreme Court held in the Heller Case that Washington, D.C. couldn’t outlaw handgun ownership, he filed a lawsuit against Chicago.

Mr. McDonald and his wife live on the South Side of Chicago and have seen their neighborhood deteriorate over the years as gangbangers and drug dealers have taken over the streets.

“My wife and I are here alone all the time now,” says McDonald, a retired maintenance engineer, who with his wife, Laura, reared three children. “I’ve got burglar alarms hooked into the police department. I have a shotgun, but a handgun (would be) more handy for me to handle.”  

Mr. McDonald became an active gun rights advocate a few years ago when he attended an Illinois State Rifle Association rally. He is concerned that a 1982 law that prohibits residents of Chicago from keeping handguns in their homes puts his and his wife’s safety at risk. The senior army vet would challenge drug dealers as they hung around his street and warn that he would call the police: “They’d just call me, ‘You old gray-headed so-and so’ and say they’d get me.”

He took the threats seriously and took steps to change the law. Becoming involved with the Illinois State Rife Association was an unusual move for someone from the South Side but it paid huge dividends.

 ”I was probably the only black at that first meeting” in Springfield, McDonald says. “I met a lot of people. Everybody was friendly.” The Army veteran adds that “it was like a bunch of old GIs getting together. … I liked their message.”

  Lawyers for Chicago argue that states and cities should be able to work out their own solutions for gun crime. The brief states that in 2008 handguns accounted for 402 of 412 firearm homicides in Chicago. It also says that handguns are the weapon of choice for murder in the United States.

Mr. McDonald isn’t convinced by this. It doesn’t seem fair that citizens living in Washington, D.C. should have more 2^nd Amendment protections than citizens living outside federal territory. Self-protection should be, as Heller states, a fundamental right.

“Why should we have to suffer with all the laws passed down by the states and the cities,” he says, “while the people who are doing all this (violence) are getting guns and the police can’t stop them?”