“Daley backed changes to state law that would require background checks for those buying a gun in a private sale, ban assault weapons, require that gun dealers be licensed and limit the number of handgun purchases to one per person per month. Those were all ideas that failed in previous legislative sessions.”

We’d like to ask Daley, or anyone in favor of limits, why they think this would work? Criminals clearly aren’t following the complete ban on handguns in Chicago, so if the Supreme Court overturns the ban, why would criminals suddenly listen to a new law on the limits of guns one can buy? This only hurts the law-abiding citizens.

On a positive note, the paper adds:

“The mayor also is asking the General Assembly to make it a Class 1 felony to knowingly sell a gun to a known gang member.”

Now that is a gun law that actually makes sense. So why should good men like Mr. McDonald have to be treated almost as bad as the gang members?

“I don’t take kindly to looking at a bunch of old white guys about my age with pot bellies grabbing 50-millimeter machine guns and putting them on pickup trucks .”

Maybe this was an off the cuff slip up, but he never corrected himself. There is a big difference between a .50 caliber machinegun and a 50mm gun. Big difference!

Video is available from our friends at Newsbusters.org.

“Concealed weapon laws are no longer enough for the gun zealots. Open carry is the new rage (and I do mean rage) and the threats of angry gun packers have spooked, among others, Starbucks, into not adopting the law-allowed private property rules against guns on premises.”

Poor choice of words maybe, but this is yet another attempt to paint all gun owners as “angry” and filled with “mean rage.”

“Newer, more driven by grass-roots and the Internet than the N.R.A., open-carry groups are also less centralized, less predictable and often more confrontational in their push for gun rights.”

The author goes on to suggest to the reader the dangers of such a move:

“Gun control advocates have raised particular concerns about open-carry laws because under these laws in many states, gun owners are not required to have a permit or any sort of training or testing.”

What is the point of stressing the issue of permits for example? On the one hand the new groups are described as “less predictable” and “confrontational,” wording that could imply these to be “dangerous” to some New York readers. Likewise, it is practically implied that it would create a wild west situation without any permits where novices carry guns. This news piece reads like an editorial at times, but should we expect anything less from the “old gray lady?”

 Give his piece a read, and you decide whether a second legally purchased gun wouldn’t have meant a very different outcome.

Some may wonder why a new lawsuit was required after the Heller decision. Chicago and DC had similar gun laws, making handgun ownership illegal in most cases. The difference here is that DC is on federal land, while Chicago belongs to the State of Illinois. The first ten amendments to the constitution, popularly known as the Bill of Rights, were written to restrict what the federal government could do. For example, in the 18^th Century, many European countries had official, government backed religions. The 1^st Amendment denies the federal government the power to establish an official American religion. But the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to the states and their local municipalities.

Several states had established churches and southern states were able to ban abolitionist literature. In the 1833 case Barron v Baltimore, the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights provided “security against the apprehended encroachments of the general government — not against those of local government.” It took a civil war, the reconstruction era 14^th Amendment and Supreme Court rulings before the Bill of Rights became applicable to the states piecemeal.

In the next installment of Guns and the Law we’ll look at Article I of the 14^th Amendment and how it applies to the McDonald v. Chicago case.

“Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.”

For the record we have no problem with the reporting on this one, but we must question Ionia’s school board on this judgment. The child just turned six-years old, and some other form of discipline should have been used.

Let’s see if the mainstream media picks up on this story.

“A gun-rights decision by the Supreme Court two years ago threatened to make it more dangerous to walk the streets of Washington.”

Is there even any evidence that the streets of Washington are any more dangerous? Worse still, somehow the editors of the Inquirer seem to think that allowing citizens to legally obtain firearms will lead to more illegal guns:

“That will lead to a greater proliferation of handguns – with the inevitable increase in illegal gun trafficking.”

We must ask why criminals will wait for legal handguns, and further ask if anyone really thinks someone would suddenly just buy guns legally, only to sell them illegally?

“For the past generation, voters and elected officials in various states have adopted a wide array of gun-control measures. But the ability of state and local governments to respond to the proliferation of weapons on their streets could be severely curtailed if the court continues down this path.”

We’ll respond by asking, why would any law aimed at allowing law-abiding citizens to legally own a gun mean more weapons on the streets? Are the writers so naïve as to suggest that criminals are avoiding buying guns because the law says so?